'New Matter' launching the MOD-t Affordable 3D Printer Soon via Crowdfunding Campaign

Oh... I get it now! Okay, I like this now.

Just have to make sure it stays very clean. And is the plate just riding on ball bearings against the bottom of the enclosure?

Also agreeing with Yorke. It takes at least a year to get from funding to shipping. Anyone with a six month timeline on a hardware project and few scheduled milestones sets off all the red flags for investors with any experience at all in mass production. (not to say they don't get funded... There seem to be a plenty of investors with no experience in manufacturing, and they love that promise of instant gratification.)

No matter how good the team or how ready they are, it takes about a year to make any kind of production line unless you're outsourcing everything or making something obscenely simple like coasters or t-shirts. Not due to anyone on the team, but because of outside production bottlenecks and regulatory hurdles. All in all it takes about nine months just to get through the EPA and OSHA red tape before you touch your factory floor. (Not just an American problem... Many major industrialized countries make it even harder to legally run a factory.)

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Originally Posted by Feign

Oh... I get it now! Okay, I like this now.

Just have to make sure it stays very clean. And is the plate just riding on ball bearings against the bottom of the enclosure?

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Yes, you do have to keep chunks of filament out of the gears. In practice, I'm not that tidy and most of the time any debris gets pushed along the pinion rod and out of the way. Only once did I have a mis-print due to a large chunk of filament in the gear.

Also, the build plate has feet in the corners that normally glide just above the flat surface at the bottom of the enclosure. Normally the build plate does not want to tip, but if you have an off-center center-of-gravity, one of the feet may touch down as you move to the extreme X-Y positions, but the transition is smooth and not noticeable.

Hi,
What about the possible "clattering"?? (I don't know if this is the right word to describe it), I refer to the little up and down movements due to the gears itself. If the bed is not held into the gears, with some guides as most printers do, every time a tooth is pushing the bed, it can move upwards instead of moving in the same plane. All the more if the bed is unbalanced and one of its feet is touching the base.
I know the movement could be mostly imperceptible but when I'm trying to print something with 0.05-0.1 mm layer thickness, that little movement could be very important in terms of quality.

Theoretically, the involute profile of the gears will give perfectly level motion. But of course, the gears are not perfect, and there will always be a tiny amount of up & down movement. In the prints we've tested, there is no noticeable up & down wobble in the print surface. (I'll try to get some hi res photos to post soon.) Also note that the main benefit of a really fine layer thickness is to hide the layer lines, and the layer lines still disappear even if there is a tiny about of variation in the build platform height.