After tearing down the scanners and being slightly disappointed that I wouldn't be able to mash this thing up nearly as fast as I thought (see The Tear Down), I decided to go to town on the scanner heads. I suspected some nice toys to play with down inside. This time, I would not be broken hearted!!!

So I did some work on ScanRap recently.
Dave from THS was nice enough to donate a third scanner to the cause.
At first glance, it appeared to be more flat than the first two, and I was considering using it as my base axis.

So I get into the process of tearing these three scanners down and taking some measurements.

So I decided to build a 3d printer. I have been pouring over the RepRap documentation, and settled on the idea of building a RepStrap "seedling" based on recycled flat bed scanner parts.

I happened to be looking around a Hard OFF and found two identical scanners, perfect for X and Y axis.

I peeked down inside, and saw that they were belt driven by a geared down stepper motor. This should give a lot of torque, and higher resolution printing, at the expense of speed.

Also, they have a guide shaft on one side, and sit on a metal guide bar on the far end.

ScanRap is a RepRap "seedling" machine made from flat-bed scanner parts. The project is ongoing.

The photo gallery for ScanRap is here: http://www.tokyohackerspace.org/en/galleries/scanrap