Originally Posted by
laird
It seems like a nice printer. There's nothing fundamentally new here, but that's not a problem - there's value in them taking others' ideas and packaging them into a printer design that works well.
That being said I'm not sure that they've thought it through:
- Two extruders don't mean that you can print one thing twice as fast, it means that you can print one thing twice at the same time. This doubles throughput. But since the two extruders move in parallel, you can't print two different parts of the same thing. People have been doing this with Makerbot (and similar) printers with two extruders for a few years - Sailfish firmware's Ditto Print does exactly this. It's great for trade show demos, and for cranking out many copies of small things. The one nice thing is that if the extruders can be spread further apart, you can make wider things this way.
- CNC mill: a 3d printer frame isn't strong enough to support a CNC mill, which is much heavier and uses much more force to cut through metal, etc. Sure, you can use a dremel on a 3d printer to mill styrofoam or balsa, but I wouldn't call that a CNC mill. Start cutting through wood and metal, using a 5 HP toolhead, and you have a CNC mill. There's a reason that mills are made of cast metal, not bolted together - they need the mass to stay together given the stresses they undergo. And then - where does all of the milled material go? And how do you hold the work material down? They need clamps or a vacuum table, etc.
- Paste extruders: sure.
So while I love the idea, I'm not sure it's real yet. if they can provide real detail, and in particular a video of the unit doing CNC milling, then it'd be very interesting.
New to 3d printing looking for...
05-20-2024, 12:56 AM in Tips, Tricks and Tech Help