We’ve seen several RepRap kits before, and here’s another low priced option. This one is specifically designed for educators. This fills a need for educators unable to afford the still-quite-expensive commercial 3D printers – because The RepMan is priced at only GB£750!
The price breakthrough will permit a great many more schools to consider teaching 3D printing techniques to their students.
Not only does The RepMan cost less than commercial equivalents, they’ve also been able to reduce the cost of consumables. Consider these prices for a 1 kilogram bucket of each:
- £60 ABS
- £75 Polycapralactone (PCL)
- £20 High density polyethylene (HDPE)
- £20 Low density polyethylene (LDPE)
- £20 Polypropylene (PP)
- £20 Unplasticised polyvinylchloride (UPVC)
- £30 Polylactic acid (PLA)
We understand that although The RepMan was packaged specifically for the education market, they are receiving interest from industry as well.
Via The RapMan
There was a very long list of comments when the RapMan folks posted their mainboard design to the RepRap blog a while back, on about this same topic.
These guys are another commercial spinoff of RepRap technology, like MakerBot Industries, and if they can deliver at the advertised prices, I for one with them every success.
A1 Technologies are our distributor us being Bits From Bytes, they are selling into the education market for us, we have been trading since the early days of RepRap and in fact brought the first RepRap mechanical parts kit to the market this was then followed by the Version 3 aka the RapMan which was the first complete RepRap spinoff kit, coming with everything required in one box.
We initially linked up with Unimatic which after trading for 42 years closed due to a deal going very bad in India, the former Directors have restarted as A1 Technologies. As a company I cannot fault their morals, kits that had been purchased via Unimatic but not delivered were still honoured by A1 Technologies, they had no legal obligation to do this.
They might appear fly by night as they are a new start-up but they have a long and good track record in the education sector and while their hearts might not be as completely RepRap as some of us they are 100% dedicated to education and see the RapMan as a fantastic tool in the class room able to promote a love of engineering & design.
Ian Adkins (RepRap core team member)
http://www.bitsfrombytes.com
Does anyone know anything about these people?
Seems a bit fly-by-night to me. Their pictures of sample products were actually made by other repraps (they’ve just copied the photos), their email addresses don’t match with their domain name, their company was incorporated a couple of months ago (and the name looks like an off-the-shelf company name)… I know the (quiet suburban) street that they give as an address – zoned commercial/industrial it aint…
etc etc.
They remind me of dodgy blokes in garages out in White City that used to sell self-assembled PCs from LOOT back in the day.
Nothing wrong with that necessarily (though personally I would never ever ever buy one that way again) but I suspect their hearts aren’t in exactly the same place as people from the reprap community.
About which I may be completely wrong of course.