In the present day, however, things are a bit more mundane, with 3D printing still very much relegated to the extremes. Immense manufacturing facilities and businesses fabricate 3D items all the time, while hobbyists toil away on small plastic parts for weekend projects or the occasional Maker’s Faire exhibit. Both avenues are expensive, but on the hobbyist front there’s a recent development that might alleviate some of the buy-in, should you be interested in some home workshop fabrication.
For about $US500, you can pick up a promotionally priced eMAKER Huxley RepRap 3D printer, and begin pumping out plastic parts in a range of colours to your heart’s content. Only 100 such units will be made available at this price, so if you’re one to be jonesing for at-home 3D printing, best get moving. [eMAKER via Boing Boing]
Mike
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:16 AMI’ve just built a CNC machine that handles laser cutting, milling and also 3D printing with the ability to change heads/spindles. The work area is 500x500mm (which is probably a little overkill). I use it to mill custom car badges and plates. All up the parts cost about AU$700. This included a 4-axis Toshiba control board, 24v/15amp power supply, 4x NEMA23 steppermotors, guide rods and linear bearings as well as the 3 lead-screws (which were the most expensive part). Then there was the frame and other bits an pieces like bearings and wiring.
If you dont want to muck around building your own, absolutely look at the eMaker, or the machines at LumenLabs.com and MakerBot.com
Their kits still require a PC and the control board.
My honest opinion after recently going down this path…is go for a CNC milling machine over a 3D printer. DIY 3D printers dont produce the finish or strength that a milled item will have. Depends what you’re doing though :)
Ollie
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 1:02 PM…there’s also various shapes that a CNC mill can’t produce though. If they did everything, then 3D printers wouldn’t have been invented.
Then there’s 3D printers producing investment casting plugs on a large scale, something you could do with a mill but is inefficient.
Personally, I’d have both =)
Comic Book Guy
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 10:35 AMI realise mills cant do every shape, especially detailed interior cutouts, but I’ve milled a solid aluminium Ferrari badge and lettering with a perfect enough finish that it was fitted directly to a car…I make machine and car parts that require no cleaning or touchups and fit exactly as required. But a 3D printer will give you globby imperfect items only really useful for prototyping and testing, and of course only uses melted plastic. Again, depends what you are making :)
3D printers are great for random shapes, but wont give a production finish, or use different materials.
Mills are great for final finish and cutting anything from steel to foam, but limited complexity, unless you move to a 5 axis machine :)
Mike
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 10:36 AMlol, it used my secret identity’s name ;)
bcarl
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:17 AMAnother CNC based machine is 2bot’s ModelMaker. The work area is 2″x12″x12″ and you can make any size model by tiling them together. The software does the tiling for you so the end user experience is as close to printing as anybody can. Plus, the materials the machine uses are so inexpensive that most models costs around $1.
http://www.2bot.com/product-info