From Austria, the World's Smallest 3D Printer 120
fangmcgee writes "Printers which can produce three-dimensional objects have been available for years. However, at the Vienna University of Technology, a printing device has now been developed which is much smaller, lighter and cheaper than ordinary 3D-printers. With this kind of printer, everyone could produce small, tailor-made 3D-objects at home, using building plans from the internet — and this could save money for expensive custom-built spare parts."
Re:Scotty, beam me down (Score:5, Informative)
It's small, but probably not as cheap as a Rep Rap [reprap.org] which is a fully open-source implementation of a 3D printer that's been around for a few years. They've developed the first iteration into the 'Mendel' which has addrssed some of the issues they came across in initial development.
Re:Hmmm... Makerbot? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, yes, but a totally different animal. I own a makerbot, and have used a Tormach, a ShopBot, and a Techno. The MakerBot is far simpler to use, and far less messy. Our makerbot is in the living room. No CNC mill is going to live there, spitting chips and collant all over the place, and potentially ripping the arm off an unwary passerby. It's very handy to be able to print small widgets in plastic quickly and easily, even with size and resolution limitations. But there are times when that doesn't cut it, and you go machine plastic, aluminum, brass, or steel on a mill.
Don't be taken in by the little CNC mill ads that you see for little guys like the Sherline -- not that the Sherline is bad, but most people that haven't used a mill don't understand the limitations. The work envelope is so small you can't make much of interest, and the machine isn't rigid enough to do anything harder than aluminum and even then you need to take pretty light cuts. And guess what -- end mills and dial indicators and so forth don't cost less just because you are going to use them on a Sherline -- the mill is just the beginning of the expenses and buying a cheap mill is sort of silly when you compare the cost of the mill to the tooling. The smallest, wimpiest mill I would even consider spending my money on is a Tormach. http://www.tormach.com/ [tormach.com]
And then there is ease of use. My 12 year old daughter prints doll house furniture on the MakerBot. In a CNC machine shop, the machinist that has been there ten years is "the new guy" -- there is *huge* amount to learn to become anything beyond a hack hobby machinist like me.
Re:I'm completely ignorant on this subject (Score:5, Informative)
Milling is a subtractive process. Start with a block of stock material and a drawing of the part you want. Cut away everything that ain't your part.
3D printing is an additive process. Start with feedstock material of some kind, and through some process fuse bits of it together to form your part. The machine in the article solidifies a resin slurry. Many 3D printers extrude plastic rod through a heater barrel, and deposit the molten plastic onto previous layers and let the whole thing solidify again. There are many 3D printing processes with various advantages and drawbacks.
Both milling and 3D printing involve a Cartesian robot that moves the tool head and/or the build table to achieve X/Y/Z positioning. A key difference between something like the MakerBot is that there are zero side forces on the tool head as it moves around. When you are driving cutting tool through steel stock on a mill there are big-time side forces. This is the key reason 3D printers are small, light, and office friendly, and why mills are big, nasty machines that weigh thousands of pounds and can rip your arm off.