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ThingiThursday Digitizer
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ThingiThursday Support Material
Lots of post-processing to be done!
Since MakerBot announced their 3D scanner, Digitizer, at SXSW back in March the whole 3D printing world has been waiting patiently to see if they can pull off another user-friendly piece of kit.
Patience is a virtue though as the actual product is still yet to see the light of day, don’t be fooled into thinking this has taken a back burner now that Stratasys have taken over. Not by a long shot, the MakerBot blog is constantly updating with progress and they have released some of the files of scans on Thingiverse.
The Digitizer team may well be taking their time but with each model you can see how they are getting better, a recent blog post detailed how a breakthrough came along when they added an extra laser to the scanner, the results are much improved.
I decided to test out one of the scans that the digitizer team have released. I chose the Thrift Store Ancient Relic, which has particular significance because of the progress made in making the model watertight without any additional modelling software. This means that the model went straight from the scanner to the becoming a printable object without any prior technical knowledge.
Due to time constraints we shrunk the model to 64% of its original size, with a 0.15mm resolution and printed on the John Burn Ltd. supplied UP! Plus’ ‘normal’ speed setting it took 3 hours 32 minutes to complete.
As the print was taking shape I was slightly worried about how the support material was going to come off. It is such an intricate object – testament to the scan – that the overhang support material looked like it would be too difficult to remove especially in some of the smaller nooks and crannies.
Once the print finished I began the post-printing process of removing the raft and the support material with the handy tool kit that comes supplied with the UP! Plus. It was easier than expected and there was only really one area that I found particularly difficult to remove.
The result was a pretty detailed little trinket; useless as it may be it is still a great experiment into scan-to-print capabilities. If this print was anything to go by - and there is still room for improvement - the MakerBot Digitzer should be very exciting indeed.
