I am not entirely sure about what the screen will do and again, we probably won't know until we decide when we are going to invest $55 into some makerjuice. I'm pretty sure the monitor will work though because I've seen videos of this same concept.

I've been getting stepper motors out of old printers and some of them have scanners which should have UV transparent glass on them right?

I ask this because my mom's friend knows a LOT about photo-curing of different kinds of resin (go figure) and the makerjuice might dissolve the polarization filter on the screen so glass is required to protect it.

Did you get a chance to decide when you'll get that MakerJuice? It certainly sounds like it will work, but I hope you'll get some experiments under way.

Not necessarily; I don't think there's a whole lot of glass between the lasers in a laser printer and the paper.

Yeah, you absolutely will want glass between the resin substance and any sensitive optics, especially if you make a mistake and the resin starts curing to the surface.

So, after a long time of not updating this thread, I am glad to say that we have decided (I have persuaded my dad) to buy some makerjuice before the printer is done because, we don't want to continue with the construction until we make sure the resin works with our technique. I think it most definately will but now we are going to make sure. We don't know when this project will pick up again though, especially with finals coming up at the end of the school year. It will definitely be continuing in the summer. Our current (and probably final) design is as follows:

Monitor on the bottom of the whole assembly.
Four smooth steel rods coming up from the corners of the monitor holder/structure.
Coarse plastic plate with rods coming out of the corners that have bushings on the ends that fit the four earlier mentioned steel rods.
An "X" shaped cross that connects the four vertical rods at the top, with a thredded nut in the middle.
The coarse plate in the center will have the arduino and stepper motor on its top. The stepper motor will be turning a thredded pole that goes into the nut that lifts up the plate.

I'll try to get a render of a 3D model of this in solidworks when I get home, but that might take a while. Thanks for everyone's support and tips! This should be a fun project to finish!

Ok, after a while playing around with SolidWorks, here's a pretty awesome render of the assembly:



This is the current design, so it's subject to change, but this image might need some explanation. The thing at the very bottom is the monitor, the thing right above that is the thing that moves up and down to lift up the model as it's being printed, then the top thing is for structure and it's what the thredded pole fits into to let it be pulled up. The small cylinder is the stepper motor and the central vertical pole is the thredded pole. Any suggestions are appreciated!

I have a suggestion on how to create your 3D printer...

You should 3D print it.

although it would actually be possible

*bump* Any progress on your project? I ran across this (clickbaity-titled, but otherwise interesting) Hackaday article, and thought that it might help you with some of the details of your build.

Hey! Thanks for that article! That is almost exactly what I'm building except ours is much bigger. I will show this to my dad and see what he thinks. Now that sumer is here, the amount of time working on the printer should (keyword "should") increase. I'll update the post after we've made some major progress.

Thank you; I look forward to seeing how yours goes, and I do hope that that article helps you past any engineering difficulties. As always, we're here if you have questions we can answer, and we love to see status updates.

Finally here is one small step for a motor and one giant leap in the production of this printer. After about 4 hours of playing with Audacity, Arduino IDE and heat sinks and wires I got the stepper motor to step when an audio signal is sent out! Remember, the printer uses a monitor to display each layer as it needs to be printed and what better way to show the layers than with a movie clip. Right? and it gets better. Movie clips can have audio so we'll slap the required audio onto the video clip and *boom* we have all we need sofware wise. What I have done now is make basicly the heart of this printer: the print platform movement system. All that is left to do, really, is to get the uv led's in the monitor and get a threaded pole, and of course, MakerJuice.

Here's a video of the thing working:

and a picture if you don't want to watch the video (you can see cemetech on my computer in the corner ) :

Huge update today! I have taken apart the monitor and gotten the screen on it's own down on the bottom of the printer. Don't worry, the rest of the monitor is still there but not quite at the bottom (it's up on the side.) and using our test LED we ordered that came yesterday, I was able to see if the monitor would work the same and...

It totally worked!! It looked a lot better in real life though. And by better I mean different. But now all we have left is hardware stuff to do and that is the easy part! YAY!! and once we get some makerjuice to test with I'll post about how the results turn out.

But about the hardware aspect, I can't, anywhere, find cheap Acme threaded poles (those are the kind they use for cnc mills for those who don't know.) If anyone knows where to get some where each isn't $25 then please let me know below.

Have you looked at McMaster-Carr yet? Congratulations on this progress!

http://www.mcmaster.com/#precision-acme-lead-screws/ it looks like you can get 3ft lengths for that price if depending on the diameter you need. Just keep in mind that there is a reason acme lead screws are expensive. You'll likely be fine getting the cheaper Steal rods, just make sure your lead screw nut is either a much softer material like bronze or plastic so the wear is isolated to the more easily replaced part. Don't want to wear out the expensive lead screw when you can wear out a cheaper more replacable part like the nut.

Edit: link to the threaded nuts www.mcmaster.com/#precision-acme-right-hand-threaded-nuts/ notice how they are all soft materials like plastic and bronze. I'd say for your application plasic is the way to go.

Edit2: looking at prices of acme nuts it may actually make sense to go for the harder cast iron acme nut and then get a softer rod that you can replace.
Remember if you get two that are the same material/hardness they will wear at the same rate which means replacing both at the same time if/when they fail. That said you may end up building a newer better machine before this one wears out so it may not matter.

Oh, Thank you for showing me that site. Looks awesome!! This will almost definitely be where I'll get these poles. As for now, I have been doing some assembling of all the parts into what will pretty much be the final 3D printer except for the coarse plate, duct tape, and obviously, threaded pole:



What do you think?

From my understanding, the printer is supposed to be like this? If so, pretty neat!

Yep! That's the same concept! Nice find. The difference is that ours has almost a 2 cubic foot print volume. But, yes. That's the same type of thing.

Here's the progress I've made in the last few days:



I got the threaded rod and some T-nuts and made the lifting mechanism. The coupler we got didn't really fit on the stepper motor. Any suggestions on how to get it to fit tightly? Also, I got rid of the two angle pieces that used to hold on the mirror back when that was the plan. Now there is more space inside the printer.

Last week my dad and I sat down and ordered every part we didn't already have that we needed and yesterday some of those parts came:



Four Linear Berings and 8 12mm Shaft holders. What we ordered was:

Those
10 more 365 nm Leds
4 12mm Drive shafts
a new coupler (for the stepper motor and threaded pole)

I'll update this thread once all the parts are here showing hopefully the finished printer. Thanks for all your help. I hope it keeps coming in and any suggestions as always are appreciated!

Also if anyone can tell me how to make my pictures smaller that would be awesome!

So, I figured out how to shrink my pictures...

Just got back from vacation to find some Makerjuice and four bushings at our doorstep. The bushings are to replace the bearings because the bearings are so crappy that they are not worth keeping on the printer.

But...

Now we have Makerjuice. We'll test it out tonightafter my dad comes home and he'll get some chinese food containers. Why? Because chinese food containers' lids are made of polypropylene. Using this material the makerjuice won't stick to it witch is crucial. But it will still be really hard to wash which is why we chose such a disposable item. Anyway, here is a picture of the two items:



It'll be awesome once it's all put together.

I'll post the results of the Makerjuice tests tonight.

Good luck with the testing! I've been meaning to ask why the LCD panel is still attached to the original metal monitor frame. I can only assume the answer is that you still have the driver board and power supply inside that frame, which leads me to the follow-up question of why you haven't yet removed it from that aluminum enclosure.

Whoa! You're right. Thanks, that'll probably be something we do after we have it working as sort of an "optimization" type thing. But yeah, that's a great idea to get rid of all that extra metal.

So, I don't mean to be cliché or anything but there is good news and bad news.

Good news is that we have successfully cured makerjuice with even just one LED. and I managed to cut out a shape from a piece of paper and shine the light behind that and it did in fact cure in that shape. On top of that we do indeed have UV transparent glass that came from a scanner so the resin can sit on that.

Bad news. And this is really bad news. Our monitor screen is not UV transparent. All this time we assumed it was but we thought wrong. It's not SO bad though because there are monitors out there that have uv transparent glass and polarizers in them according to my research.

So, either we'll get a different monitor (which is my vote) or we'll try to get our projector idea going again but with that we'd have to get a UV bulb which are not cheap and would really suck because we already got a bunch of UV leds for the monitor idea. I'll look online some more tomorrow for a UV transparent monitor and see if we can get our hands on it.

Kinda sad though that we were almost done but now we almost have to start over on the curing mechanism. Ah, well. Live and learn