Atomstack, a Chinese intelligent manufacturing technology company, released its Cambrian line of desktop rubber 3D printers, a first for desktop printing. The printers promise greater prototyping and faster production of customized rubber items.
The company is marketing the new printer on Kickstarter, where it has raised over $500,000 HKD. The printer’s two versions, Pro and Max, are available for $339 and $379, respectively. The printers provide reasonable desktop build volumes, with the Pro sporting a 235 x 235 x 250 mm build platform; the Max can build up to 320 x 320 x 380 mm.
The rubber that Atomstack uses for its Cambrian printers is highly elastic and resilient. These properties allows desktop printing a new range of products alongside typical plastic filaments like PLA, TPU, TPE, ABS and PETG.
Jason Li, Atomstack’s CEO, commented on the product launch:
For years, the FDM 3D printing industry has been trying to develop a reliable way to print with rubber-like filaments. This has been difficult for a number of reasons including the fact that highly elastic filament materials are prone to jamming. To solve these problems, we had to rethink the entire process. We began by designing a new 2.85mm direct extruder design that eliminated nozzle jams, then we developed special rubber filament TPR (Thermo Plastic Rubber) with a high elasticity (50-70A hardness) and resiliency ( >50%) capable of accurately and reliably printing virtually any end-use rubber products.
