After 5 years of developing and producing our line of Hydra Research printers including the Nautilus and the Minnow, we have made the difficult decision to wind down our printer manufacturing business. We have decided to focus solely on our on-demand 3D printing services.

Check out our new case study featuring ElementDrive, changes to our unique filament sampler subscription, new products, and more!

We couldn’t be more excited to announce that pre-orders for our upcoming workhorse 3D printer, the Minnow, are now available! We expect to begin shipping the Minnow in Fall 2021.

We will be closing Minnow beta applications very soon on February 19th. If you are interested in applying for beta access please do so as soon as possible here.

Keep an ear to the ground for the Minnow pre-order announcement!

We are pretty excited about this little printer. This is a brief update, but I wanted to provide some news before the end of the year.

A new 3D printer is coming… Also new this fall: 4 fresh Fillamentum Vertigo colors, PETG, Magigoo, Slice Engineering parts, and free shipping on orders over $49.

Learn about agile manufacturing using 3D printing in our latest case study featuring RepOne Strength. Also explore a host of new products, material colors, and 3d printer parts available in our online store now.

2020 has been bumpy so far, to say the least! However, Hydra Research is committed to continuing to offer the same industry-leading 3D printers and support services in addition to our direct additive manufacturing and 3D services.

After many trials and tribulations, our custom wire harnesses have arrived and production is under way! Our trial production has been successfully completed and 6 new Nautilus 3D printers have joined our print farm!

Trial production of the Nautilus is officially underway! We completed assembly of the first of our six trial Nautili that will form our print farm and we’re very happy with how it turned out. The printer is looking and working great so we will begin producing parts for the final production run this week! It was awesome to build a Nautilus with all of the finalized components instead of the re-used and handmade parts we use for development. If you’ve been waiting to get your order in, now’s the time!

Due to stock levels with some of our suppliers, we will not have all the parts for the Nautili in until late May, meaning it will be at least a week after that until we can start shipping Nautili. Luckily the delayed parts are not needed to begin production as they can be added at the very end. Thus we can still continue our plans to begin production as soon as possible. We will continue to allow pre-orders until production fully begins, so get your order in while you still can!

We are getting ready for our trial production run of the Nautilus. Parts have begun arriving and we are getting excited to start producing Nautili. We hope to be finished with trial production by the end of April.

We have officially moved!

Our new warehouse space is located in NE Portland and we share it with a number of other Portland based companies. The space we have is 10 times the size of the tiny office where the two of us developed and tested the Nautilus.

Once we are all set up, we plan to look into open houses and workshops for the local community.

You can now reserve a place in the queue for the first round of production. We aim to begin production in March after we move into our new space (more about that below). Reservations are $150 and will guarantee you a printer from our first production run. Reservations are limited, so make sure to purchase your spot before they run out!

Beta testing for the Nautilus 3D printer is officially under way! We have sent out the first two beta units and are beginning production of a second round of three more beta units, which will be going out soon.

We had a great time sharing our new Nautilus 3D Printer prototype at the Portland Mini Maker Faire this September!

Thank you to all those who stopped by and showed their enthusiasm and support for what we are doing. It was awesome!

I was initially planning on using the Einsy Rambo by Ultimachine in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi running Octoprint, but due to the limitations of the Einsy's 8bit framework and communication issues between marlin and Octoprint I was not able to have all the features I had envisioned. 

I am pretty happy with the hardware design of the printer. I have reached a point where there are no major issues and everything fits and functions properly. The front frame panel now goes top to bottom and the door is inset into this panel. This increases the rigidity of the printer. Additionally, I have opted for an all-black design in this iteration, as black printed parts are easier to produce without cosmetic defects I decided that I want the acrylic to match the printed parts, so a matte black acrylic will be used. 

The new tool head is the most compact and simplest version I've designed yet. In addition, to being much quicker and easier to print, it also features a much simpler magnetic couple between the tool head gantry and the hotend. It was challenging to devise a belt clamping mechanism in this new quite confined space, but I've got something that has been working well so far.

Hydra Research invites you to come by our office for a behind the scenes look at what we do. We will have free drinks, snacks, and more! Bring your friends and family and explore the magic of 3D Printing and open source design.