Gizmo 3D Ships Printers to Crowdfunder Customers With Surprise Upgrades to Software and Hardware

Last year, the entire 3D printing industry became adrenalized when Carbon unveiled their breakthrough Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) technology, a truly remarkable production process that is capable of printing objects 25 to 100 times faster than traditional printers. Since then, this technology has been assembled into the M1 commercial 3D printer, which has found itself a home among major companies and 3D printing service bureaus. But, while everyone had their eyes set on CLIP, the Brisbane, Australia-based startup Gizmo 3D Printers came out with their own super fast DLP SLA 3D printer made for the consumer market.

The Gizmo 3D printer uses a technology similar to CLIP, but utilizes their liquid resin with a top down system rather than the bottom up methodology used by Carbon. Founded by the husband and wife team Kobus and Michelle du Toit, the startup hosted a successful Indiegogo campaign for their speedy SLA DLP 3D printer earlier this year, but ran into an unfortunate production delay due to the payment service PayPal, which had frozen a majority of the funds that they had raised. It was certainly considered to be an initial setback for Gizmo 3D Printers, but they managed to take this extra time and upgrade their 3D printer as well as the accompanying software.

“Even despite the issues we’ve had with PayPal blocking our Indiegogo funding and the unexpected delays caused by our surprise upgrades, we were only 4 weeks late with our initial Indiegogo delivery and we’ve already started sending out some of the printers that are only due to be sent out in November,” Kobus du Toit told 3DPrint.com.

Now, Gizmo 3D Printers is finally ready to deliver their DLP SLA 3D printer to their eager customers, which they hope to pleasantly surprise with the latest enhancements. For starters, the startup surprisingly implemented stainless steel vats into the printer design instead of the originally planned plastic vats. Gizmo 3D Printers also added over 100 updates to their software over the past six months, all of which were based on customer feedback, helping the company to improve the user experience of the 3D printer. One of these updates in the software is the significant increase of the slicing speed, increasing the already respectable speed of the DLP SLA 3D printer.

“We’ve also had a recently had another exciting breakthrough whereby a new modification that we’ve been working on allows standard speed prints to be virtually layer-less as shown in the attached low poly cylinder photo,” Michelle du Toit said to 3DPrint.com. “Our aim is to have this modification built into the next batch of printers and it will also be made available to purchase soon.”

Thus far, the select number of customers who have already received their DLP SLA 3D printer from Gizmo have had success printing with ease and at high speeds. One customer, Johan Siverklev, posted his experience with the 3D printer on Facebook. Though he ran into initial issues with a loose connector, he was able to get quick support from the Gizmo 3D Printer team via Skype, and had his first print just three hours after setting up the machine. Without knowing much about the settings or inner workings of the printer, Siverkley managed to print the Cellular Bowl by Dizingof, a 35-millimeter high bowl that was produced with the continuous printing technology at 1 millimeter per minute.

After dealing with some slight speed-bumps regarding PayPal and the money raised on Indiegogo, it’s quite refreshing to see a 3D printing crowdfunding campaign not on only succeed, but actually deliver the expected product to their customer base. The Australian startup is currently offering their DLP SLA 3D printing technology in three different size formats, the small-sized GiziMate, the medium-sized GiziPro, and the GiziMax, which is the largest of the three. Delivery times currently range from two to four months, but that wait doesn’t seem quite so bad when you consider the enhancements that the Gizmo team has made over time, as well as the initial positive customer feedback. Discuss in the Gizmo 3D forum at 3DPB.com.