Topic awaiting preservation: 3D printing

So who's played with 3d-printing yet?

There are a few services - send in your design, receive the object back a couple of days later,
and maker bot industries has sold about 6000 makerbots...

I'm still waiting for somebody to show up with a laser cutter locally... building a CNC right now, fairly sturdy beast,
but it's sucking up all my fun cash... (though she's still pretty reasonably priced around a kilo euro and we're having a lot of fun
learning what not to do).

But damn, this stuff is hot... and a whole new level of copyright infringement waiting to happen.

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Not done anything 3D printing-wise myself TP but your post has had me reading quite a bit on the state of the process to-day. Such a wide scope of applications for this process it looks to be remarkable.
Some linkage:
Transplant jaw made by 3D printer
Could 3D printing end our throwaway culture?
3D Printer Build Week: Day One



Happy V day Lovers

I would probably burn one out in the first month. So many things in my head that I want to make, but I have also no real fabrication skills or real hardware. Even the ability to print custom gears would keep me busy for a very long time.

I can't help but wonder how much a problem, or limitation, gravity is with such a 3d printer.

with the current 'fused deposit' generation, gravity is quite the bitch - basically, you can't print decent overhangs without some filler material that you remove later on.

The big commercial 'powder' printers of course don't suffer from gravity at all.


Thingiverse has some amazing designs to download and tweak already..

I'm gonna learn '123D' this weekend... seems to me to be the photoshop of grown ups ^^

There's a guy in my town that does this, and he ended up working for Makerbot after he threw a Hackerspace together in our town. When I knew him at the Hackerspace, he was throwing together RepRap 3D printers, and building RepStraps and reviewing a book on how to build a Router (no not that kind of router).

He's now their web developer. He also made the 3D canvas which displays uploaded models on the site Thingiverse.

I made a video of Tony when we were active in the local Hackerspace.

All of these 3d Printers run on something called gcode which is the instructions that are used to move the router head / printer head around.

We also did some 3D scanning using various pre-canned software packages and split lasers while we were there too. But Tony, he took it to the next level. He designed and built a 3d printable laser scanner called spinscan which spins an object around to scan it into a file.

I was pretty blown away by all this; as Tony stated, it's the closest thing any of us have to transportation.

If you want to see some photos from the days back at the hackerspace, enjoy my flicker photo stream, and if you want to see what Tony is up to these days, check out his flickr photostream.



- AIM: MASKKKK

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warjournal, gravity is no problem so long as you have a printer with two heads on it and have some water disolvable material.

You make sure that the disolvable stuff is printed where the overhangs are and then when the model is done printing you soak it in water until that stuff disappears, and wha-la you got the overhang printed.

(Edited by Maskkkk on 03-01-2012 17:08)

It took me a minute, but I think I understand, Mask. One print head to print the actual object. Then other print head with water dissolveable to print the supports. Then soak. Yes?
Maybe, just maybe, I will put back on my wish list.

That's right! But as far as I know there's only one 3D Printer that supports that right now, and that's the Makerbot Replicator which can print things as big as a loaf of bread!

But I think it's also like the most expensive one that there is...

but if you only have one extruding head you can also swap out the plastic filament and put another one in real fast to change filaments, but it's probably not the best way to do that...

(Edited by Maskkkk on 03-01-2012 23:01)

I was looking into making some glasses frames via Shapeways. Some annoying limitations ATM, but probably not too far from now it will be crazy simple.