jamesnewton@geocities.com is the email I give out for everyone to spam me at… and it shows how long I’ve been around. Also the same at http://massmind.org.
The marketing issue boils down to how to explain to someone who just went to ebay and typed “stepper motor driver” that the pile of crap he just purchased for $10 is going to blow up three times, where as the $30 kit I sell will work the first time, is VERY unlikely to blow up, and will cost $10 to repair if it does. If anyone has a solution to that issue, let me know.
The solution is education about quality differences and higher wages 
Man this got me thinking back. The smartrap was a nice but flawed printer. Have you resolved its problems?
I built a couple (and if I’m not mistaken @Griffin_Paquette did one as his 1st machine) the problem I had was the bed had to be light to not sag so a heated bed was a problem. The bearings sitting so close together meant it pivoted there. I was rather sad when i pulled mine apart. Is is indeed a very hackable printer. It taught me a lot and redesigning so many of its parts to suit my needs I did do a dual extrusion head for it and it printed rather well. Actually my 3rd printer was designed around its parts so i could reuse the bearing shafts and the print head I had made here’s a pic of the machine I built from it that machine is still printing today at least 2 years later. I still have all the smartrap parts in a box.
@Michael_Scholtz , I believe the printer has important improvements over the typical Smartrap. First, the frame, which adds a lot of rigidity vs just the Z rods. Second, the extruder is not printed, but a metal extruder. We had reliability problem in our bowden setup when we were using a 3D printed extruder, so we opted for a PTSone all metal extruder and an e3D lite6 hotend to be safe in the extrusion side. Third, the autolevel system, integrated by default in the design, lets you have a removable bed and no to worry too much about the bed position or level.
It is still a entry level printer, not the stiffest one, but we have discovered that the speed is more limited by the amount of material that it can extrude than the rigidity of the structure. Never tried an Smartrap but it is a great design that we used for inspiration.
I am using a different (and printed ) extruder and was able to get decent print quality at speeds up to 80mm/s … Provided slower acceleration.
One thing with my unit is the wobble that happened with the stock acceleration settings.
Something that I will be working on once the heated bed is complete is a baseplate to provide a more stable and stiffer operation.
Please note that these observation are about my unit which I sourced myself 9months ago.
All my work to come should be seen as add on and not solutions
