How far away are we from ordering replacement parts from Companies with 3D printers?

Factual Questions
1

It seems like 3D printers could be the answer to getting replacement parts made. There’s so many items today that have small plastic gears or other parts that the manufacturers aren’t interested in providing.

Ink Jet printers are an excellent example. I’ve tore down several at work and found one small gear or lever broken. In some cases I can use one broken printer as a parts source to fix several others. Ordering the parts isn’t an option.

The same goes for lots of small appliances too. A tiny gear in a mixer can’t be purchased to make the repair.

I’ve been cheated several times on Ebay buying Vintage Nelson Dial A Rain sprinklers. They are heavy duty, but have this plastic, heart shaped disk that breaks. The sprinkler is a giant door stop without that heart shaped disk. Several Ebay buyers misrepresented the sprinklers as “working”. It cost more to send the sprinkler back then it was worth. I haven’t thrown them out because I’m hoping someday I can get that disk made with a 3D printer.

you can see the red plastic disk on this one. It’s heart shape and is critical for operation.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/70s-vtg-Nelson-Dial-a-Rain-automatic-oscillating-Lawn-Sprinkler-/261244542464

Will we soon see the day that Companies with 3D printers can supply the parts? By simply sending them the broken part, they scan it and print? They probably would have to clean up the scan where the part is broken first. The break doesn’t need to be reproduced. :wink:

2

Fairly far away, given the fact that the structure of “printed” parts is vastly different than most traditionally manufactured parts, more so with the various laser sintered methods. In other words, critical parts won’t be able to be replaced with inferior parts, and non critical parts the cost of making a single part will be ridiculously expensive.

3

I wondered if the plastic in those 3d printers was tough enough. Typically gears in printers or appliances are a tough nylon. That heart shaped disk in the Nelson sprinklers is more of a standard hard plastic.

I wouldn’t have thought printing a part was time consuming. Isn’t the 3d printing technology marketed as quick and simple? Scan whatever you want to reproduce and print?

The main problem is touching up the scan. A broken tooth on a gear for example would require touching up the scan. The clone tool in Photoshop could replicate the missing gear tooth accurately. You’d just clone using one of the undamaged teeth as a template.

4

In professional 3D-Printer setups, the material is pretty tough.

Here’s something from 2011: Urbee: The world's first 'printed' car rolling off the 3D printing presses... | Daily Mail Online

You figure if they can print a car that can last 30 years, then the material is ready for primetime.

The stuff you can print with a $500 3D-Printer are not going to be that durable. Yet. But judging from the pace of development in this area, I think it would be foolish to bet against this technology.

5

In at least one case, right now.

6

The problems are manyfold.

Even very cheap apparently trivial parts (for instance gears on a printer) are manufactured to tolerances that are simply out of reach of 3D printers. It is astounding just how good a mass produced part can be - simply because the costs of design and tooling are amortised over an almost incomprehensible number made. It isn’t just simple dimensions that matter, surface roughness is critical, and is something 3D printers struggle with.

Next, as noted above, the materials are not the same. A 3D printer needs materials that match the printing process. Your simple gear is made of nylon, or even higher spec plastics because they have the right mix of mechanical properties - such as friction - surface toughness - a number of different metrics of strength - possibly heat and chemical resistance.

You need to consider that the component you want to replace broke for a reason. Typically that it was stressed to the point where it wore out or broke earlier than the rest of the components in the device. This tells you that even when it was made of the preferred material, and manufactured to better tolerances than you can manage, it broke.

3D printer materials will get better, but at the same time the materials used to manufacture the original parts will be developed further. The world of polymers and plastics is very complex, and astounding things can be done. A simple part from a device could be made of a huge range of possible plastics, some of which have properties that you would not even guess were possible.

Also, the design and manufacturing of a plastic part takes into account the material properties during the manufacturing process. Typical moulded parts will have had the entire fluid flow and heat flow of the moulding process modelled, this is done for trivial things - like ensuring the mould actually fills, and there are no voids, to understanding the heat flow a it relates to part shrinkage, and tolerances, and can include control of the internal structure of the parts when when internal stresses and orientation needs to be understood and controlled. This is why an apparently trivial part can be vastly more sophisticated than it appears, and why it can often provide mechanical capabilities vastly more stringent than you might imagine.

7

Thanks. I didn’t realize the problem was so complex.

I guess for the time being we’re still stuck throwing away good equipment for lack of parts.

8

Where I work, we are already using a 3D printer to make replacement parts for some of our production equipment. It requires an engineer to take the original part, measure it very carefully to build a 3D model of the original part, then modify the model to take into account the physical properties and mechanical limitations of the 3D printing process. Most of what we’ve done is for housings and knobs, things that don’t need to be terrifically strong or precisely shaped. I do have a 3D-printed gearbox on my home 3D printer that has run for hundreds of hours without breaking, which actually surprises me since the printed gears are nowhere near as precise or strong as injection-molded or machined gears would be.

9

Slight hijack: My wife had a tooth cap manufactured by a 3-D sculptor. It has to be made to extremely high tolerance (although I think the dentist in the end did fine tune it) and also be extremely tough (say to chomp on almonds). The dentist placed some sort of probe into her mouth (so there was no stage of making a mold) and scanned away. Then she and I went into a nearby office where the machine was and we watched it, with a bunch of machine tools, drills and files, create the cap from a solid block of metal. That was several years ago and the cap is till good.

10

More importantly, when will 3D printers start coming with a disc of replacement part files?

11

Not sure if you actually read the OP, but for what he’s talking about, we’re already there. I can’t find the news article I read, but it was within the last year and was specifically about some folks who couldn’t get replacement parts for some gadget, and they were able to order them fairly cheaply from a 3-D print shop.

12

Apparently I wasn’t the first to think of making broken parts.

I’m going to look into molding. I might be able to make that heart shaped disk for my sprinklers. It’s a simple enough shape. I think Hobby Lobby has those kits.

13

Also is strength really an issue if they’re already powerful enough to print teeth and gun barrels?

14

The tooth mentioned above was carved out of a block of metal. That’s not 3D printer technology.

The printed gun barrel tends to break after a few shots.

However, 3D printed parts are strong enough for many mechanical purposes now. As I mentioned above I have a gearbox on my printer with 3D-printed gears. They probably won’t last as long as metal gears would, but they have already run for several hundred hours of use without breaking.

15

It’s going to be harder than you think to use molding materials from Hobby Lobby to make something useful, at least the way I think you’re thinking of. You’d need to make a silicone or latex mold of the item, and then you’d fill that mold with self-hardening plastic, and have a part. They do have, or should probably have, everything you’d need to do that, but (and I say this from personal experience) you’re going to have a lot of trial-and-error ahead of you.

I would suggest that, instead, you get some Sculpey Clay and make a few attempts at crafting a piece that works. This will, in the end, be much cheaper… you’ll only have to try, oh, a dozen or so times before you end up with something useable. I won’t vouch for its durability, however; the stuff is fairly tough but small imperfections will lead to big problems later on.

OR; depending on how good you are at carving, you might even make a replacement part from wood. Definitely the cheapest option, and shouldn’t be too hard if you have the right tools.

But plastic molding is difficult and expensive, relatively speaking. I used to use mold-making supplies for candle-making, and also made some small plastic molded items with an eye towards making cheap costume jewelry and miniatures for gaming. It ended up being much more difficult to make plastic (worth selling) than I thought, and would have required some expensive equipment (vacuum pump, temperature controlled ovens, etc etc) to produce top quality items. So I played with the stuff for a while and gave up. Learned a lot tho, may pick it up again later as a hobby.

If this is what you end up doing, you’ll need… mold-making material, a box to pour that material in while holding your original item in place, release agent so your item doesn’t stick, the actual plastic you’re making your item out of… then, your newly-made item will have imperfections due to the fact it was broken in your original cast. You’ll have to correct those, then make a NEW mold from it, then make the new part from that. Oh, and there’s also the issue of shrinkage… your new part will be ever-so-slightly smaller than the original!

Start with Sculpey.

16

I appreciate the advise. I may have to rethink my plan. Thanks

17

Don’t get me wrong… it was fun, making stuff out of plastic, and I’d do it again if I had money to burn and time for another hobby. I’d guesstimate… I dunno, $50 or so for everything you’d need, maybe more, probably not much less, assuming you read up before you start (you-tube videos are good) and buy everything in the store. And if your first try works as planned.

It could end up being a fun hobby, who knows. Just don’t expect it to be cheap to start.

18

Did you check my link on how they printed a car? This is not the same setup you are going to have at home, but it does show that 3D printing can produce some pretty tough stuff if you are willing to spend the money.

It’s entirely reasonable to believe that these materials will continue to improve, especially now that there is actually a real mass market, even if it’s a hobby mass market.

19

Sadly they hardly printed a car. They printed some of the body panels. The car itself is aluminium. Note the pic at the bottom of the page here. The body has zero crash protection, and is little more than a lightweight faring around a metal go-cart chassis.

There is a vastly better example of a 3D printed car. :slight_smile:

20

On the other hand, the big end of town does have some successes. Laser sintered titanium looks good if you want to build something insane.