The Explosive Growth of 3D Printing 213
MojoKid writes "If you've ever attended a World Maker Faire, the first thing that strikes you is how organic the whole scene is. Inventors, creators, and engineers from all walks of life have their gadgets, science projects, and creations on display for all to see. Some of the creations you see on display range from downright amazing to completely bizarre. One of the big attractions, a technology area that has experienced explosive growth, is the land of 3D Printing. MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2, to new players in the field like Solidoodle, Up!3D, Ultimaker, and Tinkerines. To watch a 3D printer in action is like witnessing art, science and engineering all working together in glorious unison."
Guns (Score:3, Insightful)
Pity that there is now a bunch of lunatics trying to make printable guns. The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.
TSA (Score:5, Funny)
The irony of your low-uid username and this comment is awesome.
Re:Guns (Score:4, Interesting)
If the 3D printing of lower receivers become a real "problem" to the ATF they'll just change the definition of which part of a gun is the "firearm". For instance, you can't 3D print a barrel since it has to be made of steel.
Re:Guns (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the technology improves substantially, 3d printed guns are going to succeed largely in stimulating the market for guns that you can operate with multiple missing fingers...
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Pity that there is now a bunch of lunatics trying to make printable guns. The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.
More likely they're making plastic stocks and receiver housing and the other peripheral stuff which holds the important bits together. The barrel, receiver, firing pin, magazine, springs, screws and other metal parts of a gun, plus the ammunition would have to be manufactured some other way for the time being. Of course some enterprising fellow who has watched In the Line of Fire might get the bright idea to make the whole gun out of plastic. Maybe it would work but its as likely to blow their hand off, or
Re:Guns (Score:4, Insightful)
Pity that there is now a bunch of lunatics trying to make printable guns. The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.
Are you implying you'd have to be a lunatic to want to make a gun?
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I modded +1 Insightful and it turned out 2, Flamebait, which is totally insane with regard to this post. So I have to post to undo.
The possibility of easily making guns, even from soap (as is done in prisons), is very, very frightening. And don't tell me that it's better to have kids attempt to steal a bubble gum with a plastic gun than actually using a real one!
It won't be long until we read that a kid was suspended from school for life because a plastic printed gun was found in his locker.
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The more guns the merrier.
Not just guns... (Score:2)
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More likely it will be used as an excuse to ban 3D printing when it starts becoming good enough for complex machines. After all, it might cut into the profits of established manufacturers, and we can't have that.
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The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.
The availability of steel pipe at the hardware store must make you very nervous.
Troll.
And you frist posted it, so 75% of the discussion will be about this bullshit.
Re:Guns...NO (Score:2)
People have made weapons out of blocks of stone, so we shouldn't build stone or concrete houses...?
Fast 3D parts you can handle, feel, assemble and use, if at least done gently with many of the printer polymers makes analyzing what you can think of for design a very quick process, whether for play or production prototyping.
Emphasis on guns, which is only partially possible is a joke. You still need barrels and other very highly stressed parts that can't be done by RP plastics. True there are RP titanium a
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Re:Guns (Score:5, Interesting)
When 3D printers can print rifled steel I'll start worrying about it.
Oh plastic would work, once, for a single shot application. Start worrying when you can print out copper jacketed lead crimped onto a brass case full of smokeless powder, in other words pretty much never.
Another problem is in strength applications the printed plastic to handle a force of X pounds is, as a raw material, Y times the cost of steel. So to correct your post:
"When 3D printers can print rifled plastic at less than 20x the cost of traditionally machined steel at the same strength I'll start worrying about it."
Not to say its useless for gunsmithing. I think the idea of laser scanning a hand, and being able to print the exact "reverse polarity" image of the owners hand to make a truely personalized bolt-on handgrip is pretty interesting. Very soon, collectors will see boring cross hatching grips as an indicator of pre-2010's firearms. Perhaps grips with such detail that they match the wrinkles (or hair) of the owners palm. Also embedding logos (probably illegally copied, or course) and other art works.
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Boring cross-hatched grips work with or without gloves on. Most modern guns seem to be getting interchangeable grips already, though, at least back strap plates.
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Oh plastic would work, once, for a single shot application. Start worrying when you can print out copper jacketed lead crimped onto a brass case full of smokeless powder, in other words pretty much never.
It definitely won't be "never". This technology is still relatively speaking, in its infancy. There are bound to be exponential improvements in materials and bonding/adhesive materials.
And the evolution of nanotech will probably make the home-manufacturing of a whole shell casing possible.
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Within -- "An amateur gunsmith has already used a 3-D printer to make the lower receiver of a semiautomatic rifle, the AR-15. This heavily regulated part holds the bullets and carries the gun’s serial number. A German hacker made 3-D copies of tightly controlled police handcuff keys. Two of my own students, Will Langford and Matt Keeter, made master keys, without access to the originals, for luggage p
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Firearms designs need not have rifled steel barrels
Good luck building a firing pin and shotgun barrel from cheap plastic too. Let me know how it goes the first (and last) time you fire it.
Re:Guns (Score:4, Insightful)
They already can. Metal-printers are not cheap though.
Also strength difference between sintered "technically a metal, but barely" vs (metalurgically) forged and heat treated specific alloy is a whole nother thing.
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Fear of armed people is completely rational.
In my country, over 60,000 people have been killed by drug violence, most of it related to the USA's voracious appetite for illegal drugs and the laughably easy it is to buy military-grade firearms and smuggle them across the border.
So yeah, fuck guns and fuck drugs.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/arms_trafficking_at_the_us-mexico_border [fpif.org]
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Perhaps if your citizens were better armed, stories like this would turn out better:
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/11/mexican-marines-reconstruct-death-of.html [borderlandbeat.com]
``Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.''
--- John Stuart Mills
If your government doesn't trust your honest citizens w/ military grade weaponry, then you've only yourselves to blame.
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Perhaps if your citizens were better armed, stories like this would turn out better: //www.borderlandbeat.com/ ...
http:
That's a terrible example. Sure, there are a gazillion guns in the Borderlands, but whenever you shoot anyone they just respawn at a Hyperion 'New U' station. They have so many guns mostly to protect against skags and bullymongs.
What we really need to do is make Siren powers illegal. Once we figure out how to 3D print those then we're in trouble.
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For the record:
- Iran ranks 79th in the rate of private firearms ownership
- The rate of private gun ownership in Iran is 7.32 firearms per 100 people
- In Iran, only licensed gun owners (separate licenses required for owning, possessing, carrying and using a firearm) may lawfully acquire, possess or transfer a firearm or ammunition
- In Iran, the law requires that a record of the acquisition, possession and transfer of each privately held firearm be retained in an official regi
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Why do you think that? Have you looked at the evidence [wikipedia.org]:
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Re:Guns (Score:4, Funny)
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You are mistaken : at slashdot facts don't get used to deny democratic moronic ideas. Only republican ones.
You seriously haven't noticed this before ?
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In countries where there are less guns, they have less gun violence.
It's pretty simple, really.
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And historically, that worked out so well:
http://twinbuttebunch.org/index.php?fuseaction=misc.sendguns [twinbuttebunch.org]
Winston Churchill wrote in Their Finest Hour: "When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms, special trains were waiting in all ports to receive their cargoes. The Home Guard in every county, in every village, sat up through the night to receive them. ... By the end of July we were an armed nation ... ."
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Huh? This referring to guns for the army.
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You can make all the snarky comments you want. Just walk around for a day and think about all the fucking idiots you see that you wouldn't even trust holding scissors. Now imagine those same idiots with a gun.
If you don't have the time to do that, let these law abiding citizens make you proud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTVa0aQnvVU [youtube.com]
Extra points if you stick around till about 4:55.
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I disagree. The government should not be trying to limit or ban or regulate guns. With operations like Fast & Furious, the government is setting it up to take away our gun rights. It is inventions like 3d printing that keep the power back to the people
Serious question, what do you hope would be achieved by having widespread gun ownership?
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Problematic for whom? I suspect that when a load of barely trained rednecks get the chance to act out their wild-west fantasies the safest person in the room is the one being aimed at.
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I could make a better weapon from what's in my kitchen[1] than anybody could make with a current 3D printer.
[1] No, I don't mean my wife's cooking.
Only one question... (Score:4, Insightful)
How long will it take before all the legalese crap breaks loose?
Sooner or later powerful people will want to appropriate this while shielding and litigate the rest of us.
Re:Only one question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Already started.
Thingiverse has received DMCA takedown notices for a couple of models, some legitimate (Games Workshop probably has a pretty clear-cut case for copyright infringement), others resolved (over a Penrose Triangle based on a design from the 1930s) and at least one other which I recall, but can't find a link for where a parent printed up a replacement part for a broken toy but took it down at the request of the toy manufacturer (if memory serves).
Re:Only one question... (Score:5, Interesting)
For the moment, costs and material limitations are probably keeping things on that front (mostly) in check. There are a few areas(like the Games Workshop figurines), where the price is quite high based largely on copyright and there is also a demand for numerous replicas(though, incidentally, I'm told that the real 'pirates' tend to use conventional mould-making and casting techniques, since those are reasonably efficient for small batches and far cheaper than a 3d printer that can capture fine detail properly).
There just aren't too many things that are made of dubious-quality plastic but are expensive enough to clone at current prices. Nothing like music where, even on dialup, the price of a CD worth went from $15 to ~$0...
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There is thingverse; but that is presently embroiled in some licensing-related controversy, peripherally related to makerbot's current togetherness problems with their OSS/OSH roots.. Most of the commercial 3d printing services also have some sort of 'library' feature to provide more things that you can order printed by them, shapeways and i.materialize come to mind; but there are others.
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Eventually
I Thought We Agreed (Score:5, Funny)
The Explosive Growth of 3D Printing
I thought we agreed not to print printable machines that print more printable machines. It's Second Life all over again ... IRL!
For those of us looking to buy a 3D printer (Score:2)
...Maker Faire was a goldmine. Every major vendor was there, and they all had samples of the classic objects everybody uses for demos, so it was very easy to compare the quality of the output. (That is, presuming that the ones that stood out didn't just print 500 identical objects and bring the one good one.)
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I'm glad to hear that you got to see the quality of the output of many different 3D printers, so up for doing a quick review of what was good and what was bad?
Re:For those of us looking to buy a 3D printer (Score:5, Informative)
Since all I looked at were completed objects, I can't say anything about how fast they were produced, how reliable or easy to calibrate the printers are, etc. What I mostly looked for were irregularities. In a 3D printed object, the layers are very visible. If you think of a cylinder, you expect the sides to be as smooth as possible, i.e., no protrusions or indentations. The layers should be completely horizontal, no glitches or waviness that make you think the printhead jiggled or anything. If you think of a sphere, the topmost layers should look like perfect concentric circles, and the top shouldn't look like it's about to cave in.
It was insanely crowded in the 3D Printer Pavilion, so once I decided that a vendor's objects were not the best, I moved on. But there were two noteworthy units: Sorry to say, the new Makerbot 2 was a disappointment, given that it's one of the most expensive units at $2800. The objects they had on display were some of the worst. The surprise winner, and the one I'm recommending to a nonprofit children's museum I'm working with that wants to buy one, was the Tinkerines Ditto. It produced the best objects, and at $900 in kit form or $1400 assembled, it was amazing bang for the buck.
Tinkerines is new to the scene, so they don't yet have a dual-nozzle head, nor do they yet support ABS plastic (the necessary heated base is still being developed), only PLA. But for our application, it's perfect. The people were really nice too, despite the crowds and the cacophony in the tent.
(Disclaimer: I have no connection with any vendor except as a customer or with Maker Faire except as an attendee.)
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Did you happen to see the Formlabs Form 1 printer? They were at Maker Faire too. They're running a Kickstarter [kickstarter.com] right now, and from the photos and video on there the parts that machine produces look far better than most anything else I've seen. I watched the video of the Tinkerines Ditto on IndieGoGo [indiegogo.com] and the parts didn't look anywhere near as finely-detailed.
I'm quite interested in learning more about the Form 1 and it would be great if someone had a first-hand experience from maker Faire (I'm in Seattle
Extra E (Score:2)
True Geeks (Score:2)
The extra E seems appropriate.
Re:True Geeks (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Extra E (Score:5, Interesting)
Or as my French speaking girlfriend suggested: Faire is the French word for "To make" so it could be a play on words?
Re:Extra E (Score:4, Informative)
There was a presentation about the genesis of Maker Faire at the Open Hardware Summit last week. The pointed out the French translation of "faire" - and said that it was something that they learned after the fact. FYI.
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Comparison (Score:3)
Re:Comparison (Score:4, Funny)
The 3D printer of today is a lot like the VCR.
In other words pr0n is going to drive the market. Home printing of customized "marital aids" and "massage machines" are going to drive the market. Whichever 3-d printer is first to market with a silicone print head wins. Also lots of size bragging... no one's going to admit a reprap huxley that can only print 5 inch long things (well, more on the diagonal) is "big enough".
Mid/long term speculation... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, does anybody care to speculate about the mid/long term distribution/ownership of these things?
I keep seeing the breathless predictions of 'desktop manufacturing, one in every household!'; but I also see that (among the people, friends, family, neighbors needing computer assistance, etc. who I have cause to know about) ownership of inkjets is actually falling, despite the fact that those are nearly free; because it's easier to just upload the pictures to some service that owns a $20k+ printer but will sell you a tiny slice of it for under 10 cents a print. Laser printers are holding the line, so far, among people who push paper.
As a technology, 3d printing is obviously here to stay; but the value proposition of actually owning one, rather than renting a tiny slice of somebody's much classier one over the internet, seem about as mainstream as the economics of owning a high quality large format photo printer or a machine shop. Definitely something that certain professions would lead you to do, and definitely something that a hobbyist would want access to; but not necessarily something that you would seriously consider owning...
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I've thought that obvious places for this would be:
- local car dealer --- in the shop where they could print up small trim parts rather than having to maintain inventory / having them shipped
- local hardware store (w/ integrated 3D scanner) --- scan the thing-a-ma-bob which they customer brings in, be directed to a particular aisle / shelf if in stock, if not, print up a quote to have a replacement printed / milled.
The problem is the run time on these devices is rather lengthy, making it har
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Re:Mid/long term speculation... (Score:4, Insightful)
An insightful observation, but I'd add that you need to factor in the reprap factor. If it goes makerbot, meaning no self replication, then you've got it, but if it goes reprap, meaning self replication, then things could get weird. If my laser printer could print another laser printer...
I'd say the best reprap analogy is livestock farming. Yes it reproduces itself to a first approximation for free, but its going to take up time and some specialized supplies, lots of specialized knowledge (although in the olden days every peasant knew everything about chickens, or thought they did, anyway), and space, and smell (molten PLA is not as stinky as molten ABS, both pale in comparison to the smell of a laser cutter exhaust or chicken droppings, but...). Admittedly for most people, chicken is what comes in little wrapped trays at the supermarket, or more likely the fast food drive thru...
My metal lathe can make another bigger lathe, but that's pretty rare in the hobby because its a lot of work, worse than printing reprap parts...
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When there is an inline recycling unit I'll be interested. Something breaks, junk in, replacement part out. Bonus points when metal and glass can be used (I can dream).
People who predict desktop manufacturing (Score:4, Insightful)
Are full of crap. While such a thing might be possible in the future, current 3D printers just make plastic models. Now that's nice and all, and there's plenty of uses for it (industrial prototyping is a big one) that is far from household manufacturing. They can't work with metal, never mind electronics. You don't just go and print out a cell phone or something.
The only market that might possibly be threatened is the 3D miniatures market. Though I don't know how good they do at colour (all the ones I've encountered are monochromatic) so you might still need to paint things. Aside from that, there is little in the commercial space they threaten. They are extremely cool toys, but little more than that.
In terms of home manufacturing if they gain the ability to work with metal, particularly multiple metals, which would require a major change in how they operate, then they could produce more useful items. If they made metal and plastic parts on a fairly fine scale, they could manufacture many every day items. However unless they could either work on the micro/nano scales that electronics work on, or in some other way make use of it (like be loaded with various kinds of chips to use) their market would still be really limited.
They are nifty for making examples out of a somewhat weak plastic (it isn't super fragile but it isn't high impact) but a universal constructor they are not.
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They can't work with metal, never mind electronics.
Not so my friend... http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138154/neil-gershenfeld/how-to-make-almost-anything?page=show [foreignaffairs.com]
You'll people are already making parts to guns and master keys that can unlock anything from baggage padlocks to police handcuffs. Yes, these are probably laboratory grade 3D printers, but it won't be long before the public can get their hands on something similar.
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As I said about my idiot thing. No people are not makiing anything. They are making very few things.
The only gun part I've seen made is the lower reciever to an AR-15. This is the part that takes the least stress, and is quite cheap (they cost about $50 for a basic stamped lower, $150ish for a nice mahcined one). This is not the business part of the gun. Go ahead and print a barrel and chamber, see how it does. Just be warned: It has to withstand about 63,000 PSI so good luck there. You try it, I'd make sur
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Kids toys.
No more Chinese labor & international shipping.
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In terms of home manufacturing if they gain the ability to work with metal,
Rather surprised no one has taken a mig welder and used that to do 3D printing.
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A bolt could be the "base" that the piece is welded to, but yes the final piece would need to be sanded down to make it smooth.
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How about Lego bricks ? I know Lego has patents, but what if I print Lego bricks for my own use and don't sell them ?
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Hey there.
You're wrong (but this is not a bad thing - you're about to learn something cool!) - 3D printing extends to metals (powders that are laser fused) - from alumide to titanium - or combinding 3D printing in wax with the Lost Wax molding techniques, brass, bronze, gold and silver.
Check it out! http://i.materialise.com/materials [materialise.com]
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The real benefit of a printer is probably the short "shipping" time. If you realize that you want a plastic part or a photo print tomorrow at the latest it's too late to order now, but if you have a printer you can get it today.
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I think it'll take off. With prints, they're all pretty much the same, and if you don't have a printer, you can just keep it digitally and say "I'll print it later" or send it to someone else who REALLY wants to print it now. And you never need to, say, print a small square of a thing to paste on top of a bit that got damaged. I, however, am counting the days until I can use a 3D printer to fix the countless little things in my house that break or that I want to improve, like a part of a clip for a phone, o
Look to the crafting community. (Score:2)
Check out
http://www.silhouetteamerica.com/ [silhouetteamerica.com]
http://www.sizzix.com/shop/eclips [sizzix.com]
http://www.cricut.com/ [cricut.com]
and there are many other brands of 2D cutters used by the crafting community.
The women who are really into scrapbooking, card making, and such will jump at the opportunity to make their own napkin holders, salt & pepper shakers, and other doodads.
I expect to see http://www.etsy.com/ [etsy.com]Etsy filled with 3D printed items in a few years.
- Jasen.
invalid assumptions (Score:3)
There are many reasons why I print my own pictures, cost being one factor, but artistic control of the process (especially in the use of "special" paper which a commercial printer could not use cost effectively) is more important. I use a Brother DCP 6690 CW printer fitted with a continuous ink supply system (think long range tanks) and I buy ink by the litre. The main cost for me is paper, and hand made 200gsm A3 paper is very expensive. For most work I use water colour paper and that runs to about £
I'd like to have one (Score:2)
But they're still above my "fun toy" expense cap. If the MakiBox ever goes into production, I'll probably buy one just for fun but $300 is as much as I'd want to spend. It's cool to have the potential to just print off any little parts you need for a project but the reality is that it takes a lot of time to design objects. It would take hundreds of hours of practice to get competent at it and thousands to get good.
Makerbot (Score:3)
MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2.
The Replicator 2 which is now closed source. That's one way to thank all the hard work of those who toiled and released open source hardware.
When can I print my contact lens? (Score:2)
I just wish I could print a brand new ready to wear set of contacts every morning!
Still looking for decent software though. (Score:2)
Blender doesn't work on my computer, but I could never figure it out anyway. (Maybe it's related to the viewport bug?)
While the prices of printers have plummeted, capable software remains high cost. Most people I know what it for engineering replacement parts, which include screw threads, but working screw threads are almost impossible to get right unless you're also making the other side of the fastener as well. While free-form modeling programs are common, Anyone know of a good parametric program?
I have
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This is awesome! Thanks!
This is just the beginning ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember the Altair 8800. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800 [wikipedia.org]
The Altair was a pretty primitive and useless computer by today's standards but it was really the first personal computer. Looking at it, you wouldn't have predicted all the ways personal computers have changed our lives.
The 3d printers we have now are primitive and fairly useless. Almost nobody 'needs' one. What about thirty years from now? I'm guessing than many people's lives will be transformed. Many tradespeople will see their industries upended. Old style sign painters had to face competition from unskilled bozos with personal computers and a vinyl cutters. Skills that took a lifetime to learn no longer provided a competitive advantage. The 3d printing revolution promises to be similarly wrenching.
The low-end machines still suck (Score:4, Informative)
I have yet to see a low-end 3D printer that works consistently. TechShop has an "Up" and several RepRaps, but it seems to take several tries to make anything, and nobody gets consistently good parts. The machines that work by laying down a strand of ABS from a heated nozzle (which is all the low-end machines) have trouble getting a consistent bond to the previous layer. The temperature at the bonding point is too critical and not well enough controlled.
Somebody should try using some high power laser diodes to heat up the point where the ABS strands are fused. Those aren't expensive up to 2 watts or so. You only need a few watts, focused very tightly on the weld area. Welding is about applying heat to both sides of the joint in the weld area. The heated nozzle approach applies the heat on only one side, the new string approaching the weld. The material being joined to is cold. Of course the bond quality is poor.
The UV-bonded powder machines work fine, but cost about $50K. Laser sintering machines seem to produce good results. The E-beam deposition approach reportedly works very well, but is even more expensive. But ABS through a heated nozzle, not so much.
metal additive machine (Score:2)
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That's one way to go, but the same could be said of the additive manufacturing machines that use plastics -- why not just make a mold and pour molten resin or a two part mixture like epoxy or polyurethane. Another issue: making a metal part in a mold requires you have a kiln capable of melting the base metal and are willing to pour molten metal in your workshop. Not everyone wants to do that kind of hot work
Truth be told, for my applications, I could simply throw a block of metal on a mill and make the
I am getting so tired of this... (Score:2, Interesting)
I know of a machine shop at a university which has several 3D printers -- why would you ever need a mill?
These are commercial Stratasys units, over $60k each -- and yet their output is inaccurate (-maybe- good to 20 thou) and incredibly brittle and weak.
People have ALWAYS been able to make things. This lowers the barrier of knowing how -- but the only people that have interesting things to make are those that know how to make them anyways.
I have found the self-congratulatory nature of the whole Maker movem
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Here, read this.
http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwgh.html [blogs.com]
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how do you do it cheaply?
Its all at the level of a thousand hours vs thousands of dollars with a pretty smooth tradeoff in between. If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.
This will probably be seen as heretical, but try an eggbot kit, if the electronics, mechanics, software, or price scare you away,han replicators aren't for you. However if you do the eggbot thing then say to yourself, "self, I can now handle 10x the challenge of an eggbot" then you're ready for a replicator.
If somebody's at a "curious hobbyist" level, where do they start?
http://www.reprap.org/ [reprap.org]
Re:How do you get started? (Score:4, Informative)
... If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.
I can recommend starting with using a 3D printing service.
Even if you use a commercial printing service, much of the experience of 3D printing is still there, like the design, the anticipation of outcome, etc.
Google for Sculpteo and Shapeways.
They're pretty affordable, and do a lot of the messy work for you.
I had this printed for 90 bucks or so:
https://twitter.com/i/#!/BramStolk/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FJmiojXxJ [twitter.com]
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Be prepared to spend at least $400, and that's if you do all of the part sourcing and assembly yourself including soldering the electronics. The reprap.org forum [lulzbot.com] and wiki [reprap.org] are good resources (though very slow lately!), as is the #reprap IRC channel on freenode. My experience is the community is generally quite helpful and inviting.
Kits typically start around $700 or so but involve a less assembly work and contain everything you need. I'm a happy owner of a Prusa Mendel machine built from a kit sold by Makerg [makergear.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Somehow I managed to not copy the link to the forum properly... clipboard derp on my part.
http://forums.reprap.org/ [reprap.org]
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:3)
I'll consider being impressed by 3D printing as soon as someone actually starts doing something useful with it.
This [wired.com] is IMO impressive: Instead of shipping plastic parts around the world the company simply published CAD files. It's a start.
Re:Two Things (Score:5, Interesting)
My company makes figurines and toys (primarily) for gaming companies.
With the advent of 3D printing, we can get the 3D resources from the client, print out the model in 3D within a day, with accurate dimensions, colours and precision, make changes, before we send it off to our factories to produce the molds for production.
Previously, each mold would cost around $5k to make, with each change costing hundreds of dollars - significant changes resulting in another $5k to restart the mold.
Cost savings aside, we also save about 6 months development time. The clients love it, because they can see a physical version of their model / figurine instantly; we love it because we can work easily with the client to make changes, and the factories love it because they have a final product and order without months of delays.
It might not help you, but it sure helps us.
Re:Two Things (Score:4, Informative)
Same poster, second point.
There is at least one 3D printing company that I know of that offers 'printing' in brass, bronze and titanium.
They're using a very old and well known technique, the lost wax - but the wax is printed with the 3D printer, and then the metal poured into the mold.
This is not only an amazing evolution on an existing technology, but because the final products aren't built up layer by layer, they're structually equivalent to anything coming out of a foundry.
The ability to print custom tools, gears and moving parts in titanium is incredible.
Re: (Score:2)
Who is it? Plug man, plug away!!
Re: (Score:3)
http://i.materialise.com/ [materialise.com]