THANK YOU very much, for responding!

SD made a horrible design choice with regards to that acrylic design.

Now I have to glue the stupid acrylic parts back together so I can make it work long enough to print this thing....

The son of the guy that installed my new hot-end said at least one other brand of printer uses the same multilayer acrylic filament enclosure. It probably isn't a very good design, and mine is cracked now as well.

ThatGuy wrote:

I understand completely what you were saying. I used to work in product development designing appliances, and making and testing prototypes. The cut paste method was used quite a bit
[snip]
Thanks for your help

Cool. And yes, its funny how much even production stuff is based off print it out and glue it on

If the scale is wrong, download Inkscape (free) and go from there - you can adjust the EPS import scale etc.

Yeah, imported into Solidworks to overlay Nema 17motor 2D sketch to check for scale. It's all over the shop. Downloading inkscape now, however I feel this is a slow arduous process, a reference square (10mm x 10mm) in the corner would definately help here.
I'll be drawing it up in 2D/3D Cad so that 100mm always equals 100mm for anyone that wants it. I'll put it onto Thingiverse under username "LeHof" for anyone that needs it.

I understand completely what you were saying. I used to work in product development designing appliances, and making and testing prototypes. The cut paste method was used quite a bit
[snip]
Thanks for your help

Cool. And yes, its funny how much even production stuff is based off print it out and glue it on

If the scale is wrong, download Inkscape (free) and go from there - you can adjust the EPS import scale etc.

I don't have access to a laser or cnc cutter. I was going to attempt to make them by hand.

then just print them out on a post script printer, glue them to whatever you want to cut, and go from there.

Like I said - they are just Vector Images... you have both the Adobe Illustrator file or the EPS file.

Open them with InkScape, GIMP, Photoshop, etc etc.. Even http://epsviewer.org/ .

Print at 1:1... glue to whatever... cut out around the lines.

Cutting stuff is a 2D operation - you very rarely 'cut things' using Sketchup or Solidworks... you Model a 3D object in those. If you just want to cut something out - by hand or computer controlled - all you need is the lines. Hence they are most often distributed as SVG or EPS... because you just need the lines to follow.. wether you are cutting by hand or a machine...

They are just vector images of the cuts - thats all you need to laser cut or CNC them.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:48767

There's not one consumer product out there I can't make better in some way. What's great about open source hardware is that we don't have to wait for the company to make the change, like in the past. Do it yourself! Share it with the community. Some may like it. Some may not. You may get praise. You may not. Just do your best. How possibly could one little company selling an eager little printer keep up with the engineering and design prowess of thousands of users world wide? I made up some pretty nice new idler brackets for my sd3, and stated simply why I did it (the factory ones broke, were sloppy, and weak - all true statements), and felt no need to bust solidoodle over the head about it. Then smitty50500 makes mine way better by adding bearings. Who knows what the next guy (or gal!) is going to come with?

Be sure to look over my stud mount extruder too Aron, you may like it. It's working great for me. More importantly, you may come up with even more awesome mods.

Just shattered my acrylic assembly. Trying to figure out this puzzle so I can print jigsaw replacement.

http://www.soliforum.com/topic/235/extr … bly-guide/

I'm focused on helping entrepreneurs get their ideas commercialized, especially medical device start-ups ideas.  Normally, people screw up because their minds are too techy or too businessy.  Forget marketing and you lose, forget functionality and you also lose.  I'm fairly sure that guy didn't do both, because that is what  normally happens.  As an engineer, I think like a tech guy, but I also force myself to think outside of that mindset.

I spoke to someone from solidoodle on the phone on Friday.  I explained that I understand why they went with the arcylic design, but it sucks too much.  Start-ups need to make decisions that don't always make sense from a thencical standpoint.  I'm confident that this acrylic design was chosen to make the extruder look super pretty.  And, lets be honest: didn't everyone think the clear extruder was awesome in the videos, before they bought one??  But if I broke the damn thing, that means a hell of a lot of other people will too.

Solidoodle said they are working on a new extruder design, and it won't have the list of engineering issues I complained about.  Thank you everyone for helping publish a replacement printable extruder!  I taped my broken acyclic pieces back together with duct tape well enough to be able to print the mk4 replacement.  And thus I'm back in business  ( I think I( am anyway, I haven't assembled it yet).