3D printers - Any of you guys have them?

Ben Heck makes his own 3d printers...



...but i'm into 4d printers...

 
JaegerIT said:
i wonder if in the near future say you want to build a small house, then you rent a giant printer and you buy a material "catridge" and you print your whole house, would be pretty neat and practical
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Then the sunlight and rain will dissolve it and you have to 3D print a new one.

I saw on NHK World, an innovative old Japanese guy developed a way to take scrap 2x4's and cut them in a special way that lets you use them like building blocks to make a house and the special cuts prevents outside moisture from getting inside.
 
badascan said:
Ben Heck makes his own 3d printers...



...but i'm into 4d printers...

Click to expand...



Ben Heck is now making pinball machines. The first one that they have released is getting good reviews and they are releasing them on schedule and full working code unlike JJP and Stern, the bigger companies. He and his partner probably can make it work but working as a boutique (small number) manufacture will always be kind of an uphill battle due to not having scale working for you. Stern may at some point manufacture other companies pinball machine on a subcontracted business to keep the plant always busy.

3d printing is neat but I have been more impressed with what you can do with CNC machines. It is older technology but much more established and you can work with more durable and cheaper materials than plastic. 3d printing has all the press but CNC machines have been doing most of this stuff cheaper and better for a long time. It doesn't have to be a lathe,too. There are laser CNC machines that can do pretty fine work and engraving. One guy I know put together a civil war gatling gun with his laser cutting machine. The funny thing though was that it is super precise but the reason why his manufacturing plant had one was just because they could cut out rake handles faster than anything else. They didn't really care that it was super precise.
 
3D printed retail items won't take off till the porn industry creates a standard model for it. That's how things work with technology
 
Prefect said:
Ben Heck is now making pinball machines. The first one that they have released is getting good reviews and they are releasing them on schedule and full working code unlike JJP and Stern, the bigger companies. He and his partner probably can make it work but working as a boutique (small number) manufacture will always be kind of an uphill battle due to not having scale working for you. Stern may at some point manufacture other companies pinball machine on a subcontracted business to keep the plant always busy.

3d printing is neat but I have been more impressed with what you can do with CNC machines. It is older technology but much more established and you can work with more durable and cheaper materials than plastic. 3d printing has all the press but CNC machines have been doing most of this stuff cheaper and better for a long time. It doesn't have to be a lathe,too. There are laser CNC machines that can do pretty fine work and engraving. One guy I know put together a civil war gatling gun with his laser cutting machine. The funny thing though was that it is super precise but the reason why his manufacturing plant had one was just because they could cut out rake handles faster than anything else. They didn't really care that it was super precise.
Click to expand...

My job is to cut things on a cnc laser. The stuff we can do is pretty impressive. I haven't been around long enough to see what it was like before but when people from other companies come in they seem like they could sit there all day watching it.
 
I thought about getting one just for kicks a few months ago, but I realized that spending $1000 for something where the novelty will run out eventually is unwise.

If I had children with toys and shit, I'd buy one, probably.
 
JaegerIT said:
no i dont, but on the subject, in a completly fiction scenario would i be able to print an ak-47 with bullets and everything?, whats up NSA how's it going
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I don't see why you shouldn't be able to make both the rifle and the bullets (minus gunpowder) with a 3d printer. Far as I know you can make metal objects with a printer? With, like, powdered metal and sintering process.
 
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Does anyone have a high res 3D scanner? I found my broken sunglasses and would like to scan and 3D print replacement frames and stems. Not sure if current 3D scanning can do high enough resolution for that.
 
GSP_37 said:
Then the sunlight and rain will dissolve it and you have to 3D print a new one.

I saw on NHK World, an innovative old Japanese guy developed a way to take scrap 2x4's and cut them in a special way that lets you use them like building blocks to make a house and the special cuts prevents outside moisture from getting inside.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. If you were to seal and paint it correctly, it would stand up to the elements better.
 
From the look of this won't the manufacturing industry and factories, etc take a big hit from this.
 
My friend bought a maker bot. Pretty sweet, he's printed me a bunch of stuff for free. I needed a glock sight pusher recently ($125), a tool to replace sights on a glock handgun. There was one already on thingaverse. Gave him $5 for the plastic and he printed it for me. Worked like a charm. He's also printed me some prototype extrusions for some work projects that saved me a lot of time and money as well.
 
badascan said:
Ben Heck makes his own 3d printers...



...but i'm into 4d printers...

Click to expand...


I was going to post something like this because people can build them for dirt cheap. Over in Europe tons of people are running their own 3D printers for around 300 dollars. Some of them have a pretty good table size and still run under 500 bucks.
 
OvaryHugger said:
From the look of this won't the manufacturing industry and factories, etc take a big hit from this.
Click to expand...

No. Not yet anyways, and the tech is still qute a ways off. Factories and the manufacturing industry make money from mass production, and the ability to hold tolerances over large quantity part orders. 3D printers are slow, have trouble holding tolerances, and don't produce the highest strength of parts at the moment.

I went and toured a company that makes larger format cutting edge 3D printers a few months ago. They were pretty open that the use is still very limited, and a lot of the stuff you read about online is fluff or exaggerated. They showed me a pretty sweet toy skateboard that had multiple types of plastic, all printed in one shot. Then they informed me it costs almost $1000 to print this toy skateboard. We all laughed. They had sold some machines to Oral B, I believe, since they are constantly designing new toothbrushes and that works out well for them. For most manufacturers still though, the cost benefit of adding this tech is not there yet.

The only thing it can start to hurt to a limited degree are small shops that focus on rapid prototyping. But most of those places can easily add 3D printing capabilities to make small plastic parts where high strength is not needed. But most of thier business was probably in tight tolerance metal parts anyways.
 
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