I’ll admit, when I first saw The Positron 3D printer designed by Kralyn3D on YouTube, I kind of discounted it as a gimmick. It prints upside down, which is impressive if you have never seen it before.
However, if you’ve been around 3D printers for a while, you’ve seen it, you’ve already asked all the questions, and already realized that printing upside down isn’t that special. Seriously, you can flip the 3D printer you already own on it’s side or upside down and it’ll most likely work just fine.
Yep, when you get down to it, printing upside down isn’t that much different from printing right side up! FDM printers work fine either way and even work in zero gravity (take a look at 3D printing being done on the International Space Station for reference!)
Once I got over that knee-jerk reaction and actually listened to Kralyn3D explain what they were doing, I realized this actually is a really neat concept.
First, the big thing that people notice is that it is printing upside down. This is explained as actually having a reason. Since the printer is intended to be portable and quickly assemblable the creator wanted the center of gravity as low as possible, and the gantry to be as minimal as possible. By limiting anything above the base to a single axis (z in this case), they have reduced weight and complexity there considerably.
The base has some neat tricks too. Like I mentioned, it’s highly portable. It fits INSIDE an empty filament box and can be assembled in 60 seconds. That’s pretty impressive for something with a print volume of 175x165x125 mm (correction 180x180x180mm). Watch the video above for a full breakdown of the machine and join their patreon for updates ahead of the releases.
At the end, Kralyn3D mentions that they’re not going to produce this as a printer for sale. However they have released all the design files and code for anyone to create, and sell, as long as they are credited properly. That’s pretty cool.
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