If you look at [Proper Printing’s] latest video — see below — you’ll immediately get the idea behind his latest printer. There are two heads on two separate gantries, which, of course, opens up many possibilities. But when you think you’ve seen enough, you find out the heated bed is a kitchen griddle, and… well, for us, we had to keep watching.
The heated bed idea was interesting, although the flatness left something to be desired. While it is a simple idea, getting the two gantries to move reliably across the hotbed griddle took a lot of parts and a careful design. We wonder how evenly the griddle heats — ours definitely has hot spots when we cook with it.
While the video made it look smooth, he confessed that there were a few redesign cycles. We were curious about the electronics, and obviously, some of the more exotic uses for this will require customized software. The gantries use a core XY drive and it looks like there is still some work to do to perfect it.
We were also amused to see something we’ve seen a lot lately but would have never seen a decade ago. It is now so cheap to make a PCB that many projects, including this one, use PCBs with no traces to get precisely machined flat pieces made inexpensively.
There probably isn’t enough detail here to make an exact copy of the printer, but the real value here is the idea and if you have the interest, you can probably put your own spin on the system. Nothing seemed especially exotic.
If you learn nothing else, you’ll probably en ..
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