I have been following the RepRap project for some time, but it always seemed to me to require hardware hacking skills that were that little bit beyond me.

At Oggcamp 2011 I watched a presentation by Malcolm Napier of empirical on the Reprap project.  Whilst this sparked my interest anew, I was put off by Malcolm’s mention of builds taking months rather than days; as before this seemed to be a project for hardware hackers.

A few weeks later I received an email from Hugo Mills asking me to post an invitation to a new Reprap build event to the Surrey Linux User Group mailing list. The build event was being organised by Malcolm, and would help users to build their own Reprap in a supported way. This sounded perfect for me so, having forwarded the email, I booked a place on the build event.

To cut an unnecessarily long story short - I have now ordered and paid for my reprap parts and am now eagerly awaiting their arrival. There are 20 of us in the first build project and we are hoping to receive everything except the electronics by the end of November.  The expectation is that we will complete the build in January.

If you would like to read more, and perhaps consider participating in a second build project, then visit the very new TVRRUG website, and perhaps start off by reading the First Steps page.

I will try and blog about the experience here, in the meantime we have a fairly active IRC Channel #tvrrug on Freenode if you would like to pop in for a chat.