3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
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3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
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Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#2If his conclusion were true companies like Shapeways would only use cheap hobby printers. But ofcourse it is not.
Reliability, support, accuracy, all lacking with hobby printers.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#3It would have been nicer to have seen a comparison using the same material as well as a series of parts designed to test for specific issues in 3D printing.
Add to this printing 100 copies of each part and we might have ended up with a useful set of data points.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#4No 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 the hobbyist machines are just going to get better as technology improves.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#5From 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 printers - weak layer bonding. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which never works well. And there's considerable thermal expansion, and thus shrinkage, in the material, which produces internal stresses between layers. That's where things crack.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#6It would have been nicer to have seen a comparison using the same material as well as a series of parts designed to test for specific issues in 3D printing. Add to this printing 100 copies of each part and we might have ended up with a useful set of data points.
"It would have been nicer if you ran an experiment to assuage my personal interest, but I didn't write you a check for $50,000 to do so." FTFY.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#7I 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 machine." and that is great. What is missing is it is every friggin' part. Seriously, all of the $2,000 printers have quirks that hit based on part geometry, especially in ABS. Part too long? need to add hold down tabs to prevent warping. Too many overhangs? extra supports. Too long a tool travel? Up the hotend temperature so that the extruded material doesn't cool down to much.
You can make great parts but every machine is different, and every part you make has a slightly different requirements. "Real" manufacturing tools are all about the repeatability and setup. Pretty much any machining center can take a gcode file, look at it, and adjust itself to make the best possible rendition, or warn you if it can't do so and meet its advertised tolerances. A hobby machine you print it, you tweak the parameters, you print it again, maybe you tweak the gcode a bit, and finally you print a really nice part.
What gets you repeatability? measuring. There are so many things that you can measure and hobby machines don't. Who puts glass slides (accurate to a tenth of a micron) providing position feedback on the x, y, and z stages on a hobby machine? Nobody, the slides and readers cost $1K just by themselves. There has been some motion toward monitoring the feed of the filament to give a "stripped filament" warning, but who measures the actual flow? the temperature of the melt chamber and feed path?
I really enjoy my 3D printer, I'm printing out a damper for a meat smoker as I write this, its going to be glorious, but its also the 3rd time I've printed this particular part to tune it up. We'll see how it works on the smoker.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#8No 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 just mean your application isn't very demanding.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#9The professional printer printed out almost 4x the amount of material in the same time (100% infill vs 25%). If it had the same settings for hollow infill, it likely would have been much, much faster.
Re: 3D Printer Comparison: $200,000 vs. $2500
#10This is an unfair comparison.. Having used a Stratasys Objet of around a similar price point, the amount of detail you can get is incredible -- down to fractions of a millimeter.
Sure, for the prints that were pictured in the comparison, either can do relatively well, but the point of higher end printers is for higher resolution prints, different materials, shapes of the print, etc. To ignore all of those use cases and focus on a generic print that a hobbyist would make, of course a hobbyist printer would suffice!