Great trip to the MWRRFestival

March 20-22 (2015) was the 3rd annual Midwest RepRap Festival held at the Elkhart County 4H Fairgrounds in Elkhart, IN.  There were a lot of cool printers and people at the event,  I was only able to attend for a few hours on Saturday (my drive one way was a few hours).  Below are a few general overview pics of the people and tables:

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Here's Ben Heck, someone I certainly didn't expect to see or meet at the Festival.  I walked by the table he was at, stopped, and said "Ben Heck?...are you Ben Heck?" and yes, it was actually him.  I only got to talk to him for a brief moment (mainly about setting up the printer he had with him) but he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

Quite a few delta printers:

One Wallace, wasn't able to catch the builder to pick his brain though.

A few SLS printers, very cool technology - amazingly seems less complicated to build than a standard Cartesian (regular X, Y, Z axis) FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printer.  Main issue seems to be the cost of a DLP projector.

Here are a few prints produced from the first SLS printer pictured above:

I was able to meet the makers of the E3D printer hot-end and got to see the E3D Volcano in action, as well as learning a bit about the technical aspects of it.  Actually, when I talked to the 2 of them I didn't know they were the actual developers.

I've been using the E3D v6 for a few months now, originally I got it because of it's versatility (can handle higher temps), the positive user ratings, but what really pushed me to get it was to print Taulman's T-Glase (PET filament), Taulman recommends a larger orifice size when printing with T-Glase to take advantage of optical properties.

Just today, 5/14/15, I finally received my very own Volcano hot end kit, distributors in the US completely sold after the festival, I couldn't find one until last week.  Can't wait to install it and try it out (my goal is to dial it in with Taulman Bridge filament).