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Lulzbot Mini is the 3D printer you've been waiting for: receives Editor's Choice award from Natural News


Lulzbot Mini

(NaturalNews) IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE U.S. SCIENTIST GMO STORY, click here for the correct story link.

After months of heavy testing of various 3D printers, I've finally found the perfect 3D printer to recommend to everyone: the Lulzbot Mini.

Today, I'm thrilled to announce why I'm giving the Lulzbot Mini my Editor's Choice award for the best consumer-level 3D printer available today! Importantly, this breakthrough 3D printer will be able to print all the inventions I release this year at FoodRising.org. You'll need to use t-glase filament to achieve good print results, however.

For the record, this is not a paid endorsement of any kind. I buy my printers from Lulzbot just like everyone else. In fact, I just purchased another Lulzbot Mini yesterday (and can't wait to add it to my 3D print farm).

What's so great about the Lulzbot Mini? It's simply revolutionary. Here's why:

What makes the Lulzbot Mini the best desktop 3D printer available today

There are four key advantages that make the Lulzbot Mini truly amazing:

#1) Automatic bed leveling

Leveling the print bed remains the single most troublesome task of 3D printers. It's frustrating across the board, and you inevitably waste filament while trying to get it right. But the Lulzbot Mini has a revolutionary approach that eliminates manual print bed leveling. It's so good that I predict this will become the new standard across all consumer-level 3D printers.

It's brilliant and simple, and it's something I've seen in CNC routers: the nozzle is moved into a "touch off" position to touch each of the four corners of the print surface. These four corners have a metal washer mounted on top, and an electromagnetic sensor detects the moment when the metal nozzle tip touches the washer. By measuring the touch off Z-axis height, the printer knows exactly where the print surface is located.

The result? No more fiddling with knobs, cursing at printers and using wearable magnifiers to level print beds. No more prints with ruined first layers. The Lulzbot Mini solves the problem once and for all. I've now printed literally hundreds of objects spanning hundreds of hours of print time, and I haven't experienced a single problem with the bed leveling.

#2) PEI print surface

Here's another reason why the Lulzbot Mini is revolutionary: In nearly all other 3D printers, you have to figure out how to make your printed object stick to the print bed. This is accomplished through a variety of methods, all of them messy and annoying (if not downright toxic).

They include things like using acetone and ABS plastic to make "lulzbot juice"; rubbing glass print beds with Elmer's glue sticks; spraying the surface with hair spray... and so on.

All these methods "totally suck" to use pop culture lingo. They really do. They suck bad.

But Lulzbot has solved this problem. With their revolutionary PEI print bed surface, there's no bed adhesion treatment needed.

I know what you're thinking: "That's impossible!" But you're wrong. Check it out:

I've been printing Float Valve Receivers for the Mini-Farm Grow Box by using t-glase filament with NO bed adhesion at all. The object I'm printing is found at this link on FoodRising.org.

Here's a photo to show you how it prints on the Lulzbot Mini with no bed adhesion whatsoever (you can see some scratches from previous prints, and a bit of extra t-glase from a previous brim, but there's no glue, no ABS juice, no hair spray, nothing):



How is this magic achieved?

Lulzbot figured out that PEI sheet material has seemingly magical properties: It's sticky when hot, but solid as glass when cool. So after the bed heats up, your prints stick nicely to the print surface. But after your print, when the bed cools down, your printed objects can be removed with relative ease. (I use sturdy wide-mouth pliers to grab the base of each object and pull it off the bed.)

No more scraping glue with putty knives! No more inhaling acetone vapors! No more sniffing hair spray between prints! (Gosh I miss the 60's...)

#3) Easily replaceable nozzle

I'm about to murder my Ultimaker 2 printer because swapping out the print nozzle is nearly impossible without permanently damaging the heat sensor. As a rule, 3D printers should have nozzles that are easy to change out. The print nozzle is the single most frequently removed part of the printer because you sometimes need to clean it or even drill it out to a larger diameter (I don't print anything with less than a 0.5mm diameter nozzle, and I often run them at 0.7mm).

The Lulzbot Mini makes its nozzles incredibly easy to swap out. You just unscrew it and screw in a new one. It takes just a few seconds. And to make things even better, you can easily find generic replacement nozzles on Amazon.com.

With a lot of other printers, you have to buy their proprietary nozzles. This sometimes involves waiting for them to ship from overseas. But with the Lulzbot Mini, you can buy spare nozzles for a few bucks on Amazon.com and have them shipped via PRIME.

Problem solved!

By the way, if you try drilling out nozzles to make them larger, you will ruin a lot of nozzles at first by breaking off the micro drills inside the nozzle. Have a good laugh and join the club... we've all done the same thing!

After doing this a few times, you will learn to put down the Dremel tool and drill them out with hand-operated micro drills like these ones at Amazon.com.

If you want a wearable magnifier visor, I recommend these wearable optics by Zeiss. (Yeah, they're expensive. Good optics are never cheap...)

#4) Supports high print temperatures

Another huge problem with other 3D printers is that they don't support the higher print temperatures needed for today's more advanced filaments like Colorfabb XT or even t-glase.

Believe it or not, t-glase filament for 3D printing needs to be printed at temperatures close to 250C. Earlier reports of it printing at 212C are not up to date. You actually want t-glase to print at the highest temperature possible WITHOUT air bubbles showing up in the print from excessive heat. This is usually around 250C, in my experience.

The Lulzbot Mini supports nozzle temperatures up to 300C. I've never taken it beyond 260C and I've never had a problem with it. Also, the filament feed problem I experienced with the TAZ 4 printer is totally solved with the Lulzbot Mini. In fact, in hundreds of hours of printing, I've only had t-glase filament fail to feed just ONE time, and even that was easily solved by removing the filament, cutting it off, and re-feeding. It worked immediately.

Also, it's incredibly easy to swap out filament with the Lulzbot Mini, unlike the Ultimaker 2 which is an enormous hassle for a number of reason I'll explain in another review.

Bottom line? The Lulzbot Mini is the printer to beat

The 3D printing industry is moving at lightning speed, but as of right now, the Lulzbot Mini is hands down the best consumer-grade 3D printer available today, in my experience. If there's anything better out there, please let me know and I'll be happy to review it!

The Lulzbot Mini is also surprisingly affordable: $1350. That's about half the price of the Type A Machines Series 1 3D printer, which is my second-best recommended printer.

At $1350, the Lulzbot Mini is a true bargain. It has a heated print bed, the miraculous PEI print surface, the "automagic" bed leveling feature, a nozzle wipe feature that keeps the print nozzle clean, easily replaceable nozzle parts, high print temperature support and a host of other features.

The only drawback to the entire system is that it must be connected to a computer to be used. It can't operate as a standalone printer running on SD cards. This is a minor drawback, but the other features and benefits of the Mini more than make up for it. The print bed is also significantly smaller than most other 3D printers, but it's big enough to print everything I'm inventing, so that's no drawback to me.

If you're looking for an affordable, easy-to-use 3D printer, this is the clear choice. Get one now and start downloading all my stuff from FoodRising.org!

Click here for the Lulzbot Mini purchase page on Lulzbot.com.

If you want t-glase filament, get it from www.SupplySource.com and help support our operations (and future inventions).

You can use the Lulzbot Mini to print out ALL my upcoming inventions

I have five revolutionary inventions to release in 2015, and all of them are 3D-printable.

The first invention was just released on FoodRising.org: the 3D-printable self-watering float valve that makes non-circulating hydroponics systems work. Click here for full assembly instructions and click here to download the 3D-printable parts that I've released to the world for free.

Four more groundbreaking inventions are coming this year and will be released for free on FoodRising.org. All of them can be printed with t-glase filament on the Lulzbot Mini 3D printer.

Comparison chart of four popular 3D printers

Here's my take on these four popular 3D printers:


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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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