Last year, I wrote an article about a RepRap 3D printer, called the Isis One, that had ticked off some members of the RepRap community. After overcoming the initial reactions from other RepRappers, the Chicago-based company, Isis3DTM, kept on chugging and has released their latest upgrade, including dual extruders for soluble support.
Now that the Isis One features dual extruders, it’s capable of 3D printing plastics like ABS and PLA from one nozzle and water-soluble PVA from the other, greatly expanding the types of objects that it can fabricate. The manufacturers claim that it’s easy to automatically generate support structures that can then be dissolved with no fuss. The dual extruders are a part of the company’s new printhead design, which uses “driven feed wheels, geared to provide 135 N cm of torque, three times the industry standard.” The new design also features a small melt chamber that is meant to more tightly control the filament to minimize “ooze and stringing.”
In addition to the second extruder, the Isis One uses dynamic bed leveling, with a probe fixed to the printhead that allows the printer to compensate for minute discrepancies in the surface of the bed. The printer’s heated borosilicate glass bed allows for what Isis3D believes to be better first layer adhesion and has a large build volume of 300 x 300 x 225 mm (12 x 12 x 9 inch). With an LCD Smart Controller console, the printer can fabricate untethered to a computer. All of this can be purchased for $2399, which includes starter spools of PLA and PVA filament and a KISSlicer Pro license.
Isis3D bills its 3D printer as an affordable alternative to industrial machines that still produces high quality objects, with the company’s co-founder, Stephanie Avalos-Bock, saying, “When we started out, we saw a ton of consumer printers on the market, almost all of which were suffering from the same reliability and print quality problems. They were novel and they had pretty lights but you couldn’t do much with them. It was clear that what was needed was something better, something rigorously engineered, something more fully thought out. Our goal was to close the gap between the cheap, toy printers and the outrageously expensive professional machines. The Isis One is a top-quality 3D printer that’s orders of magnitude more accessible than anything that came before.” They’ve also suggested that the second head and soluble support structure can produce such intricate objects as this Gyroid by Dizingof (I’d post it, but, after the recent controversy, I’m not sure what sort of permission the manufacturer has to use his designs).
Two heads are always better than one and soluble support does sound like a welcome alternative to breaking off support structures and sanding down the nubs. We’ll have to wait for users to chime in with their own experiences with the Isis One. Tell us, Worshipers of Isis (my new phrase for Isis One users), how does the IsisOne hold up?
Source: Isis3D
