World Domination, I just got my self a 3d Printer!!!

[bigmoose]

nechaus... I don't know about you! You are going to start a revolution around here, and I bet a few more of these "miracle machines" are going to pop up in the labs and shops of board members...

Thank you for taking us to a new level!!

 

[nechaus]

thanks for your kind words,

its going to be a good learning experience for me, ill be using cad like programs alot more often
I could prob print people stuff if my print skills are good and you live in aus, it would be just the cost of shipping and plastic, handy for rare parts
the more cool cad designs i have the better, i wanna build up a whole library of things to print.
I could certainly make housing for the cheap watt meters from places like hobby king, make it water proof and have a few small leds so you can see the screen when you ride
it has been a pain in the ass for me in the past tying to mount them nicely.

 

[Alan B]

Good job. I've been watching these for awhile. Looks like a solution in search of a problem. I need one.

I hear that low cost metal printing versions are only a few years away. So much for gun control. They'll be outlawing CAD models.

Wonder when they'll be able to print batteries.

A plastic and metal printing unit will be able to make "real" printed circuit boards! multi-layer!!

 

[nechaus]

metal printers would be so awesome, I can hardly wait!
that would be 100% the best tool ever

 

[amberwolf]

I need the one from Eureka that can print bodies, so I can make myself some replacement parts.

 

[Arlo1]

some pictures of various things you could build

frock YEH

 

[nechaus]

few more pics

 

[Hillhater]

Earn money,..get printing. !

 

[nechaus]

the good old rabbit pearl, used by millions of women

 

[Kin]

One thing that has been holding me back, that i ought to google search and do some research about, but..

How hard is it actually to set up your styles? I can make my shapes and everything in autodesk Inventor (student ed), export at Step, but then presumably there needs to be some setup to get it to print. Setting up stuff on the CNC at work takes actually quite a bit of work, because I don't know EdgeCam that well, or really at al. Is it hard to setup files for the 3D printer..? On some level I figure it should be easier, there are almost no lining up or "depth of cut & router size" issues. Nor can the bit really break because of a bad feedrate&rpm, because of course there's no spinning bit.

Also, there's an instructable somewhere on instructables.com about 3D printing all of your joints for making a custom bike frame, and then layering carbon fiber to give the real strength...It's a method of making the bike without having to design and build a larger jig. it's pretty awesome. Thats what had me thinking a few months back more seriously about 3D printing.

 

[nechaus]

Yeah, you can get a plugin for inventor or google sketch up and you should be able to export the file to a .STL quite easily ,

check out http://www.thingiverse.com a site for people to upload their designs and prints, also includes the files to download.

i just took a few screens of the print software, think it should be a fair bit easier than a cnc machine, pretty sure you have way more settings to deal with, but let me know
Also attached the manual of the machine, if any ones interested

 

[nechaus]

looks like it could be as easy as checking your extruder, loading the file and pressing 3 more buttons and it should start printing lol

I have 2x2m of carbon fiber, what a great idea to give it strength, I was horrible with making things out of carbon fiber..
but now i could just cover the plastic with carbon fiber sheeting.. resin it up

 

[Kin]

Bear in mind you still need to examine loads and think about how you layer the fabric, but yeah.

That interface looks awesome. Very manageable. I think part of what complicates the CNC machine is the number of considerations like how to hold the object, rpm, feed rate, how much you cut per layer, etc. It doesn't look too hard with practice, but for one time items and without practice it's finicky. I like that 3D printer software.

 

[nechaus]

Ill have to test the resin on the plastic, im not sure if they will work together either, the resin might heat up to much and melt the plastic or react in a funny way.

Would be nice if there was an easy way to make an add on for a cnc machine to do plastic printing... seems like it would be better having the whole structure made from a metal opposed to wood or plastic in the first place.

 

[Kin]

There are 3D printers with metal framework. While it seems nice to have an addition to a CNC machine to allow 3D printing, I think it would have niche uses (ooh, imagine having one of your bits be an excruder head. The thing is that big metal-working CNC machines are expensive and you don't want to tie one up for 10 hours to make a dinky cup, which otherwise is awesome except you could make the same thing in aluminum in 6 minutes.

I'm not quite sure what you figure by the resin/epoxy and plastic. The resin shouldn't heat up too much because it will have a reasonably high surface to volume ratio. I found the instructable for you, it is sweetness: http://www.instructables.com/id/Custom-3D-Printed-Carbon-Fiber-Bike-Frame/

 

[MattyCiii]

Funny, I was loading a model into my MakerBot for a print, logged onto ES to kill some time, and here it is, this thread is top of the active topics.

I have 2x2m of carbon fiber, what a great idea to give it strength, I was horrible with making things out of carbon fiber..
but now i could just cover the plastic with carbon fiber sheeting.. resin it up

The parts I'm printing go alongside some CNC'd flat carbon fiber shapes, I'm using for a belt drive enclosure. I'll post pix when I get a chance. But it's such a great combo. CF for flat, rigid covers & bling, ABS for complex shapes. Bolts hold it all together.

How hard is it actually to set up your styles? I can make my shapes and everything in autodesk Inventor (student ed), export at Step, but then presumably there needs to be some setup to get it to print.

I use the free CAD software available from eMachineShop.com. It's pretty decent 2.5D CAD software, but of course it's designed around subtractive processes like milling instead of additive - 3D printing/FDM. What's cool about using the eMachineShop CAD is that if I intend to have the part CNC'd in metal, I can design and print with this CAD, print a prototype on the M'Bot, test fit/double check, and if it's perfect, order the part from eMachineShop right through the application.

Once you get proficient at the basics, there are a lot of tricks posted out there on how to optimize - on the MakerBot forums and those of other printers. For example I just learned how to use a program called Netfabb Basic to slice up the 6" x 4" edge of my belt enclosure - basically a big hollow oval, which is way too big for the MakerBot to print, into slices, then group them to print them all in one build. This will turn the tedium of starting 9 small jobs into just one job that will take only about 3x as long as each of the 9 parts individually.
Belt enclosure side wall:

Side wall as sections, clustered to fit the 3D printer build platform:

Carbon Fiber meets ABS Plastic. 3D printing is pretty darn useful.

 

[nechaus]

Funny, I was loading a model into my MakerBot for a print, logged onto ES to kill some time, and here it is, this thread is top of the active topics.

I have 2x2m of carbon fiber, what a great idea to give it strength, I was horrible with making things out of carbon fiber..
but now i could just cover the plastic with carbon fiber sheeting.. resin it up

The parts I'm printing go alongside some CNC'd flat carbon fiber shapes, I'm using for a belt drive enclosure. I'll post pix when I get a chance. But it's such a great combo. CF for flat, rigid covers & bling, ABS for complex shapes. Bolts hold it all together.

How hard is it actually to set up your styles? I can make my shapes and everything in autodesk Inventor (student ed), export at Step, but then presumably there needs to be some setup to get it to print.

I use the free CAD software available from eMachineShop.com. It's pretty decent 2.5D CAD software, but of course it's designed around subtractive processes like milling instead of additive - 3D printing/FDM. What's cool about using the eMachineShop CAD is that if I intend to have the part CNC'd in metal, I can design and print with this CAD, print a prototype on the M'Bot, test fit/double check, and if it's perfect, order the part from eMachineShop right through the application.

Once you get proficient at the basics, there are a lot of tricks posted out there on how to optimize - on the MakerBot forums and those of other printers. For example I just learned how to use a program called Netfabb Basic to slice up the 6" x 4" edge of my belt enclosure - basically a big hollow oval, which is way too big for the MakerBot to print, into slices, then group them to print them all in one build. This will turn the tedium of starting 9 small jobs into just one job that will take only about 3x as long as each of the 9 parts individually.
Belt enclosure side wall:

Side wall as sections, clustered to fit the 3D printer build platform:

Carbon Fiber meets ABS Plastic. 3D printing is pretty darn useful.

That's an awesome way of getting things machined

man i cant wait until i get my printer, i hope its as good as your one

 

[GCinDC]

[youtube]L4INtIgq1MQ[/youtube]
this guy has to be on ES. more here.

 

[amberwolf]

That looks useful for a lower-power setup; maybe if the plastic hooks (and the spokes) can take it, even higher power would be possible. Not sure max torque you could put thru it.

This part:

winterproof, openings under each tooth, which work to slough off snow and mud

To avoid dirt accumulation in between the tooths of the belt disk there is a small gap. Snow or small particles can fall through.

sounds helpful.


FWIW, there are a bunch of things I'd love to print with a 3d printer--but none of them have a practical use; I'd just like to have a physical copy of some of the various things I once built in Lightwave3D, when I had time and patience to do that sort of thing.

 

[MattyCiii]

That's an awesome way of getting things machined

man i cant wait until i get my printer, i hope its as good as your one

Thanks! But please note I have a love/hate relationship with my machine. Maybe I built it wrong or my modifications have cheesed it up, but about 1/2 the time it is not working right, wasting my time and small chunks of wasted ABS. This is one of the first "Thing-O-Matic" MakerBots, they've moved on to their next model already.

Once you get into it though it's like e-bikeing. You tinker, you read people's mods, you think... you improve. If you look closely at my pics, you'll see I've pressed in some brass fasteners/nuts that I'm anchoring my bolts into. I read about them here: http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2012/05/fastners-for-3d-printing-threaded.html. In the article they're melted in with a soldering iron, but I just press them in. Just measure the OD, and print a hole for them about 0.2mm wider diameter, and they press in real nice. This way I'll have a nice elegant looking finished product - all the bolts are button cap stainless, very low key. The nuts are embedded in plastic.

The 3D printer definitely opens doors.

 

[nechaus]

oh yeah, i remember reading about that model, and then realized they had the replicator for double the price..
i was close to buying that but then i found the 3dstuffmaker, 99% assembled.

Just sent them an email earlier on, they said it should be shipped today, so i should get it next week woohoo
im gonna have it running in my home office, hopefully its not to loud

 

[MattyCiii]

Hope you get it soon!

One thing having a 3D printer does for you is it forces you to think of things in terms of buildability. I mean, just because you can draw it, doesn't mean you can print it (the need for support structures, etc.) and just because you can print it doesn't mean you can mount it ("Crap! How do I reach that screw now?").

I'm facing this challenge right now. A small design oversight on my carbon fiber belt enclosure means I'll have a bear of a time mounting the belt with proper tension. I think I have a way around this fact, but only completing the task will tell me for certain. D'oh!


I'm sure this same fact is true with turning, milling, and other part design - but it's a lot cheaper to make mistakes on a 3d printer!

 

[Hyena]

there are a bunch of things I'd love to print with a 3d printer--but none of them have a practical use; I'd just like to have a physical copy of some of the various things I once built in Lightwave3D,

Heh that's the first thing I said when nechaus told me he bought it. I thought "oh man, all the cool shit I could make with that!" and then when he said to pick something to make to test it out I couldn't think of anything useful for the life of me :lol: Various nerdy scifi replicas came to mind (the terminator skull posted previously) but nothing too useful other than a connector housing for a multipin plug I want for my stealth.
People would have no doubt been similarly excited when the first photocopiers came out. "wow we can copy anything we can put on the glass here!" and what do people do ? Print pictures of their arses :lol:
Philistine has demonstrated that the human race hasn't matured or changed a bit in the last 50 years

It'll be interesting to see how you can extend the work area nechaus, to print longer objects by moving the base along mid-print. Bring on the rad custom lipo boxes! 8)

I need the one from Eureka that can print bodies, so I can make myself some replacement parts.

Tell me about it! :|

 

[Philistine]

Philistine has demonstrated that the human race hasn't matured or changed a bit in the last 50 years

Now that's very not fair to me, I actually prove the human race hasn't matured or changed in tens of thousands of years.

 

[Hyena]

Yes I'm pretty sure some of the oldest cave paintings ever documented are pictures of crudely drawn cock and balls :lol: