The cheapest 3D printer so far
An affordable 3D printer that anyone can use? Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. We keep being promised machines that can output solid objects as easily as a Word file. But we get Heath Robinson contraptions that cost £1,000 and, after we spend three weeks asking people on the internet why nothing’s working, the printer takes all night to produce a cracked plastic blob.
There’s a reason why there’s been so much hype around this technology for the past few years. In 1989, a man called Scott Crump patented an ‘apparatus and method for creating three-dimensional objects’ by controlling the discharge of a melted material on to a base. He called it ‘fused deposition modelling’ (FDM).
Crump’s company, Stratasys, had a lot of success selling FDM machines to industry, but they were much too expensive and complicated for casual use. Twenty years later, however, the patent ran out. People who’d been playing around with their own FDM machines – most notably the RepRap, a worldwide open-source project – could now develop them commercially. Suddenly 3D printing for the masses was on the cards.
The trouble is, FDM still depends on making something messy and unpredictable highly accurate. Expect a lot of adjusting, reprinting, cleaning and adjusting again. And that’s after you figure out exactly what you need to print. Not even Scott Crump has invented a way of turning gravity off while you work, so your software has to add support structures, which you’ll later whittle away with a knife. Because it’s impractical to make most items completely solid, internal lattice structures also have to be calculated to hold everything together.
This is why, although they keep getting smarter, domestic 3D printers are still only for the dedicated enthusiast. The da Vinci Jr doesn’t change that, but it does cost less than its rivals. As with ink in regular printers, you’ll need to budget for consumables. The ‘fused filament fabrication’ (FFF) method – essentially FDM – uses plastic wire which costs £27 a roll.
Some 3D printers look like half-finished Robot Wars entries. By contrast the da Vinci Jr looks like a cross between a 1990s Apple iMac and an aquarium. It’s more the size of a toaster than a microwave, so you’ll need less room, but the output size is limited to 150x150x150mm – a six-inch cube. In reality, it’s too time-consuming and expensive to frequently print anything as big as that.
To keep things simple, only PLA filament can be used, not the tougher ABS. This also means it’s not necessary to have a heated print bed: instead, large squares of masking tape give the plastic something to stick to. Nozzle cleaning is handled rather primitively by poking a bit of metal into the extruder. One definite miss is a full complement of memory: we couldn’t get our first model to print until we slotted in a 4GB SD card. At less than a fiver, that could have been included.
The XYZware software is basic, but lets you import 3D models in standard formats, scale and rotate them, and add support. On a medium-precision 0.2mm setting, it took us 40 minutes to print a Lego-sized 2x4 brick, and eight hours for a fist-sized skull. This was after we’d manually adjusted the nozzle height by trial and error to get our plastic setting properly, and learned to anchor larger models with Pritt Stick to add extra support.
In the end, our results were better than those from many other 3D printers. That’s very impressive for such a cheap and attractive machine. But it’s still far too much fuss for most people to put up with, and because XYZprinting has deliberately made the da Vinci Jr incompatible with generic filament, you have to pay a fixed price for refills. 3D printing for more of us, maybe, but not yet the rest of us.
VERDICT
If you’re realistic about the challenges and limitations of 3D printing, this is a competent machine at an exceptionally reasonable price.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Single-nozzle PLA filament printer • 1.75mm filament • 0.1-0.4mm resolution • 2.6in display • USB 2.0 port • SD card slot • Requires Windows 7 or later or OS X 10.8 or later • 380x420x430mm (HxWxD) • 15kg • One-year warranty