Project Background aka For Science!

Part of the inspiration for actually putting this project into motion was the desire to have a 3D printer of my own but for a more reasonable price than what is currently available. Granted, at this point, anything resembling a budget has sort of been thrown out the window in favour of actually getting the damn thing assembled and modified as quickly as possible. The other part had a lot to do with seeing where US schools ranked in Math and Science coupled with the limited budget that a lot of teachers in the US are faced with.
I have a friend who is a NY teacher (thankfully unaffected by this so called war on teachers we have going on in the Empire state) who spends a good portion of her salary on supplies for her class. She'd been thinking about projects to do during the upcoming school year and I was thinking how to actually put some of those engineering classes to good use. The end result of this was a 3D printer that could be easily afforded on a teacher's salary and used as a class project to teach some of the basics of mechanics to students. This is, of course, in addition to whatever could be printed as a teaching aid (I suggested the parts of a cell, she suggested a globe or something).
However, there was still the cost of the ABS or PLA filament that is used to create the models. This can often reach over $40 for a kilogram. My solution, use plastic pellets. They are much cheaper ( prices for the same weight can sometimes be as low as $5) and, if you have the necessary materials, can be custom coloured. This also led to the idea that in a future model, recycled plastics might be used as well as commercially available pellets thereby making the printing even cheaper.
Here's the bottom line: The end result of this is a printer that is going to be affordable, easily assembled, stylish, and, because it'll be running on open source software (at least for the time being), easy to use. There are some bonuses that I've thrown in but those will have to wait until a little closer to the end of the month, just before the Kickstarter page goes live.