Why Modovolo’s Big F***ing Printer Is the Most Badass 3D Printer Ever

Large 3D printers. They’re slow, expensive, and smelly. It’s why they aren’t used often in large-scale manufacturing. 

We couldn’t help but wonder though: what if you could build a large 3D printer that was fast and inexpensive - and also amazingly good at producing high-quality components (but maybe still smelly)? Such a printer could make Modovolo Lifts at an extraordinarily low cost which in turn means that the Modovolo Lift can be priced 50% less than a competing drone — yet Modovolo can still be profitable. 

The Big Idea. That’s the big idea behind Modovolo’s Big F***ing Printer (the “BFP”). If the BFP were a car, it would be a Big Mac dump truck with the performance of a Ferrari but at the cost of a VW. 

Current 3D Printers. But before we get into the BFP, let’s talk more about the current state of large 3D printers.  It turns out that they suffer from the same design problems as current drones: (1) they are heavy and (2) industry dogma rules, i.e., they all use the same basic design. 

The Problem with Heavy. This is going to come as a shock but heavy things are slower than lighter things. It’s just physics: Force equals mass times acceleration. More mass means it takes more force to accelerate. The standard 3D printer has a heavy gantry, cross beams, and stepper motors.  If there is less mass, then for the same amount of force there is more acceleration. 

The Problem with Industry Dogma. We’ve talked about the stages of industries in an earlier post but as a quick recap: every industry at it’s beginning has an explosion of ideas, designs, etc. and then slowly goes into a state of maturity (and “conventional wisdom” or “industry dogma” rules) where large jumps product evolution pretty much stop and only incremental improvements. 

That’s where the 3D printer industry is now. In order to increase print speed, industry dogma dictates that you use more powerful stepper motors. Well, more powerful stepper motors are heavy. So that means that the frame and gantry of the 3D printer needs to be heavier as well to handle the more powerful (but heavy) stepper motor. But that extra weight means that the stepper motor needs to use more force to achieve the same acceleration. So it’s still slow. Physics strike again. 

So how do you solve this dilemma? That’s right. You need to make the 3D printer unheavy.  

The BFP’s Lightness is Rightness. As with drones, lightness is the key to high performance for 3D printers. It’s why the BFP’s gantry, frame, and other components are all designed to eliminate all weight (yet still be incredibly stiff). We didn’t cheat either. We could have easily used exotic materials. But we didn’t because those are expensive. All our components are made from standard materials - but designed in such a way to dramatically reduce their weight. 

The Result of Lightness is Speed. The lightness means we can use smaller and faster components - that are also much cheaper. For example, the BFP uses very small stepper motors to push and pull the Extruder and the other components of the 3D Printer and, because smaller stepper motors are inherently faster, this increases the print speed. And more stepper motors can be used throughout the frame structure, which in turn also increases the print speed because the distance between each stepper motor to a component is much shorter. It’s a virtuous cycle. 

The Big Deal: Lower Cost. Okay, but why is this such a big deal? It’s all about cost. 

Current drones are just outrageously expensive - even ones that are made in China. It’s one of the reasons why Modovolo’s mission is to democratize flight and one of our core Product Principles is to increase performance (like flight time) but at the same time lower cost. It’s the magic formula for why the Modovolo Lift is half the cost of competing drones. 

The BFP is a key reason why we can lower the cost of producing the Modovolo Lift.