You’d be laborious pressed to search out somebody who likes 3D printing greater than I do. I wrote Fool’s Guides: 3D Printing, I’ve reviewed a number of printers for Hackster, I’ve owned a number of, and I’ve used them each professionally and for my very own initiatives. So once I say that I’m impressed with a brand new 3D printer design from the neighborhood, I imply. And I’m very impressed with this quad-head 3D printer constructed by YouTuber Tinkerer in a Bureaucratic Land.
This printer design was primarily based loosely on the HyperCube, but it surely options so many modifications that it’s unrecognizable. The obvious distinction is that this 3D printer has 4 extruders. That implies that it may possibly print 4 occasions as quick — at the least in case you’re printing 4 of the identical mannequin. In contrast to IDEX (unbiased twin extruder) 3D printers, this printer’s extruders all mount to a single shared carriage. That implies that their X, Y, and Z strikes are all equivalent. It’s potential to print totally different fashions with every extruder, however doing so received’t save a lot time and the extra Z-hop strikes might negatively have an effect on the print high quality.
However this printer is attention-grabbing even apart from the 4 extruders. For instance, the ½” thick hand-scraped aluminum tooling plate mattress rests on progressive mounts that enable at no cost motion to compensate for thermal enlargement with out warping. Because the mattress heats up, the steel expands. If it had inflexible mounts, one thing must give throughout enlargement. To keep away from that, this mattress rides on ball bearings on prime of little rails and so it may possibly slide because it expands. Moreover, the lead screw nut mounts even have ball bearing interfaces. That eliminates the Z-banding that may happen when lateral motion within the leadscrews interprets to the mattress.
Just like the HyperCube, this printer design makes use of a CoreXY kinematic system to maneuver the extruder carriage. The extruder mounts have slots, which makes it simpler to set all 4 nozzles to the identical top—simply loosen the mounting bolts, transfer the mattress as much as contact the nozzles, then tighten the bolts once more. The X and Y axes trip on hardened metal cylindrical rods as a substitute of the linear rails which have develop into common these days. Some might query that selection, however real-world proof hasn’t proven that linear rails are any higher than rods.
There’s much more to this construct that I don’t have the house to debate right here, so make sure to watch Ep.1 of the construct sequence on the Tinkerer in a Bureaucratic Land YouTube channel. Different attention-grabbing options embrace customized boards and extruders. The purpose right here was high quality at pace, occasions 4. It appears that evidently was achieved, as this printer has acceleration on-par with the most effective CoreXY printers and the output high quality seems to be excellent.
