P3Steel - Prusa i3 3mm Steel Laser cut (aka Leonardo) by irobri

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

This is a remix of twelvepros redesign of Josef Prusa i3, the printer was built in April 2013, decided after attending a local Maker show in Zaragoza, Spain.
I liked the Prusa i3 single plate design but then I saw twelvepros and thought it was a better option, I just wanted to get rid of the threaded rods y axis mount and adjustments.
Although this is not based on it, I want to mention S. Graber and his Graber i3, he came out also with a very nice redesign of twelvepros of a complete laser cut i3.
The printer is made of 3mm laser cut steel since I wanted it to be sturdy and I had a laser cutting machine available at work:
Pros:
Steel is 10 times cheaper than aluminium
Laser cutting steel is easier and cheaper than cutting aluminium
Steel is stronger than aluminium
Cons:
Steel is 3 times heavier than aluminium
The design is for 3mm thickness steel and with lots of carvings to reduce weight. All square holes and tabs have special rounded corners for accommodating corresponding parts and give a very good fit between plates. No threading required.
I hope someone finds this design usefull.
(Leonardo is just the name of my printer, here in our local reprap group we give names to our printers...http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Proyecto_Clone_Wars)
Over 50 people have recently made this printer in Spain, they have been working a lot and they have created a wiki (thank you guys!) for this printer model which they have named P3Steel, the wiki has a lot of helpfull info for building the printer and it even has an animation of the assembly of the printer, I post the link because I am sure it will help anyone that decides to build it, the wiki is both in English and Spanish: http://reprap.org/wiki/P3Steel
Since the number of made printers is increasing exponentially and now everyone knows the printer as the P3Steel I just updated the name to the new one!