Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “First Look: Creality cr-30 – Infinite Z axis 3d printing”.
Welcome back to make workshop where we check out tools, toys and tech built for makers. It’S 20 21! I am super excited. We have lots of incredible stuff coming your way, so, let’s just jump right into it. Today, we’re going to look at a 3d printer that can print infinitely in one direction.
This is the creality cr30 also called naomi wu’s 3d print mill. You may recognize naomi wu from the cover of make magazine. You should go subscribe to the magazine to get uh. All these wonderful incredible stories we’ll touch more on that later. I believe this was a pet project of hers in collaboration with creality, to bring a belt printer to the market.
So let’s just tackle that right there, a belt printer. What is that? What is this printer? Why does it look so weird? Why is it so special? This is the latest iteration in something we’ve been seeing within the community for a few years, which is just called a belt printer, and that is a 3d printer that has a belt for a bed. We saw this years ago with a patented device from makerbot and since then, we’ve seen a few variations that are skewing the patented aspects to be able to bring the concept to market, and the idea is this: you have a belt for your bed, so you can Print parts over and over and over and they’re, automatically moved out of the way. This specific shape and design that we’ve seen puts the head, the printhead, the extruder at 45 degrees to the belt, which means you can actually print an infinite amount in this direction, which is technically the z direction.
It gets confusing. I know, but you know what forget about which axis it is. The point is you can put files in here that stretch off that direction for a very, very long time, basically till you run out of filament or run out of space. The cr30 is a kickstarter project, the kickstarter is already done, it was successfully funded and we have seen creality put out printers in the past, so this is a product they’re going to be selling very soon for just under a thousand dollars.
It comes shipped in the box in just a few pieces. You basically just have to bolt on these two pieces, and then this whole back frame is a single unit. That bolts on assembly was very easy. It took me only a few minutes to get it assembled, and then i was printing. Let’S go into a little bit of specs here.
The print area is, of course, a little bit confusing because of the belt. You have 200 millimeters by 170 millimeters by infinite. In this direction there is a filament run out sensor and a bowden tube setup. Instead of a direct drive to save a little bit of weight on the core xy setup down.
Here you will have to manually level your bed, which, on this system, is a little bit different than what you might be used to. You have these two points here for making sure the actual surface where the print begins is level, and then these two points here to make sure that, as it comes down the bed, it’s not too out of square. I didn’t have any problems whatsoever printing in pla.
Getting things to stick getting the bed level at an acceptable quality. I’D want to dial it in a little bit more. If i really wanted something to be just beautiful and stunning – and one thing that’s very interesting – is that the support structure, since this is a the printhead – is at 45 degrees things you normally would print without supports coming out away from the printhead. This way you need support with this machine and things you normally would need supports on other machines. Going that way, you don’t need supports it’s hard to explain. But if you look at these chain links that i designed you can see, they look like they’re, just kind of hovering out in the middle of nowhere and the ones that succeeded turned out just fine.
Now that was a very difficult file for any printer to print because of the hangovers, but this printer did an admirable job. What this is, what was sent to me is a pre-production unit, so some of the things you see on this machine may not be the final versions. For example, i think this belt is different on the final versions that are shipping whenever you purchase one. What was so exciting about this machine to me is the fact that it’s new and the fact that you can print very large objects.
It’S new, you know it’s, it’s not something! You see every day, you don’t see this style of printer every day. That’S exciting! That’S fun, it’s always fun to to have something new and interesting to play with. It does have some downsides. Of course, the optimization on your typical 3d printing machine has come from.
You know, years of community input and refinement, and this machine has not had that refinement. Yet so it’s a little bit rough around the edges in terms of print settings and quality, but as you’ll see on my prints, it worked just fine, just fine. I haven’t done anything special to this machine. There are updates to the firmware, there’s new printing profiles and stuff like that, but everything you see in this article is actually the default.
The only thing i have changed out of everything is just to increase the temperature of the bed a little bit because things weren’t quite sticking to the bed and that’s it so i’m confident that even quality is going to go up from here. So, let’s talk about the strong points of having a belt, you can print the same object over and over and over and over. As a matter of fact, the slicer that comes with it, which is a variation of cura, has a little setting where you can just put one object in there and then set how many you want to print like with these little maker faire robots. I just plopped the file in and told it to print 20, and it did it just pumped them out overnight. You can see the prints are not absolutely perfect, but it’s acceptable quality.
The other bonus to having this this belt is, of course, as i was saying earlier, you can print very long things now. A lot of people are using the print mill to print cosplay swords, which are very long, and you know i don’t really have much use for a cosplay sword, a big plastic sword. So i wanted to come up with something that was practical, and i did so here is this file.
I love this file. It’S just a little articulated arm that you can move around and lock in different positions. I use this on my workbench to do things like hold gopros hold lights, you know all kinds of stuff, but it’s a little small using the 3d print mill. I was able to make a larger one. Now this one is going to be capable of holding a lot more weight and being a little bit more functional. Now i printed it mostly hollow, as you can see it printed, just fine.
The quality is great. The print mill just spit it out. I printed it mostly hollow, which unfortunately means it’s not going to hold a lot of weight right now, but i have probably about 20 or 30 pounds of filament on the way i’m gon na reprint this a little bit stronger, and this may even hang from the Ceiling and be able to hold a dslr camera for top-down shots of my work, always nice to be able to have a practical print. Just look at that thing. Super super fun, but that also puts into frame who this printer is for. This is really a niche item. Uh absolute beginners probably aren’t going to want to mess with this over over a printer that is kind of tried and trued, and you know you’re going to get fantastic results easily right off of the bat. This is more targeted towards somebody who is willing to tinker and is willing to.
You know, put up with things not being absolutely perfect so that they can be on the cutting edge of technology. Somebody who needs to produce tons and tons and tons of an object and doesn’t want to deal with setting up an automation system of their own. They can buy this, throw the files on it and get it done with maybe a little bit of tweaking to their print profiles, or if you have the edge case where you just really need to print long things, it happens. Some people have that need they just really need to print long things.
I see this as an absolute win for those niche cases and a pretty cool toy for people who are just really into the new tech and want to tinker. If you want to learn more about the print mill right now, you need to go to the kickstarter for most of the information i’ll leave a link to that below. Hopefully they will update their site soon and you’ll be able to get the final pricing and specs.
As i said before, i believe it is just under a thousand dollars for the print mill thanks for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed it be sure to give us a thumbs up. It is super helpful on our youtube channel to get those thumbs up and subscribe, so you don’t miss any of the awesome stuff.
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