May 16, 2016 | By Alec
A lot of exciting stuff is happening at the HQ of Dutch 3D printer manufacturers Leapfrog in Alphen aan den Rijn. Over the past few years the company has built up a reputation for delivering many different type of 3D printers, so we were very interested to hear that the Bolt, a completely new dual-headed Leapfrog 3D printer, is under development. Fortunately, the Dutch engineers from Leapfrog were happy to share a sneak preview of the promising Bolt 3D printer, which will be released in June 2016.
As you might know, Leapfrog 3D Printers was founded in 2012 by a Dutch flexographic company called AV Flexologic. In need of a prototyping solution and unsatisfied with available 3D printers, Leapfrog and the classic Creatr 3D printer were born. In the years that followed, the Dutch company released a number of other sturdy and versatile 3D printers, both for professional and home users. Back in the fall of 2015, they launched the high speed and very accessible Creatr HS Lite 3D printer.
It could therefore be expected that Leapfrog was working on a follow-up release, but the Bolt 3D printer has some very interesting features. As Leapfrog’s marketing specialist Vlad Szilagyi revealed in a sneak peek, the Bolt 3D printer will feature a dual print head capacity, an Activated Carbon HEPA filter, a completely closed 3D printing platform, and comes with custom multi-platform software.
The decision to develop a dual-headed 3D printer is remarkable, because they have received some criticism from the community in recent years. In particular, these setups tend to suffer from oozing (which can ruin colored prints), while you also need to sacrifice build space to accommodate the additional hardware. But according to Szilagyi, this won’t be a problem for the Bolt 3D printer. Though unwilling to share too many details, he revealed that the Bolt doesn’t suffer from oozing at all, while it also features a very large build space – large enough for Replicator Mode 3D printing, to produce multiple copies of components simultaneously. Common dual head problems thus won’t trouble the Bolt 3D printer
What’s more, Szilagyi also revealed that they have built a comprehensive user-friendly software platform to accompany the Bolt. “The software is the best we have ever developed. It provides control of the bolt from any device with a browser and WIFI and give you full control on the Bolt. Combined with shared storage, filament detection and a webcam, the bolt is a high quality printer with a superb ease of use,” he says. The Bolt 3D printer is thus looking very promising already. More information, such as the 3D printer’s price, will doubtlessly follow in the weeks leading up to the Bolt’s June 2016 release.
Posted in 3D Printer
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Being totally honest, it looks like a cross breed of a Cubicon and a BCN3D Sigma... interesting but wouldn't call it disruptive, simply because nothing new.
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