The R-360 has a third of the parts of a conventional RepRap

Nov 11, 2013 20:26 GMT  ·  By

One good thing about the desktop 3D printer phenomenon is that it's still in early days, so people are trying everything and anything, from 3D printers complete with embedded PCs and webcams, to 3D printers that you can fold up and walk away with.

The R-360, built by Replicator Warehouse in the UK, belongs to the latter category. The R-360 is built to be cheap, as well as easily assembled and disassembled.

The printer comes partially assembled and can be put together in under an hour, the company behind it boasts. This is possible because, thanks to some smart design choices, the R-360 is only made up of about a third of the parts a regular RepRap has.

The unique design element of the R-360 is the turntable print bed that can turn 360 degrees. What this means is that, instead of the print arm having to move around all over the place during the print process, the printed object is rotated while the arm only moves up and down.

This saves quite a lot of parts and also has the advantage of being perfect for 3D scanning. In fact, the R-360 comes with a 3D scanning mode built in, though, obviously, you'll have to supply the scanner yourself.

Most of the plastic components are 3D printed themselves, so you can easily replace them if they break or you want to modify something. The printer is open source, so models for the parts are no problem.

The R-360 is now available on Kickstarter, with a delivery estimate of February 2014, for the early bird price of £349 ($558, €416), which doesn't include shipping.

The R-360 has a print size of a 210 mm diameter disk and a 200 mm height. Layer height is 100 to 300 microns and works with PLA. The printer can handle ABS as well, as long as you add a heated bed.

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A fully assembled R-360
All of the components in a R-360
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