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Looking for cheap 3D printer for working prototypes? Metal or plastic.

W

Wayne Morellini

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I'm looking for a cheap 3D printer that can produce prototypes and final working parts, metal alloy or plastic. This usually is done by laying powder and melting shape, or through a liquid bath where parts are hardened before another layer is added, or they sink and are covered. You can make holo parts and complete gaps with these.

I haven't kept up with the technology since early times, so don't know what is out there. I see $399 and $25 printers, but none of these allow for the free floating parts and viods. Prices below $1000, as far as possible are good, as I only want to do my old designs and print them, maybe do limited runs of some really thin items.

Does anybody know of any (the more the better)?


Thanks

Wayne.
 
The future

The future

The future of 3D printing. HP 350,000 droplets a second, 10x speed:

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...ys-its-50-cheaper-10x-faster-than-others.html

The article also does not take into account of how you recycle contaminated powder effectively. Also that you can stack a number of parts in the powder bin, which is another performance aspect. Say I had the back of am computer monitor to manufacture (just an easy but unlikely scenario). They could closesly even within a mm stack onto of each other I'm the powder bin with other components stacked in the top one and beneath the bottom, and around the sides. Now imagine if the tube is 20,feet long and 3 feet wide and deep. That is a lot of parts I'm one run. Now imagine if the head is 20 feet long, now imagine if it is 3 feet wide. That is very fast, and compact compared to the tooling required for direct injection and such forth for all those different parts on a factory floor. Now, imagine you suddenly you suddenly only need factory floor space of 20% the size (see latter tech below),even 10%. That can be millions lower costs with lower labor costs. So manufacturing suddenly becomes cheaper on 10k+ runs of products. But HP doesn't have the technology here.

Now, let's forget plastic firna moment and consider archiving it with laser or electron beam splintering. Let's consider that you van have aschone, like black magic showed off years ago, that assembles circuitry boards, but also assembled parts in the mix, or made parts polished up and assembled from the mix. Now, whole camera could emerge from a short machine, test 99% of the time within range very closely (when the machine goes wrong you might get a batch). So much so, if it wasn't for outside parts, it would be useless testing them 99.9%+, of the time. Your costs come down. The entire chain to dealership can be automated eventually.

Now, take a step back and realise some of the manufacturing outcomes I described has been archived before. Back in the 1940's or 1950's, an company in England manufactured bakerlite radios in a longer floor machine (but very compact) that spat out finished radios. In my old printed (simple cheap) car design it would spit them out for maybe a $1000. My methodology was more mainstream than this for speed.

So, there is talk about doing down to 10nm I think. I'm impressed, there are even some techniques I had come up with and wanted to do, such as vapor deposition.

Now imagine a mechsnism where you could shed off atoms (and molecules) of most elements and deposit them. You can print whatever within reason using tiliions of heads. I can print chips, and opto electronics in a design. The computer aided manufacturing software can automatically adjust configurement of my designs to fit all regulatory requirements. Now, imagine if it can design the whole thing for you from a functional description, and even automatically send off and register the design for you over the network. You now longer have to design in a way to prove it works, but get towards simple simply describing how it does it, rather than how that works, then get towards just drscribing what it does and let it figure it out. Now imagine eventually, you just tell it what you want, or intend, your wishful thinking, and it does the rest. Eventually it may even initslise talking to you to determine what and if you want or.need anything, or just observe you and surprise or suggest something (this is all Artificial Intelligence by now, hundreds of years in the future, or maybe 50 years with enough crowd funding etc). This is the progression model.
 
Now, laser spintering is the preferred industry solution, but on the low end, there is the Prusa_i3,l series fused depositioning printer, from RepRap open source project. Limited unsupported printing, no powder or liquid bin. But now with mixed color and even a mig welder version.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prusa_i3
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_project.

The Reprap people are looking to use electron beam technology for metal rather than laser (but I don't want to use a large vacuum chamber). A tunable l, but high efficency photon source (have a design) may get rid of most performance issues with lasers. I don't know if they want to develop a powered bed or not. I have like maybe less than 40 pages left open to skim, but have run out of time. However I don't think I want to buy that little plate Davinci Jnr on sale, even just for shape models of handheld devices. I have still not archieved my goal of finding a cheaper laser splintering powder bed printer with very fine resolution tolerances to make things like hinges, threads, holes and slots. Though I am thinking there is further advantage to extruded fused deposition printers if you can angle and thing the head to get around and in objects and attach hanging bits (and multiple nozzle heads for color and material mixing, how come they don't do this, and what is the issue about head clogging, dontnthey know his to do it, and to use the shortest heating section so you can safely wind back the filrment before it hardens?).
 
This might be cheaper to contract out to a materials-construction company that specializes in this kind of thing. You could probably book X number of hours (or days) on a system like this for a fraction of the cost of actually going out and buying a 3D printer.
 
Depends on how cheap somebody wants to make it. It is all about IP, what I make in house nobody else gets to see, is more secure. Plus it could be hundreds of indivual designs. So while I'm at it, I might as well see how much something costs that can manufacture limited volumes of the same design. Thought of a very nice design for tablets based off of one of my very old designs. Be interested in checking that out, but something like an HP (for instance, I'm not looking for something like that) maybe a thousand units, could be at least 500 at a time. I'll have to get measuments. That's interesting stuff, though you would normally get it batched manufactured elsewhere unless it was low volume high profit.
 
There's nothing good out there for 3D printers that are also cheap... Maybe in a couple more years. If you want serious metal parts, your best bet is a 3 or 5 axis CNC. You can buy "desktop" CNCs that do pretty much everything for under $10K these days and have similar working volumes as most <$10K 3D printers. Then you can make real aluminum or steel parts. I've seen a few under $5K for real CNCs, but I can't speak to their consistency or accuracy.

I have a few 3D printers here and they're mostly all garbage tinker toys. The two I use most are the 5th Gen MakerBot -- simple, effective, prints PLA, usually just works... And the new MarkForged Mark Two. The latter being more expensive, but I can print real usuable parts out of nylon and reinforce with carbon or kevlar. They're a much better setup for embedding components and attachments and provide more consistent build. Their new Onyx material looks intriguing, but I haven't been able to play with it yet. Used Makerbot 5's or similarly capable no-name printers out there can be had for around $1500 or so. This may or may not be a good place to start, depending on your needs, as in what you need your printed parts to actually do.

Biggest problem I have with 3D printing with most ABS/PLA systems is they provide little value other than visualization. We spend more time trying to tweak and tailor the model to print efficiently when that time would be better spent on the actual design or other aspects of a project and then just send the object to the CNC. For usable plastic components out of the ABS/PLA printers, we have to design according to the layer bonding restrictions and often have to print parts in multiple pieces and then glue them together in order to alternate layer directions and maximize strength. Had a MakerBot 2X here for a while and that was super-handy for printing dual materials and the ability to use flexible filaments like NinjaFlex. But had a handful of other issues with that printer and it seems most comparable ones on the market suffer the same problems and lack of support. So I unloaded that. Now I use the flexible nylon on the Mark Two or build parts out of nylon/PLA to make a mold and then mold them out of silicone or other soft material. Handy for button pads and other bits. I seem to be doing a lot of small electronics industrial design work, both for my own robotics efforts lately and for clients. Our Mark Two setup is most used of any printer/ CNC we have here. But it's a $15K setup as it exists at the moment. Stratasys has a setup I would like to buy into, but it currently sits at $60K or so to get started and I have other more important things on the list to buy first. New CNC is up next so I can build larger stuff.

Hiring out CNC or 3D printing is a crapshoot. On precision components this becomes a nightmare as many of the high-volume production shops can't hold tolerances very tight. They often tend to have poor QC or under-trained people running and/or maintaining the equipment which also leads to QC and tolerance issues.
 
I thought there might have been a basic metal for like $4k, but get canned on the cost and handeling of the metal powder/pallet. I see amazon is selling extruding metal wire, but haven't seen the machine. I know that there was a mig welding version of the reprap somewhere. So, I want yo look into.thaynas a compromise. I figure you should be able to do reasonable horizontal areas if it can be timed precisely, but maybe not very smooth, and if the head can be thin and bend even structures that hang unsupported.

As for tolerances. I'm not after much, maybe smoothness in joints a bit, and threads (but bssicall that would be course gauge and forced producing smoothness in plastic etc.

Going on from above. For resolution I'm after sun visual. I'm my calculations of doing a large scale dynamic simulation, I determined that 2400,DPI was not enough, because once brought close to the eyes it drops down to 600dpi. So I determined 9600dpi, and that it probably would aid in producing smoothness and surface texture resistance. So, eben though 100 micron is adequate, ones closer to 30 or less were better, which is out there. Anyway, in a hinge as long as I can get a 100 micron gap, that would be good.

And yes, I agree that the cheaper ones (from around $200 on Amazon) are mainly good as visual aids, which it fine with me but I did see a link for a $25 one if that is all I'm going to do on handheld objects).

Hmm, I've just got the most amazing idea on how to do a cheap extruding machine that might be able to do everything. Just another idea that makes it simpler, and.another again. But I need a partner to design and manufacture it. Anything you would be interested in Jeff.
 
Contrasting to what I posted before on affordable metal printers (he goes into mixed plastic and metal filaments that can be used at home):

https://all3dp.com/3d-printing-metal-need-know/

I didn't write it. Maybe he posts here, and doesn't realise what is outside his field?
 
This guy mentioned metal clay printers. Along with other metal binding printing techniques this is a good metal option, if you have access to a kiln. It burns off everything to leave metal bonded together. But a few issues remain. This printer has large 250 micron feature size. How big and complex can you make objects. The jewlers metal clay his shrinkage. How do you get even enough heating access into complex large objects easily (design wise). How supportive is the substance to build large structures without spread (in plastic you can probably). However, a substance in yje mix that generates heat can do this (but venting still needed). So, if 60-2.5 micron was possible it would be good. But no where near that atom level 3D printer design came up with years ago. Now I'll have to consider if that can be scaled big enough. Been considering more ways to do object by extrusion, and something just occured to me about how to transfer to this technology. Not enough atomic level knowledge.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/produce-the-mini-metal-maker#/
 
Yep, just got a high speed technique, rather sophisticated, but build my camera design on it. This might mean very long life. Have several new mechanisms writing these (but based on many years working out related technology).
 
Cheap Metal printing

Cheap Metal printing

Well it looks like what I wanted to do with powders (and rust powders converted to iron after printjng):
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-01-d-metals-alloys.html

Theorectically you could have hundreds of thousands of print heads. Still a powder bed ads support. There is a simple solutions to the problems they mention with powder beds. Pretty cool though, and cheap.

Here is that welding oprnsource reprap printer:
http://www.appropedia.org/Open-source_metal_3-D_printer

Here are some metal examples by a company that prints by order, they also have a store structure with camera parts:

http://www.shapeways.com/materials#

http://www.shapeways.com/marketplace/tech/camera-video/?li=featured

I have seen 10 and 20 micron printers in a best if article on this site. But this resin printer is 5 micron, that's 4800dpi:

https://www.3dhubs.com/3d-printers/B9-Creator

This here is just one example from the best of 2016 page (consumer I think) that has large volume of 33cm high and 28cm round (three armed delta printer):

https://www.3dhubs.com/3d-printers/rostock-max
 
OK, some new interesting cheap 3D printer tech I have found. I'm still searching through the links I opened up weeks back as I can't seem to get through things. So, I'll try to update this post in the next hour with more links.

Large volume 30x30x40cm 50 micron $499 3D printer kit

http://3dprinting.com/3dprinters/fo...-3d-printer-kit-costs-499-massive-build-area/

3D magnetic metal jet printer, 200-500 micron droplets.

http://3dprinting.com/3dprinters/vader-molten-metal-3d-printer/#
http://vadersystems.com/#themk1

This page lists a lot of cheap printers, including with metal extrusion at under $300, and a number of 50 micron ones.

http://3dprinting.com/3dprinters/40-affordable-3d-printers-on-sale-under-500-buy-now/#

Here is a recent page of large format printers, one over 6 meters build area. Yes they do look like traffic safety cones at it's mouth.

http://3dprinting.com/3dprinters/be...3d-printers-big-enough-to-3d-print-furniture/

How many decades does a 3D printed house take to cone out 2018:

http://3dprinting.com/news/contour-crafting-expected-to-be-used-to-build-homes-by-2018/

An old article on new materials, pretty interesting. One company had a multi material product called digital material I think (forgotten). They also have a rubber like material. People are also printing full color in sandstone. Ceramics is something that interests me, as I identified a decade ago that ceramic technology is a future construction material for lots of things in a resource starved society, that would require lots of power generation, requiring a lot of power generation. I told it to a friend who is a top electrical power supply industry engineer. He couldn't see the value in it. Says a lot for top engineers (they tend to have similar blockage to smart know it all users, just less of them). 3D printing of mineral complexes ceramics is something of a future thing for me. You can make engine blocks, flexible, even in the 80's an aluminium contented ceramic was machinable by machining tools.

http://3dprinting.com/news/10-game-changing-3d-printing-materials/
 
OK, just figured out how to make a cheap powder bed print, a few hundred dollers. Minor. Developerable in 6 months to working prototype, likely a lot faster with help. Minor headache thinkimg of it. Second and third version coming through.

OK, replaced that idea with dissolvable supports as a speedy compromise. Found a printer that does that with water disolvable supports. Now all that is needed is supports for metal. A second nozzle using the binding materials used in the metal decomposition /extrusion, might do this for metal with some modifications. After firing they dissapear. However in either case needs discrete drainage holes and plugs. So, now a powder bed is not so needed, but it is not as fine resolution, fast on vàriouse shapes maybe, and toxic waste material or fumes may have to be dealt with. But an inkjet like head with sinistering in a powder bed is going to be way faster, and a lot more resolution. Yep, I know the technology that could be used to do this. So, using the same support technology two sets of nozzles could print a layer a 2400dpi+ resolution in seconds, but that depends on, hmm another method has occurred to me, it depends on the matarial mix used.

http://imaginables.com.au/collections/3d-printers/products/ultimaker-3
 
A full color printer with 3.75 micron resolution and 10 micron layer resolution, decent 12x12x18 inch build volume. Pretty descent figures:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ordsolutions/rova4d-full-color-blender-3d-printer

http://www.ordsolutions.com/rova4d-full-color-blender-kickstarter/

They have a dual filament and dual paste version, including for food use. 1000th of an inch:

http://www.ordsolutions.com/rovapaste-filament-3d-printer/

More to come:

A kid's printer. Pretty nice:

https://3dprint.com/151324/thingmaker-3d-printer-delayed/

https://3dprint.com/119630/mattel-thingmaker-3d-printer/
 
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