I took it home, cleaned it out with a leaf blower on my driveway, and then wiped the whole machine down with some paper towels, and it looked almost as good as new.

It was old, dusty, and abused to all hell, and all the binder lines were frozen, but looked mechanically intact. And one such machine, a Z402, came up at my friendly neighborhood college surplus auction and I got it for a bargain. The term eventually consumed the rest of additive manufacturing as patents began to run out, but in 2012, Zcorp was acquired by 3D systems, who promptly wiped all their information off the face of the internet.īut the machines remain. What we know as 3D printers today had been around before (namely FDM, and before that, SLA) but those were, unsurprisingly, referred to as “Fused Deposition Modelers” or “Stereolithography apparati” or “Rapid Prototypers.” The term “3D printing” was first used to refer to this powder process, and Zcorp was the first company to gain rights to use the patent on the process, and the Z402 was the first machine produced by Zcorp. As a fun 3D printer fact, the Zcorp Z402 was probably the first machine to be called a “3D printer,” because it was using a printer head to print in 3 dimensions. It was basically building sand castles, and the parts had very little mechanical strength, but it was able to produce a very large part very quickly, and later versions of the technology were able to print in full color. It would then drop down 1 layer, and spread a new layer of powder over the build. It was the first industrial machine to use an additive manufacturing process called “binder jetting.” It used an HP inkjet head, going back and forth over a bed of powder (mostly plaster), spraying a sticky “binder” and causing the powder to stick together. A company called “Zcorporation” or simply “Zcorp” releases a 3D printer called the Z402.

This is one of my favorite projects I’ve probably ever done. Mechatronics, GCODE, Material Science, Eagle board design, Electronics, Control Theory, CAD ^ Two particularly messy images of the ReCorp at MRRF 2018, by OSHPark ^ Control Board stack with RAMPSSB and Stepper2Laser

Zprint z402 software