I stumbled across this (no affiliation etc.) the other day:
A couple of years ago I experimented with 3d printing and concluded it was (at least) a couple of years away from being useful and/or practical.
I wonder now if the technology has moved on enough to be worth spending time on trying again. There are some very useful things I could do with printed carbon fibre, but I realise that could end up wasting many hours.
Anyone care to share their views?
Thanks.
I gather 3d printing is rather expensive, that all the sub 1k machines are basically pants. The concrete printers look most interesting imho.
NT
Do any of the laser ones that print in a tank of resin work with glass/carbon filled resin (~5%)?
If so they could make pretty strong parts.
The ABS extruders have quite a weak bond between layers.
e basically pants. The concrete printers look most interesting imho.
3D printing is very expensive unless you're really carfull. Check out the c ost of consumables for the printer you have in mind. We brought a printer recently not sue which one but it was £10k+ Material £500 per KG the washable plastic which is used as support cost £150 a KG and that gets washed down the plug hole !It;'s also a slow process painfully slow on the sub £1k printers and the resolutions pretty low. It can take 5 hours or more to print something of more than a couple of inches high & wide. Also the siftware can be a bit hit and miss some is better than others, so me will waste plastic and take far longet to print.
And here we are, with sub £300 machines doing good work. ;-)
I think so, depending etc.
Just this morning I designed and my mate is currently printing a bracket to support a water trap I found in my workshop to fit onto the wall near my compressor. This is just one example of many things I've now designed and printed, including all the plastic parts for my own printer and for brackets for cycles, torches, trailers and such.
Yes. I built a MendelMax 1.5 with / for a mate who would only buy one (in kit form) if I agreed to help build it with him. ;-)
Luckily, I had previous engineering, electronics, electrical, Arduino and programming experience so this was nothing completely new, outside of the actual details of this particular printer. The first test print, a 20mm cube came out square and 19.97mm so we were pleased we had understood what was required and done a good job. ;-)
Since it was assembled (from a kit, we thought that would be wise for the first machine) it has been in near-daily use, with only the odd misprint and very little in the way of maintenance.
I am looking forward to having my own printer and now have most of the parts ready and waiting (simply for the convenience of prototyping stuff in my own time).
The PLA we use is pretty tough and fairly cheap (£14/kilo) and the time it takes to print some things is still generally only a fraction of the time it would take to manually fabricate / turn / mill the same (even out of plastic)! ;-)
Cheers, T i m
Thanks for that insight, that was my understanding of current 3D printers and good to hear a positive spin.
surely best used at the moment to make patterns and then use a decent material for the finished component. Is th elost wax process practial for DIY?
Aluminium is too difficult to melt on a stove, are there any more affordable alloys that melt at an easily achievable temperature?
There are some easily fusible allows that could be used directly in a 3D printer, though most are either toxic or very expensive indeed.
Solders and woods metal?
Yup, you need flower pots and a fan.
NT
Yes, but I wouldn't touch Woods metal containing Cadmium. The idea of melting it on a stove fills me with horror.
I was thinking of some more robust alloy, so long as it melts sub 4-500 degsC.
More appropriate for the Woods metal you mentioned though you wouldn't see me using that stuff. Cheap but very toxic.
There's always NaK alloy. The eutectic melts at about -12C, but of course this is higher for other ratios.
Put some of that in your water pistol.
Cheers
Would that be before or after it had been filled with water?
You are welcome.
I believe PLA is one of the easiest plastics to print (low extrusion temperature (~200DegC) and no need for a temperature controlled cabinet) and it is pretty strong and whilst flexible when thin, quite rigid when solid.
My mates Mrs was tasked with pinning down a good starter printer and in turn asked me for advice (don't know why, I'd not even seen one in the flesh, let alone built one ). All I could offer was the following (based on what I'd seen / read on the net and in no particular order):
The frame should be as rigid as possible.
The design should be open source.
Any kit should be sourced from the UK.
There were a good few out there already.
They should have good reviews.
She came up with the MendelMax 1.5
We did like the Delta printers but thought for our first foray into the world of 3D printing, a Cartesian printer would be better / safer.
As it turns out the MM has a reasonable print area (l=200, w=200, h~150 mm) and runs for hours with little in the way of attention.
When first presented with the kit I / we questioned lots of things, however and in the fullness of time, most of the things we questioned now make very good sense.
So, the (very) rigid frame means it can be moved without anything going out of calibration.
Parts and mods can be found all over the net.
Any issues with the original kit (missing parts) were resolved quickly.
There were plenty of pictures and videos out there to assist us with the build.
I now have all the electronics for mine (cheap, eBay), the extrusions for the frame (Misumi Germany), the fastness (local Co), and I'm only still considering the smooth rods and linear bearings [1]. The .9 degree stepper motors are sitting in my shopping basket.
I'm going to make the actual extruder myself but using some direct drive parts bought from China (having a lathe helps with such things).
I hope to collect a floor mounted pillar drill soon and that, along with a printed jig should help me enlarge the (56, two sets) extrusion holes from 4 to 5mm diameter, ready for tapping to 6mm.
Cheers, T i m
More costly, but we bought an Ultimaker 2. It's a printer, it Just Works. Take STL file, load into software, set quality dial, save to SD card. Put SD card into printer, select file, press Print. Thassit. Oh, and wait somewhere between 10 mins and a couple of hours.
PLA is 30p/m, and usually an inch cube plastic widget comes out at some fraction of a metre. Changing PLA isn't quite to the level of changing cartridges in a regular printer (you have to pull out the fibre from the back of the machine, it helps with feeding/unfeeding but you still have to poke in into the feed tube), so you don't want to do it after every run but it doesn't require any special skills.
The thing I liked most is there is zero calibration. It could almost be a Windows printer - except it doesn't have driver hell like Windows printers ;-)
Theo
Is it also open source OOI? We actually wanted to build something (open source) so we could then fix it if / when we wanted.
;-)
Or presumably you can also print direct from a PC (if you wanted)?
I guess that depends on the density of the print? Ie, if you are printing 100% (density) and using .3mm nozzle and .3mm layers then assuming 1" to be 25mm that would be (83 x 25mm / layer, 83 layers?) more than 1m of filament?
Similar with the MM. It also needs to be done hot.
Similar with this MM. The X and Y axis positions are set from the home end-stop micro switches and are not critical (as long as the print job ends up on the bed ).
The Z axis is a bit more critical re setup but once set (and it takes about 5-10 mins to do with nothing more complicated that a strip of paper as a feeler gauge) seems to be pretty 'hands off'.
Ok, if you change the nozzle and the replacement is slightly longer / shorter then you may have to re-tweek the Z but we printed a micrometer mount for that so even that is pretty easy / quick now. ;-)
I can't say I've really experienced that myself (over many many years) but have with the much less common / popular alternatives (OSX / Linux). ;-)
Cheers, T i m
How about using a microwave :-)
It is, sort of:
Having previously had a RepRap that required endless fiddling, we realised was costing more in time than it saved in money. So we wanted something that worked out of the box. The files released mean we can repair it or fix bugs if we have to. Compared with most other equipment the software isn't terrible, so we haven't needed to go near it.
You can, but the little ATMega inside doesn't have a lot of RAM so the PC has to feed it gcode in real time. It's also a USB-serial thingy so not too quick. Octoprint supports it. It is possible to send gcode to save downloaded files to the SD to save pulling the card - I haven't tried that.
Yes. I imagine it's the same for any printer.
All this is done in the factory. You do have to level the bed when it comes out of the box, but there's a step-by-step guide on the LCD.
I haven't tried changing the nozzle; they were experimenting with a dual extruder Ultimaker 2 but it turned out not to be good enough, so they didn't go into production. Getting the spatial thing right so they didn't bump into the thing they just printed turned out to be trickier than expected.
Theo
Ok. Thanks for that.
Maybe then we were just lucky with the RAMPS / Marlin solution as since we first set it up we haven't touched it either. ;-)
Sure.
We often print directly to ours using USB and can't say we have had any real issues?
I've only played with that, not actually used it in earnest (yet). ;-)
You are supposed to be able to do that with Repetier Host but I haven't figured out how to yet? So that means if we are printing a long job, we generally stick the gcode on an SD card and print directly from the RAMPS.
Yes, we do that (with the paper / feeler gauge technique) and in so doing set the Z home position. Is yours automatic on the Z axis (after bed level calibration).
Mate bought the 'deluxe' kit that came with dual extruders and whilst both are mounted and wired up, we have not actually tried it with both as yet. *Personally* I just see it as a liability but have agreed with my mate that we will try it, if only the once. ;-)
It still amazes us to see it in action and how it deals with all that sort of thing. I bow to the folk who did all the programming, all the movement dynamics and path optimisation etc.
Cheers, T i m
You lot are wimps, we used to spray cadmium/tin! Then run it through the furnace. It was then put through the punch presses which created lot of dust. I do wonder how many birth and other defects we caused?
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