I’ve seen a flurry of posts from the usual press-release aggregator “news” sites about this printer this morning, and immediately it looked… familiar. So I wanted to put the usual 3D printer crowdfunding warning out there: If it seems too good to be true, it very probably is. Especially if it seems an awful lot like a previous crowdfunding project that failed to deliver.
Do yourself a favor and avoid the bad gamble.
Originally shared by Stephen Baird
This seems to tic all the “bad bet” boxes -
Questionably low price? Check
Overly optimistic timeline? Check
Suspicious similarity to previous failed printer project? Double check
As far as I can tell, this IS a Pirate3D Bucaneer printer but without the wireless connectivity and with a CoreXY motion system rather than an H-Bot setup.
There’s also the fact that there’s not a single picture of a print it has done… Yeah, I’d stay far away from this one.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/avoc-super-cheap-super-fast-3d-printer
And the use of “custom electronics” to save cost. No matter how much you strip off a printer controller, the things have hit commodity pricing levels out of China at this point, you’re not going to be able to make them better and cheaper and fully custom.
@Stephen_Baird Something like a reimagined, stripped down Mega2560, two layer, small format in production quantities they’d be able to save money and get a form factor that better fits the design. The issue is that they have to be into the 10s of thousands to recognise that scale. I’d say that’s unreasonably optimistic. From what it looks like they are trying to do some of the original Printrbot boards could fit the ticket.
As you mention with the scale of RAMPS right now, I can get good quality RAMPS/Arduino clones with Stepsticks for under US$10 in 100 qty. It would be great to see an all in one board RAMPS clone with low cost parts but I don’t see the market supporting it at this point. The bubble in the low end has burst and the traction is toward the $200ish kits from Shenzhen. I make more now on frame upgrade kits for those machines then when I was selling more lower cost machines.
It does look like a black Buccaneer. Including the questionably thin z build plate rails with bad looking leverage.
As I remember the Buccaneer, its case was extruded aluminum. This one claims to be extruded polycarbonate. Suppose they bought the tooling off Pirate3D, or did Pirate3D’s Chinese contract factory decide to start offering extrusion made on their tooling on their own initiative? I know that’s not uncommon with Chinese factories.
But their claimed print area seems to be larger than the Buccaneer’s, which is confusing, because the Core XY setup should take a bit more peripheral space than the previous H Bot setup and slightly decrease the build area if they’re using the same extruded case.