What I’ve got so far

Parts have begun arriving for my delta 3D printer. So here are the things I currently have – I’ll tell you how much I paid, what the quality is like, how long they took to arrive etc.

To begin I received my completed, already soldered RAMPS 1.4 board and heated bed build platform from eBay store fabster3d.

The RAMPS kit came with an Arduino Mega 2560 R3, the RAMPS 1.4 board itself, 5x A4988 stepper drivers, an SDRamps extension board, a very nice set of wires for hooking up steppers, endstops and thermistors, and finally a 12VDC 50mm fan. All for $130 USD plus $12 shipping to New Zealand. I was very happy with what I got for the price!

I also purchased from the same seller the RepRap Heatbed MK2. The heatbed came with a thermistor, large DC wire and surface mount resistors and LED’s (Which seller kindly soldered onto the heatbed for me at no extra charge!). The heatbed was $24.90 USD and shipping was free with above RAMPS kit.

Overall very happy with my RAMPS kit and heated bed build platform. Shipping only took 4 working days to arrive at my door in New Zealand. Only complaint would be that the little heat sinks mounted to the A4988 driver chips had slid off a little while drying. As a result they aren’t centred over the chip and don’t look too good. I’m still sure thermally everything will be fine.

I haven’t yet been able to test the RAMPS board because I’m still waiting on my stepper motors. I have verified the Arduino Mega works well and will update when I test out the RAMPS.

Lastly I received my pulleys and linear bearings from TechPaladin. I didn’t purchase any belts because they weren’t long enough for my very tall delta printer. The order cost $45.90 and $10.32 for shipping to New Zealand..

The linear bearing were extremely cheap at $1.65 USD each! That very cheap considering most places I saw were selling them for $5. The pulleys though weren’t as cheap, they were $6 a piece but still not too bad.

Shipping was very quick and all the parts look to be really good quality!

That’s it for now. Next post I’ll be showing my RAMPS board running my stepper motors.