December 3, 2010 
What do you get when you cross a makerbot with a BFB Rapman?? The Ultimaker! Erik De Bruijn wanted to print bigger parts so he put his knowledge of Reprapping to good use and designed the Ultimater! The Ultimater is a laser cut plywood based design, very similar to the makerbot construction, but has a fixed build platform and moving extruder head (very similar to the Rapman and BFB 3000, actually the BFB hot end is being used in the early prototypes). The interesting aspect of this machine is the X,Y cartesian setup which has a cross hair arrangement which allows the hot end support structure to be very small allowing for a large printing area in a small machine. Also of interest is the that the extruder drive mechanism is mounted on the side of the chassis and feeds the filament through a long tube and into the heated hot end. This set up has not been used on other printers so it will be interesting to see how reliable it is over time.
The printers are due to go into production shortly and should be able to be purchased through www.ultimaker.com all the way from Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Cheers!…
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. “Calamity is the test of integrity.” by Samuel Richardson. Appreciate it for helping out, fantastic info. “Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen.” …
Bud.. Utrecht is in the Netherlands.. Not Germany.. It’s a Dutch product..
Ah thanks Paul. Our mistake. Correction made.
No worries. Keep up the good work! Will have to look you guys up in Melbourne.. See what cool toys you have..
For sure! We have a few 3D printers and a laser cutters at this stage but I’m sure that will grow!