Like one of the commenters below, I recommend using a service for 3D printing. The reasoning is that for a couple of bucks (for a 4cm x 4cm x 4cm / 2"x2"x2" part), the print quality will be _much_ better than anything you can reasonably make at home. I've been able to print sub-millimeter-thickness gaskets for example. The bigger parts I make look like they're injection-molded (no layer marks, etc). Plus, I get a huge variety of materials (like metals, silicone, ceramics). I personally have used https://craftcloud3d.com/ (finds the cheapest pricing across a multitude of vendors and materials) and https://www.jawstec.com/ (one of the vendors that pops up often on craftcloud for MJF). Not affiliated with them in any way, just a very happy customer.
Things I would like to 3D print
111–120 of 146 posts
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#112While 3d printing is great a few notes from my experience.
1. 3d printers are not very good for high dimensional accuracy. 2. A set of reamers is very helpful for dimensioning holes. Works much better than standard drill bits. 3. I find the smell and fragility of SLA material so problematic I never use my SLA printer. 4. Larger nozzle size/layer height has a HUGE impact on print time at the cost of resolution. 5. Since I also do CNC and need CAM investing in learning fusion360 was well worth it. I can design and print pretty quickly now. 6. If you don't like to tinker get a printer that has auto bed leveling. 7. Klipper is very worth investing in 8. Since your board mosfet can fail closed you need to be around and monitor your printer. Most systems have thermal runaway protection but if a mosfet fails closed fire is possible.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad got one of the original Makerbot printers back ~2009. It was expensive, I'm pretty sure in the thousands. And it sucked . Sometimes you could get it to print right, but most of the time it screwed everything up to the point where it wasn't useful for anything. Every print was a roll of the dice. Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, p…
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake in 2010. It sucked. I had to replace a lot on it to get it to work, and the best thing it ever did was print the parts for my current printer. I have since given it away.
If it's any consolation, we had the Makerbot Replicator which I'm pretty sure was the slightly "higher end" version and it probably didn't work any better than the Cupcake.
I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height.
The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't used Fusion360, but I have to say the screenshots of the UI make it look appealing and pretty straight forward (more so than say Solidworks). My assumption is that it and other standard CAD packages would have a greater learning curve for a programmer who mostly wants to print simple but custom objects. Granted, I have a background in non-CAD 3D, but OpenSCAD was incredibly fast for me to pick up not just b…
Fusion 360 is pretty easy and fun to learn. I became productive in it within just a couple hours, and used it to print some things for some house projects. Just my $0.02.
Nice. I'll have to give it a try!
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#115Funny story. I bought a printer for my kids this year. An Anycubic Mega Zero with a magnetic base. It stays pretty calibrated but I have struggled with base adhesion once a few prints have been through it. IPA and abrasives have not fixed it...maybe I will get around to some other things...there have been a few random failures, but not many. We printed a few novelties items that came out OK. The real learning curve i…
I had a similar experience where my first few prints worked great, and then had bed adhesion trouble. It turned out the filament had absorbed water from the air, and drying out the filament solved it.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#116Cool things to print are minimal surface structures. Cody at the action lab on youtube has a cool video on them.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#117[deleted]
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#118Do not hesitate. It's an enjoyable hobby.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake in 2010. It sucked. I had to replace a lot on it to get it to work, and the best thing it ever did was print the parts for my current printer. I have since given it away.
If it's any consolation, we had the Makerbot Replicator which I'm pretty sure was the slightly "higher end" version and it probably didn't work any better than the Cupcake. I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even ob…
The late-model Chinese printers you see today (which are overwhelmingly duplicates of the Ender 3) are the beneficiaries of lots of community development over the last ten years - this has the added benefit of making cheap and easy printers for new users to get into.
From the Cupcake to now:
1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving.
2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape)
3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews.
I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.
Re: Things I would like to 3D print
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thangs is super useful, as you can search by geometry. Sort of like a reverse image search. Works really well and is just amazing to me.
I've never actually understood the use case for that personally. What do you reverse model search?
It‘a most often used as an auto-complete - of sorts.
For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.
But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.
Hopefully that makes more sense.
In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.