3D Printing is really great for industrial designers who want to prototype products. My uncle is an industrial designer and I remember how costly it used to be for him to come up with a simple prototype. Today a $2500 printer can get one pretty far in a few hours, trully revolutionary. It gives a greater margin for experimentation, trial and error.
3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
71–80 of 104 posts
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#72Hi, I wrote the article. I am really enjoying the comments everyone has contributed. One major detail I left out was the amount of failed parts that came out of the professional machine prior to getting a good one. I was unaware of the reject rate at the time I wrote this. In addition, the production tool ended up having resin added and then sanded to cover up some of the imperfections on the "professional" print.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#73"The Stratasys printed part was printed with ABS material, 100% infill with a standard layer height on normal detail settings. Not having direct access to the machine I was not able to extract any real nitty gritty details on the overall print set up. For the Lulzbot print that I created I used HIPS material with a 0.5mm nozzle, 0.1mm layer height, 25% infill, 4 top and bottom solid layers, 45 mm/s print speed with s…
I had some of the same questions...my suspicion is basically two fold
1) the infill change may have been intended to make the print times comparable (he suggested both were about 18 hrs)
2) He may have been attempting to compare the default (or default-ish) settings of each machine
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#74I enjoyed this article, but perhaps not for the reasons the author hoped. This quote, "With some tweaks to my G code and use of a nozzle that is more suited for higher resolution prints I am confident that I could produce a part that would be very close to the quality of the Stratasys produced part." really summed it up. It sums to "I can tweak my setup and get this part to be good enough relative to the expensive ma…
Welcome to the wonderful world of quality control :) Making something is easy, making something with a high repeat accuracy and very low fail percentage is super hard. I learned this the hard way myself with an IO expander for the Atari ST that I designed. I needed it to drive the lathe/mill controller, the ST simply had too little IO capacity so with a bunch of decoders and latches I was able to drive a much larger…
when I teach innovation classes we talk about the difference in mindset between making 1, making 10, and making 100 of something (and obviously this would scale to 1000+ but that is kind of beyond a lot of students). Until you have experiences with scaling manufacturing you have no clue.
I used to do consulting work on this (my background is in manufacturing). Typically I would come into a company at the prototype stage and work with them to redesign the prototype to make it manufacturable...I loved doing it but wow does that mindset have to change about what can be accomplished. There was an article on HN a while back about why you can't manufacture like Apple that I really should have saved, it makes this point beautifully.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#75No mention at all of the strength/rigidity/hardness of the jigs. The professionally printed one was made from ABS, which is a harder plastic than HIPS. It is also possible that the professional machine bonds the plastic filament to the workpiece better. The best way to test this would be destructively. Of course, if the jig is just going to be used for a short period of time, structural integrity doesn't matter. And…
Also missing from the discussion are tolerances. If the Stratasys is able to print meeting high significantly higher design tolerances, that alone could justify the price tag. Certainly in other areas of manufacturing, adding zeros to the accuracy/repeatability of a system often adds zeros directly to the price tag. If you can get a print hot off the printer and immediately say "LGTM" without further ado, that may ju…
Underrated comment here. The same exact part can cost $20 or $2,000 to produce depending on tolerances!
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the wonderful world of quality control :) Making something is easy, making something with a high repeat accuracy and very low fail percentage is super hard. I learned this the hard way myself with an IO expander for the Atari ST that I designed. I needed it to drive the lathe/mill controller, the ST simply had too little IO capacity so with a bunch of decoders and latches I was able to drive a much larger…
I know a session musician who played on major hits I wont mention the artist he mentioned who had 97 separate vocal tracks in protools on one Hit :-)
Sometimes you have to work a bit at it to get it right ;)
Must be a heck of a live performance. Autotune ftw.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are there any 3D printers that integrate a milling machine? No, and there likely never will be. Why would you wait for hours to then still have to mill down your final product when all the advantages of 3D printing are then lost and all the advantages of milling are lost? The advantages of 3D printing are that as an additive process it will work in many environments where a subtractive process would not, the advant…
I was thinking of smooth curves. Judging from the photos, even the expensive print has a voxelized appearance. I've certainly seen that in the one 3D print I've handled too. So my idea was to print slightly oversize, then mill and polish for perfect curves.
Don't people often just use acetone or another solvent to smooth the surface of chunky prints (outdoors, I hope)? How effective that would be would vary depending on the plastic, but it seems easier than milling (if not especially precise).
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the wonderful world of quality control :) Making something is easy, making something with a high repeat accuracy and very low fail percentage is super hard. I learned this the hard way myself with an IO expander for the Atari ST that I designed. I needed it to drive the lathe/mill controller, the ST simply had too little IO capacity so with a bunch of decoders and latches I was able to drive a much larger…
when I teach innovation classes we talk about the difference in mindset between making 1, making 10, and making 100 of something (and obviously this would scale to 1000+ but that is kind of beyond a lot of students). Until you have experiences with scaling manufacturing you have no clue. I used to do consulting work on this (my background is in manufacturing). Typically I would come into a company at the prototype st…
This is a key component in why hardware start-ups are hard. Proof of concept: dead easy, as long as physics does not make your product impossible. Prototype: a little harder. 0-series: already quite hard (that's roughly what the story above was about). Mass manufacturing: super hard.
It's also why manufacturing samples should never be taken as indicative of what a plant will actually put out and you still need to sample the actual product to determine if quality is acceptable or not.
Lots of companies doing business with third world producers have found this out the hard way. (And then there is malicious substitution as well to content with.)
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#79From the article: "One defect I observed on the Lulzbot printed part was the blade portion of the tool had a split in it from not bonding correctly. This was most likely a cause of pushing the 0.5mm nozzle to its limits in terms of layer height but a little glue and some pressure would fix this split no problem." Er, that's called a "reject" in manufacturing. This is the basic problem with low-end filament-type 3D pr…
And there's considerable thermal expansion, and thus shrinkage, in the material
That crack is clearly due to cooling and shrinkage pulling the layers apart at the edges. (The effect is more pronounced at the ends. Large parts generally curl upwards at the edges, like cooked pepperoni, just less so.) The fact the author immediately doesn't know this marks him as something of a noob. Also, he should infill the crack with extruded melt from the print head, not just clamp and glue it. Otherwise, he will be loading the part with bending stresses. (This is also a noob level lesson.)
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even an engineer, and I have made one. But, making a 3D printer by yourself from ground up (or assembling one with the parts bought from china etc.) takes a lot of time. I only paid attention at my spare times, so it took my months. But I must say that, it is a very satisfying hobby. I strongly recommend it :) But if you want to buy one, you can find very nice 3D printers at $250 - $300 range from aliexpress…
No, I meant using a 3d printer to build cool stuff.
As a start you can just go to Thingiverse to search for a model that fills your need and send it to the printer. That would take you all of a couple of minutes. Per try, until it comes out ok.
If you want to try your hand at 3d modelling then you'll probably download Sketchup as a start and noodle around while watching youtube tutorials on the side. In about 8h you'll feel confident enough to actually model something meaningful. After ~40h you'll be able to knock together a model quite proficiently.
After you'll have gotten tired of Skethub producing broken STLs and not allowing you to change your mind after modelling a thing, you'd move on to one of the real CAD software package, like Solidworks or Fusion 360 (which is great for beginners, btw). That rabbithole goes exactly as deep as you've got time for :)
Fiddling with the printing itself will take a bit of setup time before each print and then a lengthy wait (hours to days) to get the result, or see it fail in some new and unfunny way. It's not really all that difficult, to be honest, just takes some time to develop an intuition about what's likely to fail.