Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown and i'm matt fitzgerald and welcome to cnet's 3d printer build weed so Matt what are we doing here again today one of the bowels of the cnet lab and we're going to be taking a look at 3d printers 3d printers were shown at CES this year they seem to catch a lot of people's attention and today we're going to attempt to assemble long ourselves so our goal is kind of the educator so hopefully educate you and to that end we got in touch with the people at Maker gear not MakerBot it's a different company but the maker gear folks were nice enough to provide us with this DIY kit so we don't really know what's in this box at all we haven't opened it yet so Matt do we know what's involved with that process at all no and since we like challenges instead of buying one assembled we figured we would attempt to assemble it ourselves but we're being told by them that it can be about eight hours to put it together although we've read from other locations that it can be as much as 16 hours to put it together so let's see what we're in for alright alright so we've got like a parts list we do we have a nice identified parts list right Oh lots of good stuff good stuff so do we have the like kids at Christmas here power supplies it's like a pretty straightforward oh yeah they're USB cable electronic assembly with with included USB cables this is part of the balsa wood assembly on the outside of the printer and as you can see from the burn marks it's actually laser-cut that means it's accurate but because it's also it's also pretty cheap so that helps keep the price down to a lot of things that makes these ready for consumers this is the build platform where the acts the final 50 piece will sit on the top of so we've got another part of the balsa wood assembly here it's all part of the framework of the chassis of the unit the electric motor assembly that will drive the chapter of the extruder head is also in the bag that is the part that actually injects the liquid melted plastic to form the item that you're printing so this is the Z rail motor assembly so Z refers to the axis so it's a 23 objects and that means you have three axes to worry about x y and z so there's a motor that drives the extruder head along those three axes and that's what this is this is the z axis model the calibration of this is what's very critical to make in the end to making sure that the object comes out exactly as desired I'm for the Y rail yes sir probably looks a lot like 20 I'll get controls or the other directions yep yeah so this is the filament this is the the consumable this is the ink for the printer essential so make your gear was nice to throw in a sample spool and this is translucent it comes in all kinds of different colors though I don't know as far as how much volume of the spool is but one thing that we can say this particular model that we're assembling has a 5 inch by 5 inch by 5 inch build platform so in theory any object that can fit within a 5 inch cube that's how large we could print with this particular model so here's everything in the box here the instructions we print it out earlier they even provide you with all the tools you need to get it all settled so that's great let's get started alright let's go you