Just bought/made one of these Geeetech Prusa i3 W 3d printers.. but documentation sorta drops off once you've made the thing.. so here I am with this 'thingy' and lots of 'thingys' left in the box - and no idea what to do now? Has anyone out there made one of these things, and can recommend any good sites for starting out!? - even knowing where I'm suppose to feed the filament would be a start!
Is there a Facebook group? Some 3d printers have decent support on there. Not sure if this is one of them...
It's pretty much identical to my Anet A8. Thingiverse and yeggi are a couple decent places to start, if you're looking for some designs to get started test printing. Otherwise, youtube is a great resource for new starters looking to get going. If you've built this from a kit, you'll know the filament feeds into the threaded tube on top of the extruder - it is a bit tricky to line it up and it's spring loaded so you have to press down while you feed the filament to begin with - once it's in, the stepper motor will feed it. Didn't you receive a usb stick or flash memory chip with anything other than the build instructions on there? Seriously, search for prusa i3 on youtube and start form there.
https://www.prusa3d.com/downloads/manual/prusa3d_manual_175_en.pdf http://www.makersmuse.com/startingup.html
Looks like a fairly standard Prusa i3 clone. Lots and lots of resources out there for 3D printers - try looking for information on Prusa i3-type printers rather than your specific model. They all use the same the same fairly basic designs: cartesian-XZ print head, Marlin-like firmware, arduino-type controller, threaded rods or lead screws for Z axis motion, etc. Your first step, once you've got your head around 3D printing basics, should be to calibrate the printer: you'll need to calibrate all three axes and the print head itself (flow rate, steps per mm, etc). There's lots of info out there for this type of printer, but I appreciate that it can be daunting for someone new to this. One tip: do some research on how to tell the difference between threaded rods and lead screws, and check whether your printer uses lead screws on the Z axis. If it doesn't then that's an upgrade you'll want to make fairly quickly: threaded rods will wear out and you will lose accuracy in the Z-axis - an accurate Z-axis is critical for proper calibration and prints that don't look like a mess. There was a time when kits often came with threaded rods instead of lead screws to save cost - hopefully that trend has died off, but it's always worth checking. Threaded rods are fasteners, they're not designed for linear motion - lead screws are.
