[Lab] Crowd funded 3d printers

[Jason Arnold]

I'm not qualified to comment on your links, but I've been researching the
current budget champ: the Printrbot Simple for few weeks now. It starts at
$349 US ($309 if you cut your own wood!) for a kit and has gotten lots of
love - excellent bang for the buck. The $599 (assembled, $539 in kit form)
Simple Metal is a step up quality-wise from what I've read - owing to it's
improved stoutness at the expense of increased weight (in case you planned
on travelling with it). They both use the same print head and have recently
received an Adafruit-engineered upgrade that makes them
Ninjaflex-compatible (which was also big consideration for me since I want
to get into printing flexy stuff too...maybe a model of an OC Transpo bus
haha).

On a side note, I started a Ninjaflex thread here about a month ago if you
wanna read up on what goes in to making a printer compatible. As I
understand it:
- A "direct drive" print head is needed to hold the filament directly over
the work rather than a "Bowden-tube" type that feeds the filament from a
distance through a tube.
- The tradeoff is that a direct drive head is heavier, meaning slower print
times.
Anyone more knowledgeable is welcome to chime in here.

*Jason*


2014-07-17 8:19 GMT-04:00 Justin Slootsky <justin at slootsky.org>:

> There are two 3d printers on different crowd funding sites that look
> interesting and I'm considering getting one of them.
>
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/craftbot-3d-printer
>
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cobblebot/cobblebot-3d-printer
>
> If any of you 3d printer people have the time to look at and critique (or
> praise) these printers, I'd appreciate it. Also if there are other low(ish)
> priced commercially available printers (or kits) that I should be
> considering.
>
> One thing I'd like to do that neither of these talk about is use ninjaflex
> filament. I understand that the feed system needs certain characteristics
> to use ninjaflex, but I'm not clear on what the requirements are. (possibly
> the feed needs to be near the extruder so it doesn't bend like an octranspo
> bus in the snow)
>
> If you think it is more appropriate to contact me offlist, feel free.
>
> Thanks
>
>
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