upset.

It would be in their interest to help out anyone who is trying to make an improvement to their design.  If it works and isn't impractical from a cost or production standpoint, and solves a problem, it might be worth adopting.

The wonderful thing about the independent forum and wiki is there is no commercial interest.

Perhaps we could clone the replacement parts and release them?

Its not open source, but a lot of the designs, such as the controller board, and software used are.

I think it would be a better idea to use callipers and recreate the parts in some modelling program. 3dcatch is nice, but you can get better results by measuring and modelling.

I couldn't agree more.  At some point I'm going to be sick of prints that get ruined after 1+ hours and I'm going to tear the thing apart to fix the mechanical problems.

I know it's not open source hardware.  I'm not looking to make a duplicate solidoodle frame.  In fact quite the opposite.  I found the frame to have a flaw and I'm willing to pay $20 or more in ball bearings to fix this problem.  Use a little higher quality parts in this regard.

I feel like this is comparable to Dell not telling me what kind and size of memory to purchase for my motherboard if I'd like to upgrade my PC.

I realize this point is pretty minor.  I'm 100% certain I can measure the part myself however, I fear I may cause damage to the existing bushing when trying to remove it/them from the frame, so it's not weird for me to want to make sure I can order a 3rd party spare before taking this risk, also making sure a ball bearing is pre manufactured with the same specs.  If my upgrade doesn't work or makes it worse I'd like to be able to put it back  to normal just in case.  I don't want to, nor do I have the tools to accurately drill out this hole if a standard bearing size doesn't fit.

As far as the other parts, I'm fairly certain that the extruder acrylic plastic won't live up to several years of use considering my brand new one broke the first time I touched it.  Solidoodle was kind enough to send me a replacement after 5 or 10 emails complaining, but a year into the future I really don't want that kind of downtime buying a new head from them if I could just have some acrylic laser cut for me at a hackerspace or something.

I would suspect they would think of that part as proprietary too and I suppose they are allowed to do that... and yet it's another part I can just pick a different design from thingiverse and bolt it on, which is what I'll do if this ever breaks.

I certainly will not be building solidoode frames and trying to compete in this business.  At this point I'm not even interested in trying to replicated a few replacement parts to keep on hand in case anything breaks.  All I'm looking to do is make some improvements to their machine so that I'm happy with it.  A lot like after market bolt on upgrades to a automobile, only in this case the bolt on upgrade I want prevents my car from crashing during 50% of it's long road trips.

After I get this issue resolved, I'm going to focus on trying to remove my z-axis wobble.

I couldn't agree more,  I'm also pretty sure there are details in the solidoodle parts that a 3rd party replacement part wouldn't need.  Some aspects could be redesigned do that the new parts serve the same purpose while addressing some of the concerns that cause them to break in the first place.

I emailed them a little less than nice email after this whole ordeal

They haven't responded to my other emails.  Even after Support on this forum agreed with Ian's suggestion on this topic.
http://www.soliforum.com/topic/368/my-t … -problems/

I honestly still feel like there is a serious communication gap here.  Or they are mad at me for being upset with them.