Website for Group Purchasing Parts for the Best Maker Projects

[quest]

I am a huge fan of my Rostock Max V2 (upgraded to the H280 hotend) and appreciate all of the information this community provides (much needed as I was troubleshooting my build) so I thought it would be a good group to bounce an idea off of.

Cliff Notes: I want to help make it easier to build the best maker projects that require 3d printed parts and other hardware/electronics. I created a website (http://www.assemble.fund) to help with this and I am curious if you guys think it is dumb or have any thoughts on how to improve the model. Below I outline my rationale for the site. Ultimately I just really like 3d printing and building things and want to help make it more accessible to others.

--end cliff notes

After I got my printer up and running and printed A LOT of solid objects/figurines I got kind of bored. I found a bunch of cool projects to build on thingiverse like:

- RC Speed Tank: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2024364
- Gyroman: https://www.thingiverse.com/quest1772/e ... e_settings

But it was hard to figure out what parts to get and the assembly instructions were not great...

I dove in and took on the Gyroman project. As I was going through the process of getting parts and doing the assembly I got really frustrated (it took forever and was expensive) and I thought other might be going through the same thing. I created a simple website where people can get together and say they want parts to build a project and then I will order, sort and ship them out to everyone. The site is http://www.assemble.fund.

Also, there were several things on the Gyroman instructable page (https://www.instructables.com/id/Gyroma ... Gyroscope/) that took me awhile to figure out that I wanted to document somewhere but there is no way of adding to or editing an instructable. To get around this I created my own wiki anyone can edit or improve for any project, including gyroman: http://wiki.assemble.fund/Gyroman.

I am curious if any of you have also tried to do one of the more complicated projects on thingiverse and if you had a similar experience. If so, would you prefer to contribute to a crowd funded campaign for me to buy all the parts and just ship a sorted kit of parts to you? if not what is a better method to accomplish the goal of easy access to inexpensive parts kits and good instructions? It didn't seem wise to make a lot of kits before i know if people wanted to make the project. I also do not have the budget or space to hold lots of inventory so my thinking was doing the crowd campaign will mean only the project that get enough support will trigger a payment.

I'd like to build other projects but most project originators don't take the time to build a good parts list and instructions so I need help from others to figure it all out.

In any case thank you for contributions to this community! It helped kick off my 3d printing experience so I am grateful!