3d Printer getting cheaper?

[The Evil Bus Driver]

Don't know how good the detail would be or what the biggest size piece but a desktop 3D printer for £1200 is an improvement.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10350028/Cube-3D-printer-goes-on-sale-at-Currys-and-PC-World.html

 

 

[Kelly]

I think 3D printers are probably still best being a group buy project by a club/assosiation. My local hackspace (Fizzpop) is doing something along those lines and seem to have a long list of other tools (lathes, mills etc).

 

Even if the detail isn't great on the 3d printed product, it could still be good enough for the basis as a scratchbuild aid perhaps? giving the basic shape and dimensions etc.

[The Evil Bus Driver]

Yeah something like that. I did read about a £500 one for the home but I still don't think the technology is quite ready for that yet. Give it a few years and we'll probably start seeing some quite interesting developments.

[Nile]

The problem with the Cube printer is it uses a cartridge with built in DRM, so it's not possible to use cheaper third party material. This is not the direction I want to see 3D printers taking.

[Rabs]

 

Even if the detail isn't great on the 3d printed product, it could still be good enough for the basis as a scratchbuild aid perhaps? giving the basic shape and dimensions etc.

 

You should check out what is possible with home photocuring resin printers (see my thread here: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/66521-and-who-says-that-home-3d-printing-cant-do-detail/) before writing off home 3D printers for not being able to do detail.  I agree that the detail from extrusion type printers can be a bit limited though.

[Etched Pixels]

Don't know how good the detail would be or what the biggest size piece but a desktop 3D printer for £1200 is an improvement.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10350028/Cube-3D-printer-goes-on-sale-at-Currys-and-PC-World.html

 

Thats about 2.5 times the going price for a decent 3D printer kit or pre-built (and even more so for low end stuff like printrbot which is about £300 assembled)  and a fair bit more than assembled one. These cheaper ones can use generic material from many suppliers so will cost a lot less to run. The cube is about £50 per 700g of plastic, the same material for ordinary non-locked-down 3D printers will set you back about £20 at the Faberdashery and can be for somewhat less in kilo rolls elsewhere.

 

The rules have been changing very fast on printer pricing, with several vendors with serious manufacturing experience figuring out how to make the reprap derived designs scale to bulk production and to drive the component cost right down. Kit prices for a small printer are now down to about $250 US for a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm build area.

 

So IMHO the cube is like the inkjet printer game - except that the printer and the ink are IMHO both massively overpriced 8) Only thing of theirs I'd buy would be shares ;-)

 

 

(For materials little btw can beat the 'Chocreator' but you may want to eat rather than run the resulting models)

 

The extrusion printers also have a particular problem for model making. The finer detail you want the more layers and more accuracy the mechanism needs (which also limits movement rates). They are brilliant for mechanical and structural objects as they produce quite strong parts so in some ways are more suited to printing baseboard brackets and things like the structural bits for bridges and gradients than for modelling with.

 

UV photocured resin printers use DLP projectors and print a layer at a time with very high accuracy in the X and Y dimension and only physical movement in the Z direction. As a result they produce much finer parts and the speed decrease is roughly linear with accuracy. They just cost a shade too much right now!

 

Alan

[Rabs]

Agree completely with all etched pixels' points - a good summary. I wouldn't have bought my printer (£2k) for modelling alone (i also use it for work), but I would have been very tempted.

[raymw]

It doesn't matter what type of 3d printer you get, you're still stuck with having to spend a long time in preparing the drawings, and in producing the item. At the end, you end up with a sort of plastic object which most likely needs considerable fettling. Fine, if you want prototypes, or a pattern to make a mould from.

 

One of the things I thought would be useful for 3d printing is figures - little 7mm scale people - make a pattern and take a mould. For such a subject the surface roughness of the 3d print would most likely be lost in the texture of clothing. I have some software - 'makehuman' - which allows accurate construction of humanoids. It cleverly allows details of facial differences, etc. However, the pose is not adjustable - just legs apart, arms outstretched - but it produces stl and other file formats. From the makehuman forum it seems folk then pass the model into 'blender', so I had a look and installed blender. There are plenty of tutorials for blender, but... it's bl**dy complicated, I think it is too much for me - I had a look at a tutorial, or at least 5mins of a four hour one, a guy talking very fast with intimate knowledge of short cut keys, just to do a shipping container model!

 

Now is make human + blender for what I want to do, any better than carving a lump of plasticine?

 

So, from a 20pence lump of plasticine, and 20mins hand carving with simple home made spatulas, should I progress? to a cnc machine with 3d print head, costing, say, £3000.00, and about 50 hours learning of blender (if I was smart enough), possibly 10 hours preparing the drawing and then maybe four or five hours extruding the model?

 

You got to be careful not to be sucked in.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

[raymw]

But I could do it quicker and cheaper and better from a mould taken from my plasicine model

[Kelly]

But I could do it quicker and cheaper and better from a mould taken from my plasicine model

 

Moulds do wear out though, as do masters if made from plasticine i'd imgine. 3D printers never have that issue as it is always from the same CAD file.

[Rabs]

Blender is about the most difficult, most unintuitive piece of software I've ever tried.  For human models I'd use Daz3D studio (which is now free).

[-missy-]

You got to be careful not to be sucked in.

Best wishes,

Ray

 

Which ever way you look at 3D printing it IS the future. OK, so now its still embrionic and the quality is not 100% but I can guarantee it will get better / cheaper / easier to use in time.

 

Turn your head away from it and you will be left behind, it will come back and bite you in the rear...

 

Missy.

[Rabs]

That said - I think that this is another area where Rule 1 applies.  If you prefer to do things the old fashioned way, that's fine.  I think that you might struggle to re-convert the people on this section of the forum though!  As for the time investment, I don't agree with that argument.  Ok, there might be faster ways to copy an existing 3d model (the plastacine example) but if you a creating it from 2D drawings and historical photos then CAD is as quick or quicker than making parts from scratch because if you stuff it up you don't have to start all over again.  

It's the equivalent of comparing pen and paper to a word processor.  One might be fine for a shopping list but I know what I'd rather write a book with!  CAD/CAM and 3D printing are like the invention of the printing press compared to monks sitting in cloisters where they had to throw away a whole page if they made a mistake!

[raymw]

Hi Kelly,

 

There is a pretty good discussion embedded in what you have said -

 

'Moulds do wear out though, as do masters if made from plasticine i'd imgine. 3D printers never have that issue as it is always from the same CAD file.'

 

The first few items from the mould are kept as patterns for remaking further moulds, if needed. This would be the same approach for whatever item you were moulding whatever the original pattern material was plasticine, wax or 3d printed plastic. You can always keep these patterns. (I am referring to the general rubber type moulding technique, not metal moulds for diestamping, injection moulding, etc.)

 

'Never' sort of needs defining. Let's suppose we mean a hundred years, then a brass pattern in a decent environment is well tested, gold plate it if you must. However, cad files? Never mind the rolling backup system required, but changes in operating systems, computer technology and so on, there is no guarantee that you can get at your files in a hundred years time. (The same with digital cameras, of course). (Paper tape still rules ;-) - sometimes). and spare parts for your machine, maybe none in 5 years time?

 

The cheap 3d printers sold by Curry's and the like. There is an attraction that you can make physical stuff easily and sort of accurately and cleanly, without necessarily getting your hands dirty. But, I reckon, probably within six months, in the majority of cases, the printers will be sat gathering dust, the initial excitement of the owners having downloaded and printed their own I-phone case having worn off, although it may be until the following Christmas, since they will have made cases for their relatives as presents ;-) , and finally decided the time and cost was not worth it. I'm saying if you want to try for yourself, by all means do so, it's your life after all. But you need to be prepared to spend a while to produce the quality that you'd like, even if it is even possible to do so. It may be best to try the drawing aspect first, and send the cad off to an outside maker.

 

3D printing is being sold as 'the answer to everything'. It is not, and never will be. It is a useful tool for rapid prototyping, nothing more (and it is not all that rapid, in many instances). There are better 'old fashioned' ways for producing much of what we want.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

 

ps (problems with the editor so hope it sort of makes sense

pps (I'm not too concerned about a hundred years time, but others may be...

[Red Devil]

This is a 3d print.....

 

 

It was produced by me for me and printed by an outside company, post print production work by me.

 

The likelihood of

 

a) someone else producing it for me

 

B) me producing something as neat and accurate by hand

 

are both slim to nil.....

 

So I disagree entirely with the suggestion that it is solely a tool for rapid prototyping and that there are better traditional ways....

 

But if you wish to persist in denigrating it that's fine by me, I'll just get on with what I'm doing without disparaging other methods. 

[RobboPetes]

Moulds do wear out though, as do masters if made from plasticine i'd imgine. 3D printers never have that issue as it is always from the same CAD file.

This might help out organisations (EM Gauge Society, 2mm Scale Society, etc.) to improve their stock in the long term (white metal parts, etc.).

[Rabs]

3D printing is being sold as 'the answer to everything'. It is not, and never will be. It is a useful tool for rapid prototyping, nothing more (and it is not all that rapid, in many instances). There are better 'old fashioned' ways for producing much of what we want.

 

This is the bit of your argument that I don't get:

Nobody said that it is "the answer to everything" and if they did they clearly know very little about engineering or technology.

Nobody said that it is rapid, and anyway the 'rapid' in 'rapid prototyping' has nothing to do with how fast the machine works.  It refers to how it can shorten development cycles in professional product development.  How long does it take to get a set of etches done?  It doesn't matter that the process might only take 10mins vs 5 hours on a printer, you still have to wait several days or weeks to get parts in your hand.

 

It is certainly not true that the only application for 3D printing is rapid prototyping.  That might be where it first became commercially viable but it certainly isn't where it is now and even more certainly isn't where it's going to be in the near future.  If your statement were true then shapeways and others wouldn't have been able to build the businesses that they have - very few of their customers use their service to produce prototypes which are then manufactured by other methods.  The fact that those companies exist is clear proof that 3d printing is good for a lot of other things too (but yes, it is still very much an emerging technology).

 

As for 'better': how do you define 'better'?  The one that gives the best resut?  The one that gives the best result per unit effort/cost?  The one that is the most fun to do?  Different people have different priorities and, as I said earlier, Rule 1 applies. 

[raymw]

Hi Red Devil,

 

What size is the model, and how long (machine time if known), and the cost to get that printed? If many more were wanted, I expect it would be quicker and cheaper to take moulds from its component parts, hence it's the prototype. If this was your first attempt at 3d cad and a 3d print, then it is a truly remarkable result. Is all of what we see 3d printed (apart from the glazing and paint, that is)? How about the wheels, drive (gears) etc? Now, obviously, if you wanted just a few more, you'd simply get them printed again, (and have to finish them off).

 

I am not denigrating or disparaging what you and others are doing, I am trying to point out the true cost of producing these items - it is not just the £1200.00 printer cost the op mentioned. You have done as I suggested - 'It may be best to try the drawing aspect first, and send the cad off to an outside maker.' - you can hopefully get quite a few printed models for £1200.00.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

[raymw]

Hi Rabs,

 

There seems to be, from time to time, a media frenzy almost wrt 3d printing - like the excitement over the 3d gun thing, rubbish tech programs such as Click, etc. This is where it is being sold as 'the answer to everything' and it is apparent they know nothing about the technology. I am aware of the 'rapid' terminology, I am using it, as many others do in a generic way, similar to 'hoover', 'biro' etc. However, if in house production, then rapid prototype may mean something else - so a ten inch cube may be quicker to mill from solid, than by any additive method.

 

Not fair in quoting 'better', without the rest of my sentence - 'There are better 'old fashioned' ways for producing much of what we want.' It may help if you defined your 'old fashioned' - I would see that as more craftsmanlike or skilled and then around in circles we go.

 

wrt shapeways and the like, I see little there that I personally think is 'worth the money', other folk are free to think otherwise.

 

Now, in your case, you have a knowledge of cad and bought a 3d printer. You've mentioned how good it is compared to the filament type, are pushing it to its limits, but also mention you bought it because you had a 'commercial' use for it, or words to that effect. So, for a newby, is a £1200 filament unit from pcworld, say, the must buy item for model rail-roading? Isn't it correct to mention the possibly steep learning curve required to get any results, etc? I have not seen much about the overall advantages or disadvantages, unless it is from folk with axes to grind, on one side or the other.

 

For someone who has a 'workshop' in a spare room, or merely a desktop, then perhaps a 3d printer is friendlier to install compared to a machine tool, but is all that is necessary?

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

[Rabs]

Not fair in quoting 'better', without the rest of my sentence - 'There are better 'old fashioned' ways for producing much of what we want.' It may help if you defined your 'old fashioned' - I would see that as more craftsmanlike or skilled and then around in circles we go.

 

Sorry, looking back I think I misunderstood your point.  I thought you were saying that the 'old fashioned' ways were 'better' for making things and hence my question of what you meant by 'better' - I wasn't trying to twist what you said. Re-reading I'm not not sure if that is quite what you meant, so apologies if I was off the mark.

 

 

wrt shapeways and the like, I see little there that I personally think is 'worth the money', other folk are free to think otherwise.

 

I agree - nothing much of interest to me either but then I feel that way about almost everything I see in shops in town.   But the point still stands - It must be of interest to somebody otherwise they wouldn't be in business!

 

 

Now, in your case, you have a knowledge of cad and bought a 3d printer. You've mentioned how good it is compared to the filament type, are pushing it to its limits, but also mention you bought it because you had a 'commercial' use for it, or words to that effect. So, for a newby, is a £1200 filament unit from pcworld, say, the must buy item for model rail-roading? 

No, it definitely isn't a must buy item - but I don't understand why you think I'm saying that it is.  In fact my first post in this thread says exactly the opposite and completely agrees with your point: "I would not have bought it for modelling alone"

 

 

Isn't it correct to mention the possibly steep learning curve required to get any results, etc?

 

Of course and I have made that exact point in my thread several times.  You are quite right to bring it up here because nobody had mentioned it in this thread so far.

 

For someone who has a 'workshop' in a spare room, or merely a desktop, then perhaps a 3d printer is friendlier to install compared to a machine tool, but is all that is necessary?

No, but by that argument almost no tool is necessary.  We could all build everything with nothing but a lump of metal and a needle file if we had the patience and the skill.  In fact, this is a hobby so precisely 0% of it is necessary  It's about what people want, not what they need.

 

But, reading between the lines of your post I think that we really agree on the main points:

Is it useful - yes

Is it easy to use - no

Is it ready for 'primetime' (as the Americans would say) for modellers - not quite.

 

In the interest of balance, here is an answer I gave to an RMWebber who PMed me recently asking for suggestions for a 3D printer for 2mm work.  We come to exactly the same conclusion.

 

The short answer is that I don't think that "simple home use" and "suitable for 2mm modelling" exist in the same product yet. 

 

I'm not sure how much you know about 3D printers, so apologies if this is a lesson in egg sucking.

 

The longer answer is:

Currently there are 2 main technologies out there for home 3d printing.  The first of these is FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling).  These use a hot nozzle and extrude molten plastic, which then sets as it cools again.  It builds the model by moving the nozzle about with a robotic (CNC) positioning system.  

 

The second is often referred to as SLA.  This uses a liquid resin which hardens when exposed to a high intensity light (often ultraviolet).  I say "referred to" because technically SLA means StereoLithogrAphy, which uses two scanning lasers - where the two lasers meet the light is intense enough to harden the resin, when only one laser is on it is not.  This came about because it was hard to turn early lasers on and off quickly enough to just have one powerful one.  These days most 'SLA' machines actually use a single laser or a DLP projector.  A DLP projector uses an array of microscopic mirrors which can be mechanically tilted and either cause light from a powerful lamp to either go out of the projection lens or not.  The Form1 printer uses a single laser, the B9 creator uses a DLP projector.  AFAIK these are the only two SLA machines below £10k, although some people have also built their own machines.

 

FDM, from everything I have seen, simply isn't capable of the level of detail necessary for 2mm.  The printer that you linked is an FDM printer and you'll notice that the nozzle is 0.5mm in diameter (which is big for recent 'high detail' FDM printers) - so that the absolute smallest feature it can produce.  There are people out there who insist that the best FDM printers can be as good as optical methods.  I personally have never seen any FDM machine that can get close to SLA.  There's a lot of nonsense bandied about about 'resolution' for FDM machines because some people think that being able to position a nozzle to within 10 microns matters when you are squirting goop out of a  0.2mm hole.  They always advertise 'resolution' (by which they mean positioning resolution of the motion system) and not the minimum printable feature size, which is what actually matters.  

 

I'm sure that both technologies will continue to improve rapidly and that FDM may, in time, equal the current SLA crop.  However, at a fundamental level, I simply don't believe that a robotic miniature glue gun (FDM) can be as accurate as an optical system (SLA). There are pros and cons for each approach.  It's easier to build a big FDM printer than a big SLA printer and the printed materials are generally cheaper but an FDM printer won't do what you want for 2mm.

 

In the SLA camp the two options are both at the top end of the price range you mentioned.  The Form1 isn't much better than an FDM printer in my opinion because the laser spot is 0.3mm in diameter, so is wasting most of the high detail potential of the underlying technology.  The B9 has a 0.05mm minimum feature size (I didn't believe this when I bought it, I expected it to be 0.1 to 0.2mm, but my recent printing has proved that it can achieve printing of individual pixels of the projected image.

 

I think that an absolute minimum for 2mm is 0.1mm minimum feature size, so the only home printer that I know of that ticks the box is the B9.  However it isn't easy to use - it's very much an experimenter's kit.  It's taken me many months of partially successful printing to get to the results I have now and I'm a professional engineer who designs similar machines for a living and I consider the printer to be my other hobby. However, when it does work it's able to beat the output of a machine that costs £250k.

 

If you are after "easy to use" then for now my recommendation would be to use Shapeways FUD for now until the technology matures a bit.  If you do decide to buy a printer the only one I would consider from the current crop would be the B9, but expect to spend as much time on printing as you do on railway modelling!

[Etched Pixels]

3D printing is a tool, or set of tools. It lets you do things that are really hard to do any other way (can you turn an N scale shunter model into a 3mm scale one at the push of a button ? any other way). It is also (like any other tools) a tool for doing things that are really much easier other ways.

 

It also depends upon your skill-set and higher level tools. If you are good at carving little plastiscene people then you'll probably do the job better that way. If you know how to work tools like Blender the reverse is true. There is also a generational thing here - 3D printing is considered essential learning today just as Wordprocessing was in the 1990s. The people who don't get the chance to learn it will go the way of the people who had their secretary print out their email and sent memos back - but not in any great hurry and mostly by attrition through age.

 

I think your comments on the tools are important though - right now the tools are akin to the early days of any technology, they tend to be functional, very powerful and focussed on those with time to become highly competent. That will change just as word processing came out of complex and hard to use (for a novice) document formatting systems. With good tools 3D printing gets very fast and easy - I've got tools that let me throw coach shells together very rapidly because the software knows about railway carriage body shells, bogie mounting types, roofs, compartments and so forth.

 

The problem with Makehuman and Blender is I suspect that someone not familiar with 3D CAD tools and with 3D animation controls can't use it without learning a fair bit. There is no reason to believe that future tools won't include simple figure posing tools that can't do powerful stuff but can be used by anyone in an hour won't appear.

 

I have to say though that in general (and this is far wider than model railways in fact more common elsewhere) most of the 'artisans' I meet who hate 3D printing basically hate the idea that everyone else will be able to make things without having spent years and years learning their particular pet craft. That to me is sad - they should be asking "what amazing things are now possible with both skillsets together"

 

Alan

[trustytrev]

Hello,

        I think it has been overlooked that the main purpose of Blender is for 3d animation.That is one of the reasons it is so complex.The 3d static modeling capability is just part of its overall purpose.I also think 3d printing is just another tool that can be used for modelling.How many people use inkjet printers to assis in their modelling activities nowadays and take that for granted?

trustytrev.

[raymw]

Ah, glad that's over, then. We all agree on everything (insert appropriate smiley here).

 

Final bit of clarification 'For someone who has a 'workshop' in a spare room, or merely a desktop, then perhaps a 3d printer is friendlier to install compared to a machine tool, but is all that is necessary?' the 'all that is necessary' was meant to reference that you need more than just the tool, you need the skill set to go with it. It needs a different approach, which is not being emphasised enough imnsho (not here, in this forum, so much, but in the big wide world in general), although Microsoft is apparently building in 3d printer drivers into future releases of their os (sort of the kiss of death!!)

 

fwiw, exactly the same thing happened/is happening with photography - ref to etched pixels last para.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ray

[pointstaken]

3d printing will "take off" when an really easy-to-use package comes into existence, that does not require a degree in CAD, or to learn the software from a 600-page manual. I don't want an "intuitive to use" package, I want something easy to use out of the box. The company coming up with ease of use package will make a lot of money (including mine when I win the lottery !).

 

Dennis

[raymw]

Microsoft have released a free 3d printing app for widows 8.1 

 

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/3d-builder/75f3f766-13b3-45e9-a62f-29590d5781f2