Recently, the Korean 3D printing market has seen some interesting developments in one of its big players, and the story seems like an old “bad news / good news” joke. Readers of this site know the Korean desktop printer manufacturer Moment has had explosive growth since its inception at the end of last year. By building a high quality, FDM-style machine, and with a lot of hard work, they have managed to get their products into several countries around the world and into many people’s homes and schools.
So, what’s the bad news? Well, for starters they were sued by their close Korean rival, Rokit, on a number of claims. Rokit claimed, among other things, that Moment had stolen and used several of Rokit’s intellectual properties and, while the Korean court later found that Rokit’s complaint was without basis, the people at Moment still had to suffer through an unpleasant legal experience.
Second, they have had some trouble securing investment which would allow them to expand their operations. As any person with experience in a startup knows, investment money is what drives everything forward in the days before the company is able to develop a reliable income stream. While the crew at Moment are still pushing forward, the expansion that they would like to have done has been slowed a bit… for now.
And, then, most recently, Park Heewan, the now-former CEO, has departed the company. While the reasons for his departure are a bit unclear, what is clear is that his vision and skills will be missed. Fortunately, they are entertaining a few qualified candidates and should have a permanent replacement soon.
So, now for the good news! In spite of all their troubles, the guys at Moment have recently brought out a brand new machine. At least, that is what I thought, until they set me straight. Strange as it may sound, the new machine is not a different machine, but rather a “perfected” version of their original Moment 3D printer. While the original machine was an amazing piece of hardware, the crew at Moment felt it needed a bit of tweaking, so I visited their new headquarters in Seoul to take a look for myself.
What I found was a sleek, small, black printer that took up far less space than the original machine did, yet still had the same sized build area. I had to say I was impressed. The original machine had a footprint of 38cm x 39 cm and was 35cm high. The new one has a footprint of 31cm x 35 cm and is 36cm high, and, while I found the original’s white and aluminum aesthetics acceptable, I love the new one! It is now black and gold in color, has a smooth aluminum unified exterior box, and the addition of a magnetically sealed front door was a really nice touch, too.
Like the original, it has all the same functionality, such as a heated build plate and an easy-to-service single head extruder. One thing that they didn’t change was the slicer software that they use, wisely choosing to keep ‘Simplify 3D’ as their slicer program. We toured their new office and they showed us a few of the newest prints that they had been testing on the machine and then we talked about a test drive. As usual, they were gracious enough to allow us to take one of the machines, first to allow my fellow writer David to use in a TEDx talk presentation on 3D printing (embedded below). Following David’s talk, they then allowed us to really put the machine through its paces in our own lab…and test it we did!
Now after having used it, almost constantly for a month, we can report that we have had no trouble with it at all. It truly is “new & improved” as the old commercial jingles used to say. Make no mistake, I am in no way impugning the original machine, but this new one is really, really good. After almost a month of constant use, we have only had five stoppages…and all five were due to filament issues; the first three, because the filament we were using had become unusually brittle and broke just before entering the extruder. This might not have happened if we had been using the filament guide tube, but we prefer not to use guide tubes…except on Bowden drive machines, of course. The other 2 stoppages were due to a new flexible filament that was too rubbery to be reliably pushed into the extruder, and an experimental silver metal filament that was just too damn hard and wouldn’t melt properly… even at 240 degrees!
Seriously, that was the extent of the troubles we had. In every other way, it performed as you would expect it to. But even in those rare instances when it did stop, and we had to disassemble the extruder to pull out the small broken piece(s) of filament, it was not difficult. Unlike some other machines, the Moment extruder is very well designed and is easy to take apart, service, and reassemble.
The only detractors we can think of is that the control panel has been moved inside the printer case, meaning you have to open the door to access it, but if it is being used around children (such as in a classroom) maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The other thing is that I would prefer is a removable buildplate, but, again, this is no big deal as the prints stick to the glass bed reliably and if allowed to cool, are extremely easy to remove without any trouble. All in all, a wonderful machine, and though some may complain that its build area is too small, it really is a TRUE desktop printer as it will easily fit on any desktop comfortably, and its great appearance makes looks like it belongs there.
