Time to get seriously jealous

[yellowshark 153]

I went to a 3D Systems seminar/demo day today – primarily to check out their EU 350 scanner. I saw one of their true colour printers (only 6 million colours mind you) printing a large bottle with powdered nylon, I think, with a print time of 3 hours. I guess it would have taken us 6 hours at least. But, close your eyes, in that 3 hours they had 7 bottles on the bed and could have fitted probably 10. So yes I am saving up, at EU 900,000.00 it’s a snip J

Getting back to the real World I saw a very detailed house, probably 1:100 scale, maybe a bit bigger, printed by their unreleased and not quite ready Cube3. By a margin as a big as from here to the moon it was the finest piece of 3D printing I have ever seen from our type of printers. The walls had clearly been surfaced mapped with a brick pattern and were awesome. A set of table and chairs, printed at the same time, could be seen and the legs were no more than 0.8mm, 0.4mm?, and were absolutely pristine. The roof, red, also had a great tile pattern, again gobsmackingly executed. Great finely detailed doors etc. Lots of different elevations.

As I said, I was a bit like Toad seeing his first car, unbelievable. The whole thing had been done in a single print without using support.

The ready but unreleased Cube Pro is the same printer but with a larger bed, fully enclosed and setup to print PLA/ABS/Nylon. Cube 3 with one extruder is around Eu1000 raising to Eu 1900ish for 3 extruders. Fully specced Pro version with 3 extruders is I think high Eu3000s. Now I know their materials are expensive but if that quality represents lack of failures, the price drops seriously. Now of course the whole thing might have been a very tall story but…

 

 

 

 

 

[Dim3nsioneer 558]

Just to make sure: You actually saw it printing, not only the results, right? For all the examples you mentioned?

 

[IRobertI 521]

To use an age old phrase: Pics or it didn't happen!

Did you get a chance to see what the underside of the usupported table and such looked like? Or overhangs/bridges in general? It sounds a bit too good to be true that they could do that sort of stuff with FDM without support.

 

[yellowshark 153]

Hi guys, no I did not see the house being printed - which is why I did say right at the end about it being a "tall storey". Sorry guys that is English vernacular for " a lie", nothing to do with skyscrapers

No I did not think to look under the table, I was picking myself up off the floor after seeing the table legs! Yup the ground floor ceiling showed the typical hanging loops of unsupported filament across a long bridge, so safe to say that there is nothing sensational there. The roof did not overhang the exterior walls, it sat on them, so you could argue that was a bit of a cheat. And indeed maybe the table was printed separately and the guy fibbed, unintentionally or not.

I must say that the more I think about it I just cannot believe the table was printed in situ - it just had to be printed upside down on a separate run.

There were quite a few other objects on display with tricky geometries that were extremely good and far better than those I saw at the show last year on the same company's stand.

Earlier I was chatting with another attendee and I said to him at the time that the house was not printed by the Cube - I saw them at the CTC show last Autumn and was seriously unimpressed with the results I saw. So yes I was rather surprised, to say the least, when I subsequently discovered it had been printed by the new version.

At the end of the day the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. It was stated that release is 6-8 weeks, I might just go back for a personal demo with a couple of my nasty STL files - and take my camera too!

 

[Daid 306]

3D Systems is known for "by mistake" putting the wrong prints with their printers. (SLS prints sitting next to FDM machines)

So I wouldn't trust anything they say about their machine, and wait for user experiences. I talked to a few CubeX users, and they where not that impressed with the results.

Their material is also ridiculously expensive. Only Fabbster does worse.

 

[brumbaer 0]

I have a B9Creator and an UM2.

I did some building withe the B9Creator which I printed with the UM2 as well.

The B9Creator uses resin, so the tiles are much better there, but I must say, I'm not disappointed by the way the UM2 printed the roofs, especially when considering that the model didn't take FDM into consideration.

On the left standard UM Blue on the right different building same roof UMBlue spray painted and given a quick dry brush. It looks much nicer when looked on from ordinary viewing distance.

Some more buildings to give you a better feel of size. A puzzle tile is 30 cm across.