1st Child printer begins to come together

I have spent the last couple of weekends worth of spare time putting my 1^st child printer together (well the mechanical part of the build at least)
So far things are looking fairly promising, I have purchased most of the vitamins required.

Electronics – I settled on the Sanguinololu set mainly because it was fairly cheap, available on eBay and supports the latest sprinter & marlin firmware derivatives.

Mechanicals – sourced from a number of suppliers, bearings from Hong Kong (eBay) motors & induction hardened smooth rods from Zapp Automation, fixings & threaded rod from RS for simplicity of ordering. In my haste to get things bought I inadvertently ordered 10mm rod rather than 8mm (whoops) and even then after I had ordered the 8mm rod as a replacement (kept the 10mm as I am sure I will use it eventually) I forgot to include the z axis smooth rods so I am still short of 2 x 350mm smooth rods to complete my mechanical build.

Hotend – I am hopefully going to be able to reinstate the original Darwin Hotend back onto the Darwin freeing up the fairly expensive (£45) Parcan Hotend for use on my first child printer. (yet to be attempted) this will involve me tapping out a small length of Peek rod (previously purchased for other tests) and coming up with a different mounting solution for the Greg’s/ Wades Geared extruder. This is not as easy as it may sound as I don't (yet) have any form of lathe (maybe I should try and print the one on Thingiverse) I will be investing in a lathe soon I hope.

AFAIK that should be all the bits I need and it is just now a case of finding the time to put it all together, I am expecting great improvements to the print quality and speed of printing from this first child, for the reasons below.

1)     Massively better overall mechanical design than the Darwin “Prototype” (thanks to the Prusa’s design)

2)     Far better electronics set (able to run latest Sprinter/Marlin Firmware derivatives)

3)     LM8UU bearings on all smooth rods

4)     Induction hardened smooth rods ( I am hoping this will mean I can push the speed boundaries to the max without the risk of mechanical failure)

Another advantage is the size of the printer is considerably smaller than the Darwin meaning that it is potentially portable.

As far as the printed parts are concerned I have had (and continue to have) mixed success with the Darwin in producing good quality functional parts for the Prusa.

I have managed to print an excellent quality Greg’s Accessible Wades Geared Extruder (ref) (4 part’s).

an impressively accurate X carriage with LM8UU snap in bearing’s by (ref)(1 part).

Reasonable Vertice ends by (ref)(1part x 6) although I neglected to notice the need for 4 x “footed” vertice ends so all 6 are the same.

A reasonable Y carriage with snap-in/bolt-in LMU88 bearing housings (this is an optional extra, to ease the need of accurate measurement/placement of the Y carriage smooth rods).

Poor quality X motor end & Idler end’s (had real problems with these due  to the mixed cooling requirements for these parts, i.e. some layers are large and therefore want no cooling to avoid warping, and the last few layers are very small and therefore seem to require some cooling to achieve the required quality, (this will hopefully be addressed with the new firmware on the Sanguinololu which will enable interactive cooling of individual layers).