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Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

formlabs.com

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Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#41

Post by briguy »

samwillis wrote: post #7

It will be interesting to watch 3D Systems share price today. JP Morgan issued a statement yesterday that they thought Formlabs might pose a significant risk to them. https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:DDD Down 2% already in just 5 min!

DDD is in a great position in a exploding market. They spend a lot of money on R&D...they could acquire this company in a heartbeat as they did Z-Corp and Huntsman in the past. Innovative companies like this help the overall Rapid Prototyping market move forward....DDD and SSYS are the big fish with distribution, service, infrastructure and the the capital ready to make sensible acquisitions. It would be a different story if this was a mature market with slowing growth and new uses were not being found for the technology everyday. It is conceivable that the way this technology is moving forward, we will be printing Clothing, Houses, Body Parts, etc. So there is a lot of room in this market....this is just the very beginning (OR I should say, the "end of the beginning" as the tech has been around for 20 years and now finally hitting the mainstream).

Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#45

Post by jcampbell1 »

slrelevant wrote: post #31
replicatorblog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put together a small comparison chart in this post: http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/formlabs-creates-a-low-c...

Looking at the Replicator2 specs vs Formlabs. I see that Makerbot lists layer height and XY resolution as 100 microns, while Formlabs has layer height as 25 microns, but XY as 300 microns. Does the improvement in layer height matter much when the XY resolution isn't as accurate? What I'm basically wondering is are you only as good your least accurate spec?

I think you are comparing apples to oranges. The replicator is reporting the positioning accuracy of the gantry system, while Form labs is reporting something like the voxel size of the print laser.

Ask a question like, what is the smallest diameter vertical column that can be printed to 1 inch in height. The answer for form labs is probably like 1000 microns, and Makerbox it like 3000 microns.

Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#46

Post by maxerickson »

illinx wrote: post #33

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know anything about the 3D printing tech used by http://www.shapeways.com/ ? Limited materials are the one thing holding me back from picking up a desktop 3D printer, so I'd like to learn more about their tech and what might be holding it back on the desktop. Their material selection is seriously impressive. The Formlabs one looks promising and I love the design, but I just don't h…

The materials pages discuss the various processes they use:

http://www.shapeways.com/materials

A lot of the processes involve replacing a temporary binder.

Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#48

Post by chime »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29
jws wrote: post #2

The call to action link says: "Pre-Order on Kickstarter" They must have not gotten the "Kickstarter is not a store" memo. They appear to be ready to pull the trigger on their manufacturing partners, so this is sort of a "how big should we make the first run?" type of kickstarter rather than a "let's create something awesome". Details… • Stereolithography printer (laser, not extruder) • Much nicer than extruder style…

This might be a kind of dumb idea, but I would love it if somebody created a Kickstarter project to create a manufacturing and distribution plant for Kickstarter projects...(obviously, would require a huge investment for all of the machining equipment).

I don't think it would work in exactly the same way you are describing but there may be alternatives. Manufacturing equipment is very expensive and the only way to justify the cost is to keep it running daily, sometimes 24/7/365. The change parts for each unique product are also quite expensive (easily $10k+). If I want to open a KickManufacturing plant, I have to buy/maintain/service hundreds of different kinds of equipment which includes the cost of the hardware, software, and technicians. On top of that, each new product will barely have 10k - 100k units ordered if I'm lucky. After that the change parts are useless. The other problem with this is the manufacturing equipment that can do lots of different configurations is slower, error-prone, and more expensive than specialized equipment that does just one thing. So if one of the Kickstarter products does become a success and they want 100m units, you need to buy new equipment or source a better large-scale manufacturer. And worst of all, most of the equipment will be collecting dust 95% of the time unless someone has just the right Kickstarter project for them.

What most entrepreneurs spend their time between getting funded and beginning shipment is finding the right manufacturer who can allocate runtime on their lines. The manufacturers lose money when the lines aren't running. The entrepreneurs get delayed when the lines are busy. This is a very complex B2B market that has no current solution. If someone solves this problem, we can have significantly better fulfillment of Kickstarter orders.

Such a site would have manufacturers periodically uploading capacities and capabilities of their equipment, warehouse/distribution resources, and costs associated with each line/product-type by time/quality. The entrepreneurs would be able to book the best-fit manufacturer (be it in US, China, or Norway) and pay a reservation-fee to the manufacturer which sits in escrow pending successful contract. The reservation-fee would be high enough to deter fake orders and be credited towards the actual product order. The site could fund itself by collecting interest on the escrow or charging per new B2B relation.

Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#49

Post by ajross »

benphelps wrote: post #42

http://3dhomemade.blogspot.com/ Any relation between the two projects? The design is quite similar.

UV resin printers have been a popular research area in the DIY 3D printing community for the last year or two. There are a few more too. Most are based on DLP projectors with some hackery to remove the color filters (e.g. carefully snap off a hundred little pieces of glass from a rotating wheel) as I understand it, which makes them expensive and fragile for a individual. This is a situation where volume assembly of a complete device makes more sense than garage experimentation, so Formlabs' work looks promising to me.

Re: Formlabs: High Resolution 3D Printer

#50

Post by michaelbuckbee »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #29
jws wrote: post #2

The call to action link says: "Pre-Order on Kickstarter" They must have not gotten the "Kickstarter is not a store" memo. They appear to be ready to pull the trigger on their manufacturing partners, so this is sort of a "how big should we make the first run?" type of kickstarter rather than a "let's create something awesome". Details… • Stereolithography printer (laser, not extruder) • Much nicer than extruder style…

This might be a kind of dumb idea, but I would love it if somebody created a Kickstarter project to create a manufacturing and distribution plant for Kickstarter projects...(obviously, would require a huge investment for all of the machining equipment).

I think a first step would be a service (maybe even just run by Kickstarter) that would handle the printing and shipping of T-Shirts.

In every post-mortem of a Kickstarter project I hear the project owners lamenting how much more time and effort it took to handle sending rewards out than they had anticipated.

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