Re: Worm Drive Grounded Delta Printer

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JamesNewton

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Solidus Labs
I have ordered SLA prints of all the parts which I plan on using for master to make casting molds for short run production.
How does everyone feel about crowd funding the production?

Jon – Solidus Labs

So... this is to be a commercial machine? You are not releasing the files? Or do you plan to do both?

Honestly, the best part of this machine is that you can print so much of it. The original repraps were mostly just hardware store metal held together with a few small 3D printed parts. So this concept of "repraping" really wasn't... real. for the most part. This machine is as close to something you can actually print yourself as I have ever seen. Only the electronics, motor, drive screw and some nuts and bolts required.

The traditional rep raps are "print little, hardware store much" where as this design is "print much, hardware store a little".

casting it seems... well, mabey it will just be "buy a little, hardware store a little" but then I don't really see an advantage to it over e.g. a Printrbot Jr.

Am I missing something?

James,
It is going to be open source. I will release the files when I am confident that the design is solid. Being able to print the printer is great if you have access to a printer. But since not everyone has access to a printer I wanted to use crowd funding to give some economies of scale benefit. Since the majority of the parts are printed, scaling with printing is not easily feasible and would require a fleet of printers. Casting the parts is kind of the middle ground where printing is prototyping and injection molding is long run manufacturing. Sure there are pro's and con's over Pb Jr. and the long list of cartesian bots and delta bots but my goal was to build a printer that was reasonably affordable, easy to produce, and easy to assemble. The assembly time should be somewhere from 1-2 hours. I think a great ancillary benefit is the printer is it is a real life application of trigonometry which fits in with the typical consumers of 3d printers, educators and inventors.

Jon - Solidus Labs