This is so freaking cool I must say!!!

This is so freaking cool I must say!!!
https://youtu.be/Pd1BSWEraf8

Oh, that is annoyingly clever.

I wonder if it can print anything besides PLA

Idea’s been out there in the world for years and years, but mad props to them for actually making it work.

@Adam_Steinmark They have shown a bunch of prints with Colorfabb nGen, XT, HT and other materials like TPU if you look at their twitter feed, so yes they can print other materials than PLA.

@Erik_Cederberg Interesting. I wonder how they achieve heating the build surface.

@Adam_Steinmark I would guess that the belt is running on top of a heated aluminium plate, should be the easiest way to heat it and at the same time keep it running flat.

Even if it would be more awesome if they did pass a current trough the carbon fiber belt and heated it trough resistive heating :wink:

I rewatched the video and a few others. Looks like your original idea was correct. When the prints pop off the belt I think that’s the end of the build plate.

Awesome!

So it just is angled st 45 degrees and the slice pretends there is a flat plate on the bottom? Weird and cool.

Massive print volume! Very cool watching it start the print in some of the other videos.

To get it to stick initially and not peel

@Nathan_Walkner Not according to another video of the machine working. They start the print right on the conveyor belt.

@Nathan_Walkner that wouldn’t even really make sense. You would have to have extreme precision in placing the part on the belt and how would you get the part that you just place to stay where you want it and not slide along what looks to be a pretty smooth belt.

I guess I just need to try it… should be easy to build.

@Nathan_Walkner maybe this video will help you understand a bit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDWLdlEOA6U

This is exactly the process I used on my printer I was showing off at MRRF. It is a heated build plate and as soon as the belt moves past the heated bed, the parts release. My slicer can slice at any arbitrary angle… the trick is that you need to “shift” the Y axis as the part is built. The other cool feature is that you don’t need to stop a print to add a new part… you just add the new gcode to the stream.

@William_Steele noticed it was moving kinda slow in the video at the end, what’s your max speed you’ve tested?

P.S. I’m a huge sucker for carbon fiber :slight_smile:

@Adam_Steinmark I had it running slow just for the show so people could see how it was working. It runs at the normal speed of a makerbot replicator, which is what I hacked apart to make it.