I remember a few years ago Wired magazine seemed to have a hard-on for personal (sometimes homemade) 3D printers, but the technology was basically just a nozzle that squirted out melted plastic. It seemed to me that for just a few thousand dollars and many hours of my time, I could be producing plastic army men that looked almost as good as the plastic army men you can buy a bag of in Toys R Us for 99 cents. Amazing! Let’s just say I didn’t share their enthusiasm. But the technology is really advancing by leaps and bounds, and it does seem like these machines will have a groundbreaking effect in the near future.
I think those who would be enthusiastic about it are the people who have specific needs. The item that I wanted to cast in concrete was because I needed more strength and design flexibility than wood and I’d looked at creating a mold to create the specific item. BUT, it would be very heavy. If I could print if from ABS plastic, it would perform the same services, but be quicker to create and much lighter. (My ideal for this would be resin, but the local shop is insanely expensive to use for short run products)
Also, I have a desire for a ‘clip’ to hold some wood pieces at a specific angle. I’d been looking at how to put it together out of metal (e.g. welded pieces). That is overkill for the strength, but could fill the need. Now, I could buy a welder, learn how to use it, or contract this out. The project has stalled out over the decision.
So, there are probably the geek squad types who just like the ‘neat factor’ of it.
Then there are going to be artists who use it as a medium.
Then there are people who see the ability to fabricate with materials that in the past were limited because you had to contract them out to specialized shops.
I’m going to see if I can break it into components to be assembled using OpenSCAD. If I can reach a point where I can render it on-screen and it looks the way I want, then I’ll probably order the printer. If the 3D design packages are too difficult to use, then the printer would be a waste of money for me.
Stupid question: but I’ve always wondered why this process is called printing.
Who do you think has the best motor/print head configuration right now if I’d like quality prints but also need a reliable printer?
I don’t if it is exactly this, but it works something like the process of dot matrix printing. The early development of the software for the new systems would actually print the 2D layers of a 3D model until the mechanical device was perfected. In addition, a much earlier form of this process would create multiple layers printed on plastic or paper that were laminated together.
Honestly, I’ve only had direct hands-on experience with the Makerbot MK7 print head, which works reliably enough (though it’s heavy and has a cheap fan). I expect the MK8 in the Makerbot Replicator works at least as well. I don’t have any personal experience with any of the other commercial printer heads yet. The printer I’m building at home is a custom Rostock-based design using a mini J-head and a direct-drive filament drive mechanism I’m designing from scratch. It does seem to me that direct drive is a better option than a geared drive head from the point of view of reliability, although you need to use 1.75mm filament and a decently powerful motor to do direct drive.
Print quality in my experience has a lot more to do with the software you use and the rigidity of your Cartesian platform - the Makerbot Thing-O-Matic as shipped had terrible rigidity and needed a lot of modification before it printed well enough for me, although it does look like the Makerbot Replicator has fixed most of those design flaws.
I’ve wondered if the days of buying figurines for table top games may be numbered. Instead, you’d go online and buy a download for a 3D printer and print out figurines as needed. It may be possible to include a paint job on them in the printing process. Sort of takes the fun out of it.
Some of the manufacturers of figurines are already worried about this.
Not long ago someone designed some models for use when playing Warhammer 40K. They weren’t identical to any of the figurines already in the game, but were in the same style. In addition to printing them out, he uploaded the 3D files to the Thingiverse website. The publisher of WH40K promptly filed legal action and got the Thingiverse site to remove the files. Not that will stop this kind of thing - the Pirate Bay site already has a category listing for 3D object files.
Does anyone else see the implications of human copying, here? I could make a copy of myself to do everything while I sit at home playing video games all day! Well, or maybe we could split duties down the middle (since a copy of myself would also be as lazy as I am). Still, it’d be awesome to work part-time for full-time wages. All I’d have to worry about is feeding my other self! Well, that and the risk she’d clock me and assume my life for her own. 
Also, maybe someday we can print out and implant a good kidney for people in renal failure! :eek:
I don’t think that linked video is accurate. They show them scanning the wrench and then printing it. I don’t think it would be possible to have a functioning wrench just from scanning it. The scan wouldn’t be able to tell how the sliding mechanism works. A scan-to-print process would produce a solid replica of the original item, but wouldn’t be able to reproduce the moving parts.
Likely they printed a wrench from a CAD drawing they have where the components are individually modeled. Regardless, still it’s pretty impressive.
Both are still frequently used. The liquid based approach is known as stereolithography (video) and is generated by curing layers of resin to form the full part. It has one of the finest resolutions (i.e. thickness of layers–affecting surface roughness) of any of the additive manufacturing technologies. The problem is it’s not self supporting, because it’s liquid, so you may need to include some additional structure to break out later.
The powder based, as someone else mentioned is known as selective laser sintering (SLS) (video; she’s pretty easy on the eyes). This is where a laser fuses layers of powder together to form the complete part. Since it’s a solid powder, it’s self supporting, meaning you can generate assemblies without additional temporary support structure. Also, the material’s pretty strong, so you can use it in lab tests much more easily than with weaker materials. It does have a rough, powdery texture though.
I’ve found that the world seems hellbent on refering to all types of additive manufacturing as “3D printing” whereas at my company we just refer to 3D printing as the cheaper spin-off of fused deposition modeling (FDM). FDM (video) works by extruding melted plastic through a nozzle to build the part layer by layer. Whereas the FDM machines are pretty expensive, the 3D printers (just cheaper versions of FDM machines, essentially) are relatively inexpensive.
All the different types of rapid prototying/additive manufacturing are used pretty regularly, depending on the customers’ needs. No technology has replaced the other at this point. They all have their advantages and disadvantages.
I see a revolutionary technology, fortunes made and fortunes lost, and a chance to finally get a life size model of my skull.
What is so cool about 3D printing is that it has brought industrialization full circle. We have gone from industrialization that created a mass produced world filled with identical and disposable crap to a world in which each of us will have to power to hand craft unique individual items. I predict that as with most technological revolutions, this one will be used to produce porn.
I’d always thought the ideal first application of this technology was custom dildo manufacture.
And that doesn’t make you smile!? Surely you have a heart of stone >:[
IANAE (I am not an engineer), but my take on this is that they lay down thin layers of the powder, and selectively add the resin to harden it. When they come to a point where the parts almost but don’t quite touch, they simply add powder with no resin. So when they come to the thumb-screw used to adjust the wrench’s jaws, there’s a little threaded cylinder of loose powder around the bits that have resin to form the screw itself. This keeps the bits from sticking together, and when the powder was blown off after it came out of the printer, everything moves as desired.
But I suspect that they did have to disassemble the original wrench to be able to scan all the parts accurately. Otherwise, the scanning process would have had to been able to scan through the frame of the wrench to find the shape of the hidden part of the moveable jaw.
Huh. I thought that was strictly in the realm of science fiction.
Like in Eureka when they used a 3-D bio-printer to create a new body for Holly.
I had no idea we were already doing research into printing living tissue.