Reverse Engineered DIY Printing Press

thingiverse

# Overview I was so very impressed with the quality of the design of the DYI printing press. I printed one for myself and then started trying to make 3d printed plates for it and printing small cards. There were a couple of problems that i encountered with the original design which i am attempting to fix here. ### Editing the STL files was not feasible. I have reverse engineered the whole printing press and i present to you an OpenSCAD version of the printer. ### The gears were breaking on me when i was printing. I have produced a new gear and corresponding rack that provides wider gears so that the pressure of pushing the plate through is distributed across a broader part of the gears. I have printed 10 times more prints with the new gears and i see no sign of breakage. ### Printing the rollers required supports. I have produced angled parts to both the lower geared roller and the upper lower so that it can now be printed without supports. ### There was no way to scale the plates (to make longer ones) The RackGearAndPinLibrary is parametrized to allow you make beds of arbitrary code. ### There was no way to scale the printer to make a wider bed. The Parametric Printer Library allows you do do just that. you can see the definitions of the small printer and the wide printer that i have printed to print on 5.5 inch wide paper. ### There was no way to make printing plates I have a library for this but am still cleaning up the code. I should be able to upload this in the near future. I have included two sample printing plates for your enjoyment. ### when i was assembling and diassembling (while test printing) the wedges were hard to pull out. - i made some wedges with pins to help pull out. # Credit where credit is due I have reverse engineered this wonderful printer and all credit goes to the original designers. I hope this allows people to customize this printer in a much simpler manner. # Questions: ### Can this be scaled to a full page printer? - Working on that but you will need a big printer. Fortunately i have a CR10-S5 so i can experiement with this. ### When will the printing plate library be uploaded? - working on it. It is a royal mess at this point and i need to clean this up ### How do you assemble this? - well it is a re-engineered version of the printer so you simply follow the instructions on the project page - https://openpressproject.com/blogs/news/how-to-3d-print-your-own-printing-press ### what gear library did you use? - i used the version that is available here on thingiverse. - https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4194148