MakiBox
Release status: working
| Description | Full case 3d printer
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| License | ???
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| Author | |
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| Based-on | [[]]
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Introduction
It’s the first 3D printer designed from the ground up to be simple, completely self-contained, reliable and most important of all, affordable!
The MakiBox A6 is a fully enclosed design, allowing for a consistent heated printing (build) space. The motors and electronics are separate from the printing space and have an active cooling fan to draw air past them to keep them cool and working at top efficiency. The printing material fits inside of the MakiBox, so nothing sticks out, keeping things neat and compact.
The MakiBox is designed to be more simple and reliable than any other in this class. Instead of using complicated belts and pulleys, it uses simple drive screws, reducing the number of parts, the cost, and the assembly and maintenance time. We will pre-assemble the most difficult parts, such as the extrusion head or the drive shaft coupling so that the kit assembly is no more difficult than an IKEA furniture.
We are just getting started (2012/07) with both the A6 and other devices that will help people build things they need. The next features we will build for the A6 are multi-color printing and plastic recycling, laser cutting and marking, and PCB routing. These new addons for the A6 will turn it into a desktop manufacturing system, not just a 3D printer.
Specifications
- Printed Parts: None on production model
- Non-Printed Parts: Laser cut acrylic or stainless steel panels. POM (generic Delrin) cnc'd brackets and gears.
- Material Cost: ???
- Cost: USD 300 + shipping. Early buyers got $50 flat shipping fee. May be additional local taxes or fees. (Partially assembled.)
- Printing Size: 150mm x 120mm x 110mm (6" x 4.5" x 4.5")
- Precision: 0.04mm (position/printing)
- Speed: 8-10cm/s (position/printing)
- Head: XY
- Bed: Z
Specialities
- Full acrylic or optional stainless steel case.
- Optional pellet to filament drive (named "MakiBox Ramen") creating 1.75mm filament within (ABS pellets 1/3 cost of filament)
- Trapezoidal drive shafts, no pulleys
Development Process
MakiBox started to create a self-contained pellet driven 3d printer, but while the development the pellet driver "MakiBox Ramen" and the actual 3d printer "MakiBox A6" was disconnected, does not feed the printer extruder direct due discovered difficulties:
- The problem is that you do need something to separately pull the filament from the (pellet) extruder and push it into the printer (extruder), if you are doing a feed tube and not direct printing. The reason for this is that the flow will get stuck extremely easily from the extruder with small amounts of back pressure. There is always somewhere in the feed that the material is molten enough to mushroom against the back pressure. -- (Jonathan Budford, 2012/12/24)
So the pellet to filament ("MakiBox Ramen") is within the same case but is now treated as an add-on and creates filament on a spool and then once rolled, used for the actual printer "MakiBox A6".
