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Cakefool posted:Thanks for the explanation, that all makes sense. This is fantastic! I wish there was more information on how it works. It's obviously a projector, but it would be nice to know the exact process. I'm eagerly anticipating the kickstarter project and potentially plans available! I suppose the biggest issue would be that the resin used is quite specialised and likely to be expensive. I wonder if there's any way something like that resin can easily be formulated at low cost. It'd be a shame if 3D printer resin went the way of inkjet ink.
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Apr 4, 2011 21:18
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This thread is awesome. I'd love a 3D printer, but I'm too mobile and poor at the moment. Anyway, although I don't have a printer, I do have significant CAD skills (solidworks and Pro/E). I think it would be pretty interesting to design something for a 3D printer, so if anyone is wanting a model of anything, I'd be happy to put something together. I'd probably need some guidance in the ways of designing for a 3D printer, but I enjoy making challenging models in CAD and it'd be pretty fun to put something completely new together. If anyone has any requests, just shout!
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Apr 6, 2011 22:13
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kafkasgoldfish posted:Random bits I've gleaned: The concept of multiple resins seems interesting, but I'm not sure how it would work. I suppose the end game is being able to colour your part, or build a single piece out of two or more materials with different properties. The problem is that you'd have to mix your resin up together, and once it's mixed it seems quite unlikely that shining one wavelength of light would cause only one of the constituent parts to harden. It'd probably just end up with a partially cured part, or a bunch of little cured drops floating about, neither of which is desirable. You'd also have to find a very high range light source and some very effective filters. It seems unlikely to me that focussing the light is going to selectively cure a plane of the resin. For one thing, the light penetration is probably pretty low in the resin, so you'd have to focus within a few mm of the boundary. Even then, given that the resin probably cures because of some photon interaction, the parts that are in the plane of the unfocused light will still likely receive a big enough dose that they'll partially cure. You could probably do something like what you discussed though. I'd use a computer projector because it would have higher resolution and be controllable from a computer easily. I think the easiest way to do it would be to build one that sank down. Build a platform that sinks into the resin, place your projector on top. Project your layer, sink the platform so that the resin covers it all slightly, project another layer. Once your done, slowly lift the platform up again to retrieve your part. From his improvements, it seems the gains he makes are due to moving the actuated support platform less between projections. Edit: Can you show me any suppliers for this stuff? The only stuff I can find for sale is dental resin, which is probably too thick, and far, far too expensive (£80/40g). Given that there's no need for cleanliness, a syringe or any of the stuff that comes with dental grade products, surely industrial resin is a lot cheaper? Edit 2: It seems UV cured resin is a common product amongst surfers. http://www.surfinghardware.co.uk/Details.cfm?ProdID=1022 for instance is £22/litre. Pretty cheap! You'd need to modify a projector to be UV though - perhaps a UV LED light source would be the best way, although I don't know if that would give out the kind of wavelength this stuff cures at or not. leo_r fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Apr 7, 2011 |
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Apr 7, 2011 00:45
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kafkasgoldfish posted:Brain dump rebuttal I think you're right - a bottom curing system would be the way to go. The height of your part in a system like that would be only bounded by the height of your plate-lifting mechanism, so you'd need far less resin sitting around in a tank to build up tall pieces. My main concern would be that the resin would stick to the bottom of the tank. I suppose there's really two issues: the first is the previously discussed focusing one - if you focus your projector onto the building plane (which would be very slightly above the bottom of your tank), would bleed over curing occur? This would be a moot point if you could use a tank surface that the resin won't stick to. Unfortunately, I'd think finding a material that's both clear for light penetration and non-stick for epoxy would be pretty tricky. It's obviously a problem that the guy with the printer has solved, so it would be interesting to see how they've put it together. leo_r fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Apr 7, 2011 |
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Apr 7, 2011 08:49
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Hello! Now that I'm grown up and have a real job, I think it's time I give in to my long standing desire to have a 3D printer. The specific use case I have in mind (although I have a feeling once I have one I'll be printing left right and centre) is custom brackets - the kind of thing that joins together a pile of servos and electronics into one single thing. Making a robot chassis out of wood is always a horrendous process - being able to design something in CAD with all the correct mounting holes and hit print would be wonderful! I'm based in the UK, so if anyone else lives here hearing their experiences on shipping and local suppliers would be brilliant. I think £500 ($800) would be a reasonable expenditure. I can be flexible (having recently learnt that somebody I know puts that much up their nose every month, I'm feeling slightly more generous in budget), but something like a Replicator 2 would be too much. The printers I've identified so far as possibly suitable are: 1. RepRap Prusa Mendel. I like the ethos of RepRap, the community seems large, and if I wanted to I could extend it. It looks like a mostly-assembled kit comes in at £450-£500. I also like the fact it has a fairly large heritage behind it. If anyone has any recommended suppliers (UK/EU based preferred) I'd appreciate hearing about them. 2. Solidoodle. I've seen it mentioned a few times in this thread, although most recently for their poor shipping. 3. Printrbot. My principal concerns are: 1. Community - I've owned enough obscure devices to know that if you go with the flow you're much more likely to find the support you need. It's great saving $100 but if you're the only person with any technical knowledge who owns a device then when it breaks you're screwed. 2. Cheap filament - I think all 3 can use fairly generic ABS, but I may be wrong? 3. Not too involved. I'm perfectly capable of populating circuit boards, but I don't really want to. Assembling a kit is fine, but assembling from scratch seems too much like hard work. I'd love to hear of any experiences with the three (especially from people who've used more than one 3D printer). Currently I'm tending towards a Mendel Prusa, but if anyone thinks something else that I've not heard of (so much has happened in the 3D printing space in the last year!) would be worth investigating, please mention it. I know there's a lot of RepRap derivatives that might be worth investigating.
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Nov 28, 2012 20:14
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I just bought a Mendel kit from the RepRapPro guys (a company founded by the original reprap designers from Bath). The biggest advantage over any of the numerous kickstarter-funded projects is probably that they're in the UK. I'm looking forward to endless evenings of tweaking!
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Jan 6, 2013 20:54
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Talking of fiddly assembly processes, I'm currently 2/3 of the way through building a reprap huxley (from RepRapPro.com). It's actually (so far) been quite an enjoyable process. I quite like assembling things though, and I have enough of a stack of tools around to not have to buy any. The kit's pretty complete, which is good. So far (with almost all the mechanical stuff done) I haven't come across anything that's caused major delays. The big advantages for me in the UK is shipping (ie it took 2 days) and cost. So far I've been quite impressed with the thought that's gone into various assembly processes. Not quite ikea, but not nearly as bad as some things I've put together. It is quite a lengthy process though. I'm aware that calibration and printing might be an issue. That should come by the end of the week! I'm looking forward to entering the world of 3D printing, although the act of actually buying the thing seems to have made all my grand schemes which required a 3D printer to evaporate from my head. Time to dust off my Solidworks skills!
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Jan 28, 2013 23:12
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My RepRap is alive! After about 3 weeks of work (on and off - probably only 8 or 10 hours of actual work) I've finally got something which produces prints. They're not perfect - there seems to be some adjustment needed in the spacing between lines. While I wouldn't recommend going through the process I just went through to someone not familiar with building stuff or electronics, it was quite interesting and I feel like I know the thing intimately now. I can't speak for other RepRap derivatives, but the RepRapPro huxley is in somewhat active development still - there have been changes in the layout and parts in the last few months and I found a lot of the assembly process to be very well thought out. Other printers almost certainly do stuff better, but the original reprap guys do seem to be still working away at improving the design on a regular basis. They don't seem to be making many public announcements or maintaining a nice looking website though, which may mask that. What software do people recommend? The RepRap wiki tutorial I was following for assembly talks about Pronterface and Skeinforge, but Slic3r seems like a much nicer piece of software. leo_r fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 21:22
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I'm having lots of fun with my printer. It probably took about 3 weeks to assemble completely. Calibration seems to be quite good out the box, but I haven't dared to go right to the edge of the print bed yet. I have a feeling extremities will be more of an issue. Everything arrived neatly packed away in a box:  It prints!  The huxley isn't the most beautiful of printers...  I printed out the rocket shot glass as a test. My housemate suggested I finish it off, so I dived into Solidworks and produced my first truly original 3D print:  The spike on the top distorted a bit because it hadn't really cooled by the time the next layer was being put down. I think some fans or some more careful slicing might help with that - I'm going to grab some and see if I can print out a bracket. I used 0.5mm layer height for speed, which means it's all a bit messy. Currently I'm working on some OpenSCAD stuff, although I'm constantly cursing it. Programming geometry is OK as long as you don't start rotating the frames of reference. Unfortunately I didn't realise that when I started and spent quite a while making different components separately and then rotating and translating them into my main model, leading to really confusing coordinate systems. I still prefer Solidworks! It certainly is an interesting approach to modelling though, and once I've got a design more or less complete the customisable aspects of it will really shine. I think for most modelling though, normal CAD is a better bet. leo_r fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Feb 16, 2013 |
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Feb 16, 2013 18:08
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DarkHorse posted:This is pretty much the only reason I haven't gone out and bought a 3D printer by now. I'm an absolute whiz at parametric CAD modeling using SolidWorks, Pro/E, or CATIA, but my last foray into free CAD options made me tear my hair out. Things that should take seconds took forever, and the whole experience was terribly unintuitive. I've not used it for any major projects, but I think Alibre takes a similar approach to the major CAD packages in terms of design process. PTC (of Pro/E fame) seem to have moved away from Pro/E towards "Creo", and for a while were offering Pro/E Wildfire for free (at least for students, but I don't think they checked). I can't find that, but I did find Creo Elements for free. I'm downloading it now - I'll report back if it's at all useful. Altogether the state of open source CAD is fairly poor. I think the home 3D printer developments of the last few years have created a lot of pressure for better tools, but unfortunately these things take time. To some extent I think the problem is that there's a lot of ways to do 3D modelling, and the design paradigm that the market leading 3D CAD packages use isn't necessarily the one that the developers of open CAD software decide to adopt. Things like FreeCAD have had a lot of development time invested in them, but in my opinion are simply approaching from the wrong direction. A lot of the open and free CAD packages let you place 3D shapes like cubes or spheres. It looks good - 1 mouse click and there's a 3D model - but it isn't a particularly useful approach for more complex designs. The sketch driven parametric CAD model is far more maintainable than additive/subtractive 3D modelling, but that might not be obvious to someone without significant 3D CAD experience. What really needs to happen for open 3D CAD to take off is for a project to be founded and developed to a functional level by someone with a good vision.
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Feb 17, 2013 23:10
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There's a recent blog on acetone vapour treatment. It seems to provide a pretty smooth finish. If you've got the space and ventilation that might be a pretty interesting thing to try. I'd imagine doing bigger parts would be quite a pain though.
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Feb 26, 2013 20:38
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I've installed a big fan on my reprap and the difference is amazing. Tall thin things have resolution suddenly! I'm going to have to rethink the tolerances in the model I've been working on! I'm definitely starting to get my printer more honed in. The only annoyance is the time taken to print things. Because I only really have time to make 1 or 2 prints every day after work, I'm having to iterate over days and days. I've got a weekend at home coming up, so I'm hoping to get lots of prints done.
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Mar 6, 2013 22:32
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Orange_Lazarus posted:So... I'm assuming for every 2lbs of ABS spool I could make close to 2lbs of Lego? Approximately, yes. However, the tolerances used in LEGO production are way, way higher than any consumer 3D printer. Apparently up to 10 micrometers (compared to 50-100 for the highest resolution hobbyist printers). You'd probably have issues in joining pieces together. I've just put the project I've been working on for the last month on thingiverse. It was originally started for their competition (which closes tomorrow if anyone's interested), but schedules slipped and I only really finished it yesterday. It's a pair of customisable glasses which can say any word you like in the lenses. They should look like this (with your word of choice):  The hinge is a snap-together guy which I've done a (successful) test print of. Unfortunately when I've tried to print the whole frame my printer is not playing ball. If anyone's interested in making a pair anyway, I'd really appreciate it if you could give me some feedback. The script I used and everything is on the thingiverse page. Bonus points for rude words (pretty much why I made it in the first place...)
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Mar 7, 2013 23:50
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