Homemade manufacturing has never become more accessible

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You may think full-color 3D printing is a must-have for HeyGears G1X Series , but the G1X Series also offers a pack for 2D UV and 3D Texture Printing, priced at just $2,799 after the limited-time cashback. The first and easiest way to get started with the G1X printer is printing in 2D on over 400 base materials, like plastic, metal, wood, glass, ceramic, leather, acrylic, and more. Have a tile you want with your design on? It’s really easy to do with HeyGears’ slicer, Blueprint Studio: Place your material in the center of the print bed, start a new Project, select your printer, start the Positioning sequence, and the Blueprint Studio software will automatically calibrate and find the edges of your materials on the print bed so you can import your image or design and rescale to your heart’s desire–then hit Print.

The possibilities feel almost endless, but you’re not limited to just 2D surfaces. HeyGears also has a Rotary attachment that allows you to print onto cylindrical materials like water bottles, glass vases, or metal rods. Support for the rotary module will be available upon launch.

Even better, this 2D UV printing capability isn’t just versatile. It’s remarkably fast and precise. The G1X delivers up to 12x print speeds compared to traditional F1080 UV printers, letting you complete projects in a fraction of the time. Plus, backed by G7 highest-level color certification and with HeyGears’ self-developed wide-gamut inks, including light cyan (Lc) and light magenta (Lm) inks, your prints deliver higher color accuracy and a professional-grade finish every time.

If you want your products or materials to have a tactile surface or texture, you can take it beyond 2D UV printing and give the 3D-texture mode a whirl by adding relief effects up to 150 mm, with a recommended height of 5 mm, depending on the materials you’re printing on. Don’t make the mistake I made of accidentally printing a design onto material that was too thin to have the full 5mm of 3D relief texture on, since some materials may curl up and come off the print bed, forcing you to replace the positioning sheet that is expendable.

That is something that I’d like to see in a future firmware upgrade, to see if there’s a way to implement print-failure detection to catch a lifting substrate and stop the job before it keeps printing onto a build plate and ruins it. I found this out the hard way. The silver lining is that the build plate itself uses the replaceable positioning sheet as I mentioned before, and the kit ships with several spares, so a failed print costs you a sheet and some time, but not the whole machine.

I’ve always intrinsically been a creator. From making wireframe dinosaurs and models to pottery goods as a kid, and more recently, 3D modelling and printing. That being said, I always wanted to make my own custom products with designs and photos, but make them in a way that you wouldn’t think of it as ‘homemade’.

The problem was that I’ve never done anything like UV printing, which was something I’ve been frankly scared to do. The added barrier to entry was the high premium with machines that can do even just one of these. Most other industrial full-color 3D printers can cost anywhere between $50k and upwards of $200k+, whereas the HeyGears G1X Full-3D Pack goes for an MSRP of $5,499 and a Kickstarter price of $3,599 for the same package. To make the price even better, HeyGears is now offering a $500+ cashback, meaning you can take home this printer for just $3,099. That’s where the HeyGears G1X UV and full-color 3D printing machine comes in, which is a fraction of the cost of the industrial competition. It helps that HeyGears isn’t new to this, and the company’s been building photopolymer 3D printing hardware for industrial and professional customers since 2015. The G1X is clearly benefiting from a decade of lessons learned on machines that cost a lot more than this one.