Another giant-sized 3D printer has appeared, this time from Print-Rite, the CoLiDo Mega. And mega it is.
As you can see in the image above, it’s a massive machine, with a build volume of 1,000 x 1,500mm. Sure, the model in the image is probably not particularly tall, but then she’s wearing high heeled shoes, too. Nevertheless, the Mega is massive, and is one of the largest filament-based 3D printers I’ve yet seen.
It’s also a delta-robot style 3D printer, which is different from competitors 3D Platform and BigRep, both of which employ the more frequently seen cartesian robot approach.
The Mega is said to print at high speed, and I suspect part of their speed is due to the larger 1.00mm nozzle, which can extrude more material than the de facto standard 0.4mm nozzle found in most 3D printers. If my arithmetic is correct, the 1mm nozzle offers 25x as much area for plastic to flow. They say the Mega can print “3 times faster in printing than other FDM 3d printer” and I don’t doubt it.
One concern with such a large unit is vibration, as such movements could be amplified by the enormous size of the device. In this case CoLiDo has addressed that by using a stuff aluminum alloy for the rigid frame, which should reduce vibrations considerably.
The machine is so large you can almost print a person life size, or at least any that are less than 150cm tall. Certainly you can 3D print moderately-sized furniture items, and even larger structures if you split them into parts for assembly.
Finally, you might be wondering the price of the Mega, which surely has a big price tag for such a powerful machine. Indeed, it does, as their list price is approximately USD$26,000 – and does not include installation fees, which probably are required for a unit of this size.
