3d printers

[wodahs]

with all the current stay at home fun to be had im considering a 3d printer to play with
anyone have one ? any thoughts on them

[russellw]

We went through the market evaluation exercise last December for a client that wanted to replace the couple they had - two reasonably cheap ones were used for prototyping and then they had three dearer ones for production work. Their budget was <$5k per unit.

I leant a lot more about them than I knew in working with their team so the best advice I can give you is to decide what you want to use it for, particularly in terms of materials it can work with, as that will determine a short list for you.

So, for example, every machine on the market can work with PLA (Polylactic Acid) and it's the most widely used filament but not all of them will work with the high-tensile version PLA-T. In itself, PLA is an amazing polymer and there are variants that mimic wood, silk, have glitter or colour changing effects and even carbon fibre impregnated PLA although not all machines can handle all variants. It's also food-safe and reasonably environmentally friendly.

ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) filament is the next most widely used for home printing, favoured for its strength and ease of use but it's definitely not friendly to the environment and not every machine can work with it.

PET-G (Polyethylene Terephthalate enhanced with glycol) is the next most widely used as it is extremely strong and easy to work with having the best qualities of PLA and ABS in one material. Again, not all printers can produce the heat (235^oC) required for it but I'd consider it a good capability to have.

Amongst the rarer (and less supported) but useful materials are:

TPE (Thermoplastic Elastomer) which while not supported by many machines is a soft rubber-like material capable of being squashed and stretched after printing.

Carbon Fiber filaments mixed with other filaments beside PLA or in higher concentrations.

Metal filaments which include Copper, Bronze, Brass and Stainless Steel are only supported by a couple of expensive machines but the benefits are obvious.

It's probably not relevant for you but they ended up choosing the Flashforge Creator for the prototyping because it handles a wide range of materials including nylon filaments; comes with two heads and has the highest plate temperature on the market (note that's the plate not the printing temp). On the downside, it's not as fast as some machines and doesn't support other nozzle sizes.

They stuck with Flashforge for the production machines, choosing the Guider IIs for all of the reasons above plus it's a lot faster albeit about 2.5x the price!

[jaydee]

I knew of a guy that needed some plastic vents for his vintage Alpha. NOS was several hundred, so he got some one with a 3D printer to knock some up for a quarter the price, even had some spares done.

[creative]

Be prepared to get very frustrated with it to start with. You will not be printing amazing prints out of the box. Once they are dialed in its pretty straight forward to use.

bang for buck and to save your sanity a bit, just get a prusa mk3 pre made direct from prusa.

I have a Geeetech i3 pro and run TPU ( for my quads/camera mounts) then use PLA for everything else. I got it close enough for what I use it for ( camera mounts only end up slamming into trees.. lol ) so never got it perfect. A mate of mine runs 10 prusa's at his work and the prints are amazing that come off them.

[pcman]

ive got a $300 bay special geeetech i3b ..... requires constant stuffing around and re-calibration and fiddling and replacing junk chinese parts, sometimes it prints awesome on a 6 hour print with no issues, other times you will spend 4 hours and 10 attempts to do a 15 minute print,

i have printed a few parts for inside most of my vehicles, dashcam brackets, tablet holders, replaced the rear view mirror in my campervan with a 7" lcd printed a custom bracket for that, printed a insert for a ef falcon to hold a 52mm gauge and couple of switches where the factory a/c controls normally are



would i buy another... yeah but i recon id wanna spend 1000ish to get something more user friendly, mine is 4 years old newer ones are much more refined i gather from research

[Sprintey]

Agree with most below, a year and 1/2 ago I got a $300 XYZ Da Vinci Jr. For the money it's been a lot of fun, and the CAD design is really fun too. I've printed out shapes, machine tool parts, curved surfaces for equipment, pokemon, model parts, landscape parts, etc.

Would I recommend the Da Vinci? Um, it's OK. Great for the money and introduction 2 years ago. I had to rebuild the print head (disassemble, reassemble and refit) and made it up as I went along as I found the customer support practically nil. And that print head went out of stock, so examples were going for $170 from the UK, no thanks... It prints OK too, but if I wanted really precise high quality surfaces I'd use a more expensive one. For shed worthy machine parts it is OK. Filament via XYZ is expensive, and filament (especially the cool stuff like carbon fibre or copper insert) will be quite more exxy again (mine only PLA), so you won't end up using it on a production run of 600 widgets to amaze the world... Treat it like a prototyping machine and custom part design and it's all good.

It uses PLA and this does not have the strength for what I want to make next, so I looked into replacement (Prusa was probably where I was going to go), but then decided to bite the bullet and go with a full CNC. Some CNCs have a printer attachment/laser attachment etc. Learning curve on this is substantially steeper.

In going down the 3dp path, you'll eventually learn heaps about CAD programs (I started with 3d builder, free on Windows and really visual and "hands on" rather than the heavy duty professional CAD programs) and now have FreeCAD on Linux (costs 0$, Tux the penguin ftw) - lots of people like Fusion. You learn STL files, etc. It's a lot of fun, like Lego for adults. I still like my little Da Vinci, keep maintaining it and will still use it to prototype an idea.

Then there's the whole wonder of watching something build itself, love that bit.

[wodahs]

i did buy a XYZprinting 3D Scanner Pro 2.0 a few days ago and its in transit to have a play
have been looking at a few machines and their abilities and build sizes
yesterday ive stumbled across a Guider IIs that Russell talked about , apparently "its in good condition" and the seller is upgrading them self's and currently prepared to let me have it at 1700 (donno if thats good or not) new currently 2499
but am also currently looking at one of two 3D Printer (XYZ Da Vinci Pro 3-in-1) one of which has apparently been refurbish the other only purchased and apparently used a few times for a collage thesis both at around the 700
one of thhe reasons i thought id pick this as a hobby to pick up was like jaydee suggested i could always use it for some of the plastics for the ol zh fairlane also as needed in the future (vents n such)
edit:~ come to think of it currently i do have a broken c piller outer vent on her maybe i could use the other scanned an mirror image it to print one

[wodahs]

ok so i ended up buying a Guider IIs , new at a discounted price as it seems they were on sale atm
and due to the bloke selling the urgent sale second hand one here started playing games when i said id buy it where and when and in need a receipt for tax
first cam ~ oh i cant do a receipt , then it was oh i have others coming to look at it ..... tuesday can you wait till then , say what ok you can wait and ill buy some thing else

so now to start finding out the tricks and do nots

edit :~ now im going to need to push my network out to the shed too so i can have this out there
had wired the house with cat 6 every where and had a 16 port 8 PoE managed switch coupled with a Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC Pro Access Point
so now i think ill just need something to talk with the ubiquiti and have another switch in the shedto port out to anything (including the 3d printer) in the shed

[wodahs]

well the new toy turned up today now to work out where its going and maybe have a play
at least i hope to see what in the box and what i need to go get
im happy enough that i dont need to wire the shed with cat6 to put it in there as it turns out my wireless network from my ubiquiti booster is strong enough

[wodahs]

checking this out https://www.mosaicmfg.com/