These 5 Pioneering 3D Printers became extinct.

the road to 3d printer success is littered with dead ends there are many early machines you might be familiar with like the reprap mendel makerbot replicator and the original ultimaker that have all had a lasting impact on the industry to this day but what about those machines that didn't make it those evolutionary paths and species that effectively became extinct after all that was the original aim of the reprap project at its core a machine that could self-replicate and through a community involvement evolve to become better and better with each passing generation but i believe these extinct species shouldn't be forgotten so these are five pioneering 3d printer designs that died out although they didn't find continued success they left a lasting impression on me and perhaps in some cases deserve a second look as the world of 3d printing continues to evolve let's get started [Music] number one reprap darwin if you're talking about pioneering 3d printed designs then it would be a miss to not mention the first design born from adrian boyer's reprap project the reprap darwin 3d printing isn't all that new with fdm or fused deposition modeling being invented by scott crump in the late 80s but the purpose of the reprap project was very different to the commercial goals of stratasys reprap machines are intended to be self-replicatable that is a child rep wrap can be built using parts produced by the parent rep rap obviously a lot of the motion components electronics and nuts and bolts can't be produced by the parents at least not yet so these were credibly referred to as vitamins with the goal of each design iteration to reduce the vitamin and part count and make the machine simpler and easier to assemble however only cost a fraction of that the first thing you'll notice with the darwin is just how over complex it is the design was loosely inspired by the existing stratasys mechanical designs and it has a complex moving gantry arrangement and this incredible z-axis movement with four lead screws and linear rods slave to a single motor with a huge timing belt also worth noting is the extruder using a brushed gear motor to pull filament down into the thermoplastic extruder which used manually wound heater wire to create a diy heat cartridge the reprap darwin was groundbreaking and despite its over complexity it spawned some of the first commercially available 3d printer kits aimed at hobbyists one of which being the bits from bites rep man a laser-cut acrylic interpretation of the rep rap darwin just like the darwin this pla only 3d printer was notoriously difficult to get a good print out of but the idea of being able to produce three-dimensional objects in your very own home was groundbreaking for the time there's no question that the surge in popularity of 3d printing over the last 15 years can be largely attributed to adrian boyer and the reprap project but back at the beginning it wasn't just all about printing in plastic or indeed using fdm technology at all number two candy fab the candy fab was a project started back in 2007 by wendell oscar and leno edmond of the evil mad scientist laboratories and their approach to producing three-dimensional objects was wildly different to that of the reprap project instead of molten plastic the candy fat machine selectively melted sugar particles together in a huge box which was then lowered as each new layer was spread across and melted in place this idea isn't too different to sls or selective laser sintering where a laser will sit a plastic powder in place layer by layer but the switch to sugar and a heat gun makes the candy fab far more affordable to run and 3d printing of huge objects becomes a realistic possibility and because the unmelted sugar granules provide a support bed for the print as it forms they are even able to produce interlinked models like this gigantic chain completely out of sugar the candy fab 6000 culminated a long list of improvements and food safety considerations into a machine that could have gone on to become quite popular indeed but in their own words the candy 5 6000 made its debut in 2009 this is the same year that makerbot was formed and the year that hobbyist 3d printing exploded suddenly you could just buy a credible 3d printer for a thousand dollars the primary motivation for making a candy fab was no longer there while the idea of printing large roughly textured objects from sugar might not be on the top of everyone's priorities the project still made great headway into diy powder-based 3d printing systems and that space remains at a pretty embryotic stage even today there was however another company with sweet 3d treats on the mind and that came along a little later and it absolutely grabbed my attention the sugar lab instead of melting sugar together their approach was to bind it together using an inkjet head an approach modified from an existing technology pioneered by z-corp which uses a special gypsum powder and a jetted binder with color to produce full color 3d prints the sugarlab team partnered up with 3d systems where they announced the chef jet at the end of 2014 and i was 100 going to buy one the idea of full color edible 3d prints with the detail they showed was just awesome and i even put together an entire business case for it but the machine never came and 3d systems killed it off along with their entire failed attempt at cracking the consumer 3d printing market they might have tried to purge that disaster from the internet but old angus remembers oh yes he does it looks like it might be coming back with something called the brill 3d culinary printer but i'm not holding my breath i'll believe it when it's actually for sale number three tantalus many early 3d printers were large awkward and fragile beasts which didn't tolerate transport all that well but what about one designed for portability enter tantalus the tantalus latin 4 very small was designed by sublime and this absolutely adorable design was a one-of-a-kind reprap with the goal of being a portable self-replicating compact printer with a footprint of only 225 by 225 by 300 millimeters that's the size of the printer it has to be one of the smallest 3d printers that was around at the time although a laser-cut version also existed it stands out to me as one of the first designs to use 3d printing for the entire chassis which was not an easy feat back in 2012. most people could barely get anything over 100 millimeters across to print without warping or failing despite being tiny the build volume was a semi usable 100 millimeter cube which could self-replicate albeit by printing the frame in parts and gluing it together but it was able to fit that much movement into such a small package thanks to its innovative use of braid fishing line to transfer movement from the motors to the movement axes unlike more traditional mono fishing filament braided fishing line is created from braided synthetic fibers like spectra or dacron and it's incredibly strong for its size with very little stretch this is way more compact and cost effective compared to even the smallest timing belts and pulleys and that combined with the ultimaker style xy movement configuration created an incredibly well put together design indeed one of my personal favorites i'm a massive fan of tiny printers but at the time i didn't have the tools or skills to build myself a tantalus things have changed a lot since then however now i could print this entire thing on pretty much any of my budget i3s so if you'd like to see that let me know in the comments below number four printerbot the time is november 2011. and if you wanted a 3d printer you're still looking at a few thousand dollars minimum for an assembled machine or about a grand for any kind of workable diy kit with the electronics so suffice to say when the printerbot kickstarter campaign dropped promising a kit with everything you need it for around 500 bucks it caused quite an impact indeed unlike other campaigns around that time that over-promised and under-delivered or didn't deliver at all brook drum managed to run a tight ship and actually pull it off and proved to the 3d printing industry that a budget 3d printer that actually worked was possible and people went nuts for it now it certainly wasn't perfect the design was hugely simplified and had many components made out of laser-cut plywood which isn't the most dimensionally stable material in the world but it was easy to put together and the assembly time was a fraction of what it took to assemble other kits and even had a pcb heatbed which was something that was kind of hard to source at the time i've only had the pleasure in meeting brooke once way back at the 2017 bay area maker faire but i shook his hand and said thank you for disrupting the out of 3d printing because after printerbot things started to change at a rapid pace brook went on to design a range of other 3d printers from the even more minimalistic wooden printerbot simple to the much more elegant and refined but ultimately more expensive printerbot simple metal but unfortunately closed up shop in 2018 citing low sales in my opinion it was the price point which put printerbot on the map but it was the price point of china's wave of budget 3d printers which ultimately killed them still the fact we have low cost 3d printers at all these days is in part thanks to the original printer bot showing that it was possible and after a 2021 update it looks like printerbot isn't out for the count quite yet number five reprap simpson so far we've covered printers that started it all printers that started the price war and printers that fit in your backpack but nothing else exists that is quite like the wild designs of nicholas seward the simpson name refers to a whole family of unique 3d printers with kinematics unlike anything else we've ever seen the gus simpson is kind of similar to a delta robot in that it's a type of parallel robot with three identical sets of axes with linkages but its implementation is wholly unique if you'd like a deep dive into the origin of open source delta 3d printers by the way let me know because they're their own complete evolutionary pathway and it's deserving of its own video i think it's pretty cool that for the gus simpson the geared arm design came about from a discussion thread on the reprap forums where a few ideas and equations were bounced back and forth before settling on the herringbone gear approach we really don't see enough of this kind of collaboration design anymore nicholas's designs are so wild that i'm not sure they can even be considered an extinct species in the same way that other machines in this list can they're more like mad science experiments with little care into long-term success but more of a question about what if let's build it and find out honestly though this is actually really cool because all it takes is just one of these out-of-the-box approaches to reveal unexpected benefits and potentially kick-start a whole new era of 3d printed design i am in no way qualified enough to discuss the advantages or disadvantages or even inner workings of nicholas's wild designs so i highly recommend checking out billy rubin's awesome interview with him linked here do you think any of these designs died out before their time or are there any others that you feel should have been included in this list let me know down in the comments below and if you enjoy this video then be sure to subscribe for more thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 277,273

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: waQQg1uz-wI

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022