I don’t follow 3D Printing in depth. Did any of those $100.00 3D printers ever become more than revenue schemes on startup sites?
No that’s way too little money to build a reasonable printer with. At best you’ll see some cheap $200-300 chinese made kits that aren’t the best quality components. It’s not till you get to the $400 range that you’ll see something worth owning
Peachy Printer is close but I think still a year away. And actual sell price to non-backers will be higher.
The peachy printer is just about ready to ship. They just recently had an update about packing all the kickstarted orders.
To be profitable it’d have to be the 2D plotter type(not delta etc), and you’d have to basically put a $10 proto-board in the middle of some bulk commerce hardware and spend months coding the topology->motor-control firmware. I’d interface it to an existing software with RE or documentation or spend weeks with UI/UX dev and a USB library.
If it’s not bolt-together from the sourcing stage you’re losing money… No crappy materials but no metal CNC either, ABS so you can actually use what you make and the parts are the same as cheap material output.
I do stuff harder than this at least once a month and am worth about $30,000. I need to get in to niche marketing and get rich off ‘vaporwear’. You don’t even need to know about business or engineering just post it with a two-hour production time presentation on a gimme site as is the proven methodology…
@Nathan_Walkner walkner it actually was designed to be very scalable. One of the initial intentions was to be able to print a canoe! Since it is resin based the print area is only limited to the size or your tanks and some optics.
@Brian_Boudreau Wouldn’t you want to make a canoe out of polypropylene since you can’t reinforce resin with fiber in 3D printing? ABS is damaged by sun and cold, and has low tensile strength as well.
@TJ_In_Space to be clear printing a canoe was not my idea. I believe the creators were looking to express the flexibility of the unit. Printing chess pieces or canoes. The actual best material is up for debate. Regarding resins I will say this they have come a long way and can have many varying properties.
I’m really interested to see how the Peachy turns out. The scalability’s a cool side effect of curing resin with a laser. For the canoe, you could always print a thin shell and lay it up with fiberglass.
@Nathan_Walkner . I associate ‘resin’ with brittle polymers hence why I mentioned fiber for something that’d hit sharp rocks with hundreds of pounds of force. ABS actually has the same problem.
I do mechanical parts out of polymers because of weight. I do large scale aircraft parts mostly. I’ll probably end up dropping $600.00-$1,000 on a delta printer that can do a decent area.
Supposedly the new tough resins are as strong & durable as ABS but I’ve yet to try them.