Benchmarks from the Bean

Here are a few shots of my first successful print on my new lcd printer from Kudo3D–the Bean.

Overall I am extremely impressed with the print quality of the Bean. At .050 mm layer height (50 microns), the layers are imperceptible–just smooth beautiful surfaces and crisp, sharp edges with fine detail. The rough edges at the bottom of the Rook are a result of my hasty removal of the support raft, which does not separate cleanly like I’m used to with an FDM printer. There was an uncured bubble of resin at the bottom of the print–apparently an error in preparing the print, which was pre-loaded on the machine. that I’m looking forward to printing some super hi quality reality capture models, jewelry prototypes, and even castable burn-out material.

Some people are fussing about the year-late delivery or what might have seemed the all-too-infrequent updates after the Kickstarter campaign, or because they company apparently wouldn’t return their emails, or because the Kudo moved from the U.S. to Taiwan and backers weren’t happy with the changes to their projected shipping bill. Add to that the fee to purchase their newly developed software and there are at least a handful of users ready to sell their machines.

Maybe it’s not a great way to build a company maybe but I’ll be happy to see what kind of detail I can get out of the machine. The novelty in the design is that it uses an lcd mask with a UV to selectively cure photo-polymer resin. Most previous resin printers cured the resin with either a laser, or a dlp projector (like for slides or movies), which could also selectively apply light to the bottom of the resin vat to cure one layer at a time. The beauty of the lcd mask technology is that it cuts costs while simultaneously upping the ante on feature size (resolution).

I’ll be back soon with prints of my own models. Stay tuned!