A 3D Printer on Every Desktop? – The Cubify 3D Printer Series
We’ve known for a while about 3D printers getting cheaper and more accessible every year, particularly the Makerbot. But it seems now 3DSystems is taking the next step forward towards making 3D printers in the home a practical reality. The Cubify 3D plastic printer series allows users to order parts from a Shapeways style library on the Cubify website, print them at home on their plastic printer, and use them right away.
As 3D printers go, they’re pretty inexpensive— the cheapest single material colour printer (the Cube) runs US$1299, with multicolour printers (the CubeX) coming in at just under US$5000 for the model capable of printing in 3 materials at once. The ABS plastic they print is also recyclable. While these printers are not quite at the resolution needed for fine jewellery master models yet, they’re getting finer resolution with each new release, and their low cost and ease of use makes these printers the closest rapid prototyping has come to a practical household machine to date.
Here is a short video of the Cube printer in action at the Google I/O conference:
Jack Meyer
Bespoke jewellery designer, and specialist in jewellery CAD/CAM and emergent technologies that affect jewellery.
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hi I would like to now price of printer and if printer is good for jewelry.Also I want to know price of the printer and the consumables
thank you
Hi Jamal:
At the moment, there doesn’t really exist an FDM printer capable of working at the surface quality we need for jewellery manufacturing. They’re getting close though– it’s only a matter of time before one appears which is detailed enough for this.
Otherwise, you’re better with a high-quality CNC mill, or one of the main 3D printers used in industry for casting– Solidscape Series, EnvisionTec, Invision, or Viper (for rubber moulding) are a few. I’ll see if I can get around to writing an article about 3D printers soon. In the meantime Google should help you with these various machines.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Jack