3D Printer First Print!

After months of planning, browsing, ordering I finally had all the parts for my Prusa Mendel 3D printer together.

The Build

Here's what it looked like before I added the electronics:

A couple of deliveries later and I had all of my electronics. Most of them are from Reprapdiscount on ebay, their site is rrd.bz .

And then this mess was created: 

Here's some other parts of the setup: 

The Reprapdiscount LCD Controller, which is actually really useful.

The extruder. A Greg's Hinged Accessible Extruder. I believe. (With a J-head hotend from hotends.com)

My RAMPS setup from Reprapdiscount. I plan to wire it properly once
I print a mount.

Test Prints

Here's the results of some test prints, with pretty much no calibrating. The plastic seems to stick to the print bed pretty well, even without the kapton, so I'm going to see if I can get that working properly, but for now I'm just printing on a small piece of kapton tape.

The very first print (0.5mm-thin-wall.stl from here) which was stopped after a couple of layers.

I was pretty happy with that, here's the same print a little bit later after the bed was levelled more and I increased the layer height to 0.3mm.

I then tried printing a gear from Greg's Accesible Extruder on thingiverse. The first failed attempt is in the background, I accidentally shorted something... But the second one came out pretty well for an early print.

So now I'm off to print a RAMPS mount and sort out the wiring.