Toybox 3D Printer Review: A Fun Way to Create Toys

Our Verdict

Immature makers will become a big boot out of watching this peachy, cheap 3D printer produce toys for them.

For

Prints simple toys speedily and efficiently
Easy setup and interface
Wide selection of simple toys available to print

Against

Hot and moving parts make it unsuitable for younger users without supervision
Unheated impress bed ways prints don't always stick.

Tom's Guide Verdict

Young makers will get a big kick out of watching this peachy, cheap 3D printer produce toys for them.

Pros

+
Prints simple toys apace and efficiently
+
Piece of cake setup and interface
+
Wide selection of simple toys available to impress

Cons

-
Hot and moving parts make it unsuitable for younger users without supervision
-
Unheated print bed means prints don't always stick.

Role of 3D printing's promise is that you'll be able to print useful things at abode. And that'due south precisely what the Toybox from Brand.Toys does: information technology merely and quickly prints toys. You just pick the toy y'all want from a pick on the company'due south website, striking the print button and await. Your completed toy then pops out, ready for play.

The process works, mostly: We were able to print some of the best toys similar trains, track, castle parts and walls and small action figures from the unproblematic-to-employ web interface, and they were faithfully printed in sturdy, nontoxic PLA in a range of colors. Simply, like growing up, there are a few teething issues you need to become through first with the Toybox, such as the odd failed print and an interface with a few rough edges.

Nevertheless, if you look at 3D printing as a hobby for you and your kids can enjoy together, Toybox is i of the best 3D printers you can buy.

Toybox 3D printer review: Toll and availability

The Toybox 3D printer debuted a few years ago for $399. These days, the starter bundle costs $299, and you purchase it directly from Make.Toys.

Toybox 3D printer review: Design

Not to put too fine a point on information technology, but the Toybox is cute. It's a small printer, less than 8 inches wide and a niggling more than than 9 inches high. The frame is metallic, with open up areas revealing the printhead and removable print bed. The print bed is a magnetic sheet that holds tightly onto the base, but which slides off easily when the print is done. Because this base is flexible, you tin remove prints by bending information technology until they lift off.

Spare impress beds are inexpensive: three will toll you $xiv. The filament comes in 0.5lb (most 220g) reels that cost $x each and fit onto the back of the printer. Although these reels are smaller than most and carry only 0.5lb of filament, you can utilise any 1.75mm PLA filament if you can work out a way to feed it to the printer.

The Toybox tin can't produce large prints: they are limited to just over 3 inches on each side. Because the size of the printer, that is no big surprise, and the toys on offering are either modest, or impress in modest parts. The train rails, for example, tin be printed in two-inch lengths that fit together to produce a larger model. The layer height (the thickness of the layers used to create the impress) is also stock-still at 0.2mm, which is pretty standard for minor printers.

Brand.Toys plays up the cute bending with the naming of the parts: the ability supply is an "electron feeder" and the filament is "printer food." The nutrient metaphor stretches to the colors too: green filament is called apple, purple is grape, white is kokosnoot and so on. It's a cute idea, but information technology also has to be accompanied by the warning that the filaments are not edible.

More than: ten Things You lot Never Knew Your 3D Printer Could Produce

Although the Toybox is designed to print toys, there are a few things about the printer that aren't kid-friendly. The hot printhead tin be touched fairly hands, and fingers could be crushed by the moving printhead. (Update, 12/17: Make.Toys tells u.s. that the Toybox uses low torque motors, and then the motors should end rather than crush anything.) There is also some other curious omission: There is no fashion to stop the print midway on the device itself. The but way to stop information technology is to pull the power plug out, or hit the stop push in the web print interface. The latter method takes a couple of seconds to take effect.

Toybox 3D printer review: Controls

The Toybox keeps the controls on the printer itself simple. There's a single pocket-sized LCD touch on screen that shows the condition of the printer and offers a uncomplicated interface to load filament, fix the printer and configure a few other bones settings. The printer connects to the Make.Toys online service over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, so you'll demand to set up an online account to control your printer.

There'southward are a neat pick of gratuitous toys available at Make.Toys, from trains and tracks to castles, miniature figures, seasonal toys like a cute pumpkin and oddities like an owl cookie cutter. The Make.Toys web interface also allows you to create your own toys, either by modifying 1 of the available models or uploading your own.

To print one of the existing models, y'all just select the model and hit print. The service does the rest; there is no need to re-create files, connect cables or process files. An online editor lets you create personalized figures or tweak an existing model by stretching and scaling information technology. The service's 3D editor is pretty bones, just I could build a few unproblematic models without problems.

You can load existing 3D models in .stl or .obj formats, but the editing tools are still pretty bones. If there is a problem with the model (such as a hole in the 3d mesh), the arrangement volition warn you, but can't fix information technology. Nosotros also plant that more complex models, such as the geometric sculpture and set of planetary gears we typically use in testing, were a bit much for this system to cope with. That's non surprising, as both are complex models designed to confuse a printer, and are not really what the Toybox was intended to piece of work with.

Toybox 3D printer review: Print process

Once y'all've chosen or created your toy, you hitting print in the web interface, and your object starts printing. All of the hard work of configuring the print, creating the print file and sending it to the printer is done past Make.Toys' online service.

We establish press to be generally successful, but we did have a few failures. The PLA impress fabric does non always stick to the Toybox's unheated print bed, so we had some prints neglect at the beginning as parts came loose and stuck to the extruder rather than the printhead. On more than 1 occasion, I had to pry a goopy lump of melted PLA off the extruder when it became stuck.

Other prints failed partway through the process, ruining the print. A print of the train runway bridge, for instance, failed when one of the towers of the bridge came loose and stuck to another part of the print.

Simply these cases were more the exception than the rule. Most of our test prints on the Toybox worked flawlessly, creating prints that stuck to the impress bed and which were easily removed from the print bed afterward.

Toybox 3D printer review: Print speed

Considering of the modest size of the impress area of the Toybox, we were non able to do our full comparative tests that feature a 4-inch-high print. Toybox prints max out at a piffling more than 3 inches tall. However, we did find that the Toybox is a fairly fast printer — a 3-inch high version of our Thinker print took just 1 hour and 45 minutes to impress.

Toybox 3D printer review: Print quality

We were generally impressed with the quality of the prints produced by the Toybox, which were make clean and well printed. The thick layers of the print are somewhat obvious (look at the close-up photo of the Thinker statue, for instance), only don't usually detract from the expect and playability of the prints.

The Toybox did struggle with some fine details,though: The clips that concord the wheels on the train were not very well formed, so the wheels had a tendency to stick as they went effectually, or to sometimes fall off.

Toybox 3D printer review: Verdict

The Toybox is a lot of fun, allowing you lot to print simple, colorful and fun toys on demand that might give a immature maker insight into how things are fabricated. And the procedure is wonderfully simple: no messing with installing apps and configuring slicers. It is just press print, wait and play. Merely the Toybox is not perfect: We had a certain number of failed prints and other quirks that make it not quite the hassle-gratuitous process you might hope for.

So, is this 3D printer going to replace a large box of Legos? No. The prints the Toybox produces are not as loftier quality as mass-produced plastic blocks, and some users volition find the impress times frustrating. But for older children who know where non to stick their fingers, and who want to add a creative angle to their play, the Toybox is a dandy and not overly expensive printer.

Richard Baguley has been working every bit a technology writer and announcer since 1993. As well as contributing to Tom's Guide, he writes for Cnet, T3, Wired and many other publications.