The Making of A 3D Printer

 

A few weeks ago, we posted A 2D Tour of a 3D Printer Factory, with lots of photos of 3D printer manufacturer Buildatron Systems's facilities. But there was one important piece missing: the actual step by step building of a 3D printer. We plan to build one ourselves shortly and detail the experience in a separate story. (More precisely, Analyst Tony Hoffman will be working on and overseeing the building of one, while I run tests on a pre-built printer provided by Buildatron, for yet another story.) In the meantime, Buildatron provided us with a set of photos that show the process from beginning to end. If you're considering buying a kit to build your own printer, or are just wondering how a 3D printer goes about printing, you should find these steps more than a little interesting.

The object of the exercise is to start with everything that's on the left side of the image above—the parts for the case along with all the pieces in the two boxes—and wind up with the fully assembled printer shown on the right.

When you're done, you'll be able to print objects as shown here (assuming, of course, that you put all the pieces together correctly). Buildatron calls this particular object a twisted bottle, with the bottle on the left and the lid on the right. (Both pieces get printed at the same time.) The gold object just above the bottle is the extruder nozzle, which is the 3D-printer equivalent of the nozzles in an inkjet print head. Note that this nozzle is visibly different from the one in the prototype printer shown in our tour of the Buildatron facility. According to Buildatron, it's still developing the nozzle, but the company expects the final version to be similar to this one.

The first major stage is building the internal frame that holds all the working pieces, including the motors that move the extruder (the equivalent of a print head) in the X (right and left), Y (back and forth), and Z (up and down) axes. You first need to build two triangles like the one shown in the upper left; two crossbar assemblies, shown in progress in the upper right and finished in the lower left; and then put the pieces together to wind up with the basic frame shown in the lower right. Buildatron says that the components are designed for long term durability, with steel rods, nuts, and washers along with ABS plastic for the joints.