3D Printer – How to Build One

From title, lots of promise; author fails to deliver on
As author is an engineer I had high hopes given the title and the author’s bio. From those 2 items I was expecting a book that teaches the design tradeoffs on 3D printers or in the least a book that would walk one through the process of building a 3D printer. This book does neither; bottom line you can’t duplicate what he built, nor can you leverage what he created as unfortunately there are zero fully dimension-ed design drawings, no cad files to download and absolutely zero engineering design information; and minimal design discussions, so if you’re looking for that; given the author’s credentials, be warned, it’s not in this book. About all you can do is look at the completed picture and then you’re on your own. You’d be a lot better off just going to reprap.org and building one of those machines. They do a much better job of telling you how to build a machine, complete with videos and step by step instructions and they supply all the component drawings and specifications for parts required for the build (of whatever flavor you decide upon).So, question is why did the author write this? It doesn’t fill in any gaps in knowledge or contribute anything of interest. The reader is not going to be able to build a 3D printer by reading this book; nor will they be any closer to be able to being able to discern what makes a good design and what doesn’t. The author doesn’t even bother to tell us how well his final version works! What this book is, is a very rough brain-storming sketch up of what the author built.Basically the book is something that you might expect from an engineer who spent an hour or two coming up with some very brief concepts; there’s really nothing concrete inside these pages. You’d be better off looking at drawings of RepRap’s online. At least with them, you can download cad files on Thingiverse and you can build them.

Introductory book to learn basics of 3D Printing.

If you wish to build a 3d printer look no further. This book will start you off on a very rewarding hobby.