We looked at equipment from a relatively new 3D printer manufacturer, HeyGears.
The company primarily serves the dental and orthotic market, although we were told they are attempting to address the needs of small businesses, professionals, and even hobbyists.
Their equipment is divided into several lines: the Ultracraft A series for dental applications, the Ultracraft C series for “chairside” dental applications, and the Reflex series for other applications.
Their latest machine is shown at the top, the Ultracraft Reflex RS system, which turns out to have quite a number of advanced features.
One of the most important features is the motion system mechanics, which are able to consistently position the plate within 0.002mm during each layer. This produces highly accurate surfaces, which HeyGears describes as near injection molding quality.
For light uniformity, they divide the screen into 60 different zones, each of which is individually calibrated to ensure there is no more than a three percent variation in light energy between all zones.
They also provide a unique Z-axis compensation feature that attempts to get around the “stair step” problem of layer lines. This apparently can be adapted for any resin and supports “up to 180 combinations of different angles, hole sizes, and edge types”. This will also contribute to surface quality.
The Reflex RS can print quite fast, up to 4.5 s per layer. This is accomplished through an algorithm that monitors no less than 18 different motion control parameters during printing. The plate force sensor is inspected in real time up to 80 times per second.
This all results in prints that are 30-50% faster than competing systems.
The Reflex RS also includes an optional resin heating feature that optimizes print results and a system to automatically refill the tank when resin runs low.
Unlike other resin 3D printers that offer slicing software, HeyGears presents “Blueprint”, which is an integrated package that provides management for the entire lifecycle, including pre-printing, printing, and post-processing. This is combined with their cloud system to provide a pretty comprehensive software environment.
While ostensibly for dental applications, HeyGears made quite a pitch to us about using their equipment for other applications. They specifically mentioned the idea of using the Reflex RS for low-volume production for figurine manufacturing, such as what might be done for an Etsy shop.
We looked at some print samples for this application and found them to be of outstanding quality. Evidently, the features in the Reflex RS do work to increase print quality.
HeyGears provides their own resins for their systems, but we were told that in the future, they will be offering support for third-party resins.
HeyGears is taking an interesting step here. They’ve learned from their dental systems on how to set up the machines for use by non-technical operators, and now it seems they want to reapply that thinking to the non-dental universe. In particular, they are looking for low-volume production.
They just might have a good answer here for that problem.
Via HeyGears
