Turning scrap into 3D printers

Three young engineers from Goa have joined hands to work together on creating 3D printers out of scrap while running their start-up ‘Thinkaprint-Goa'.
Two of them Sanket Naik and Amey Borkar were friends in college and passed their BE (Mech) degree from Goa College of Engineering in 2014, while the third Ankit Sawant, is still in college, doing his post-graduation in Pune.
Co-founders of ‘Thinkaprint-Goa', Amey is a junior design engineer in Crompton Greaves in Kundaim, while Sanket handles the 3D printing orders of their start-up. The trio have come to an agreement with Infinyt3D Company from Verna and handle their 3D printing service aspect, while pursuing their own interest in developing models of 3D printers in Goa.
The idea for making a 3D printer started when they watched a video on YouTube, which showed how to make a mini 3D printer using computer CD drives. They tried doing this first and then moved to make a bigger one. During this stage Amey realised that dot matrix printer had parts that could be used. Since the motors and belts costly, it did make sense to use these parts from the old broken dot matrix printers.
After multiple trips to the local scrap dealer and hardware shops, they managed to get their first printer ready, which after a bit of troubleshooting and tweaking the settings, began to work.
"We did not begin with the idea of making parts from scrap, we wanted to make a 3D printer for ourselves and wanted to get it done by cutting down costs as low as possible. All this work began in the month of February last year and took us two months and Rs 3,000 to make our first 3D printer," briefs Sanket. They participated in CIBA's Kaun Banega Udyogpati (KBU) and came in the first 50.
After the duo built printers, they wanted to convert it into a business idea, but over the course of time they realized that making and selling 3D printers is not an easy task to execute. So, they decided to be in 3D printing services and roped another friend Ankit Sawant to start Thinkaprint.
Amey quips, "Creating something out of nothing is just like magic. We built our first 3D printer using nothing but CD-Drives."
After the success of first one, the trio managed to make three working prototypes. "Currently we are working on the fourth one, to make it reliable and compact," says Sanket.