Meet The Maker
REGULAR
D printing has come a long way in
its short history. We’ve seen various
printers at all price points, but the one
thing they have in common is that
they’re all better than their equivalent
models of just a couple of years ago.
The factors that have driven this are the
collaboration inherent in open-source hardware and
the constant drive to provide something better. Both
of these are found in the work of Josef Pru ̊ša, creator
of (among other things) the most widely hired home
3D printer on the market, the Prusa i3.
We met up with Josef to find out how the magic
happens, what’s next in the pipeline, and how he
got started.“I was playing with music and I started to build my
own controllers,” says Josef. “So I needed to make
knobs and faders, and that’s when I found 3D printing.
So I went ahead and started to build a RepRap. And
because I’m a lazy person, I found it really complex.
I wanted to make it easier and simpler during
the process.
“When I shared it back, people started to use it
instead of the original design. It became my hobby,
and after two more years, when people were
constantly asking me to build a printer for them,
I turned it into a business. And from there it’s grown.
“I went full time in, I think, 2012, so six years ago.
I dropped out of college and started a company.
“A lot of people in Czech use me as an excuse,
‘Hey, he also dropped out, and look at them.’ But you
have to have something before you drop out. If you
just don’t like studying it’s a bit tougher.”PRINTING WITH ULTRAVIOLET
You could say that things are working out OK for
Josef; his company has sold around 100 000 printers
so far, with most of that coming in the last three
years. So what’s next on the horizon?
“We acquired an SLA resin printer company and,
for last year, we were working on making a new
one, the Original Prusa SL1. That’s a resin-based 3D
printer, which is a completely different technology
than we were doing before. It’s pretty exciting.”
Resin printing sounds a bit sticky, but according
to Josef, the process is similar to using a traditional
material such as PLA. The only difference is that you
use light rather than heat:
“PLA is a thermoplastic, so you heat it up and then
you lay down the layers. But this uses liquid resin:
when you shine a specific UV light on it, it cures3
Meet The Maker:
Josef Pruša
Taking home 3D printing to the next level
Right^
This level of detail
was unimaginable on
hobbyist printers only
a few years ago