helagak wrote:still cool to see innovation and new ideas.
Agreed. I was rushing out the door and didn't have time to elaborate.
First of all, I think it is the most innovative and original 3D-printing idea I've seen on Kickstarter. I think it is pretty clear how new and "outside the box" this is. It is a really intelligent solution, especially the drop size.
Design concerns:
- Drop size can vary by up to 10%, if everything else is held constant. That means if you design a part 50cm tall, you could have up to 5cm of variation.
- Requires a DC coupled sound card.
- How will it be calibrated? As it has no way of measuring the starting position of the resin, the x-y dimensions will be off by some scaling factor.
- Layer thickness is a function of how much volume has been printed. Since you're floating your reservoir on top, the resin thickness (and therefore layer thickness) will shrink as you build. Of course, this can be alleviated by increasing the surface area of the resin to part volume ratio, but then you need containers and resin quantities pretty large! You could account for this in software to an extent, though.
Logistic concerns:
- He's on pace to have over 5,000 orders. I have no idea how he'll handle that logistically. It was pretty intense fulfilling 470 kit orders for Filastruder, and that was with the help of half a dozen friends. He's looking at a challenge an order of magnitude larger.
- August 2014 is a long time away. There could be a whole lot of innovation between now and then.
- The price entices a lot of people that are new to 3D printing. This is a very new, very untested technology - think reprap in the very early days. There are going to be a lot of bugs to work out. People that have not dealt with 3D printing before may not be happy about that...
- Crowdfunding on two different sites is pretty strange.
In short: Really neat idea, not likely to get near the accuracy of FDM printers, could have massive problems fulfilling backer rewards.
RavensCrest wrote:cheap printer and expensive "ink" era is here now?!
It's $40/kg. That's in the same ballpark as ABS/PLA.