Wednesday 23 May 2012

New toy: Zcorp 3D printer

I'm wondering if my old Ebay addiction is coming back to haunt me. I just won this little beauty, a Zcorp 3D printer. It is based on inkjetting a binder into starch powder to build up a 3D model. I actually started trying to make one of these myself once: my attempts at a 3D printer but lost momentum. This one is not working but at £235 it is worth it just for the mechanics, if I get it working then that is great, otherwise I can probably put my own electronics on board. Printing in starch/plaster powder is not a patch on the resin based printer I just supported on Kickstarter except that the parts are perfectly supported by the powder. This should allow me to print CT data of bees that I collected some years ago directly. That was the original idea behind building my own actually.



There are two vats, one the build and one the powder, the gantry has a print head and a powder spreader. The powder vat piston goes up and the spreaders spreads the powder onto the build area, then it prints the binder and the build piston lowers and the process repeats. Simples!

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