3DMonstr: Large, quad-extruder 3D printer on Kickstarter

[3dm]

Hi, @DT,

I'll try to answer these one at a time:

I do not intend to work in PLA at all unless necessary. My first goals are ABS and nylon.

Understood. We've heard it loud and clear from a lot of folks. Done deal. We'll have a heated bed. In fact, I just got off the Skype with Ed, one of our engineers, who's started prototyping our solution. I'll keep posting updates as we get progress. The next time you hear about it from me will be either because someone else has asked this question, or because we have something working in the lab.

i already have another machine on order that is much smaller, but has a heated bed and has been tested with PLA and I believe nylon. Though of course they are trying to push their own filament.

Oh, boy, do I understand this! But no, we're not going to do that. Basically, we've designed our extruder to have the widest possible material spectrum we could, based on what we knew. And we're going to continue testing with various materials (I have some cool new filaments from Taulman sitting under my desk waiting to be cracked open).

However, I do like the larger size of your -24 for some of the projects I want to try. I am still worried that it hasn't been tested with anything that would prove that it would work at near the full envelope size. I would love to see a 23" open cube displayed to show no warpage. Once you have the machine, of course.

Yes, we're very much looking forward to being able to test this.

One thing I'm worrying about is that at such a large perimeter there would be too much time for the previous layer to cool before the next layer gets laid down, and I don't know how this will effect things.

We've done some PLA prints in the 13" range (diagonally on the 12" bed) and we didn't see any issues with layer adhesion, even when layers were fairly complex and took a long time. I'm pretty optimistic that there's not a step function there, as layers cool in a continuous decaying function, so a small incremental increase in time between layers should have diminishing negative effect on adhesion. But, of course, the proof is in the printing. Soon.

And yes, I'm worrying about SSYS being lawsuit happy right now. But I suppose I can make my own enclosure...

Re: enclosure: yes, this is an unfortunate situation. Although I can't help directly, I suspect that either some commercial entity may produce an enclosure for some other purpose that you may be able to re-purpose, or that the user community will come up with a shared solution.

Ben.