Ladies and gentlemen. Brace yourselves for owning the sweetest printer ever created. These have been around for the past decade or so, but they were priced at around $100,000. Now, according to reports, a company called Desktop Factory is planning on introducing a consumer version of the 3-D printer for around 5k at the end of this year, and another company 3D Systems thinks they can have one for around 2,000 in 3-5 years. What does this mean for the future of the laserjet/inkjet printer? Does this mean that something else will replace the jet printer and make them obsolete? Will this spell doom for businesses that craft small parts in China to sell them in America? If consumers can simply print one off at home, then what will be the use of businesses that craft these items? The first thing that came to mind when I read this is that I hope you can use this to make car parts with. Wouldn't that be awesome. Here's a link that shows you how it works. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/printers...e-almost-ready-to-invade-your-home-258582.php
I remember when PCs were five grand.This technology would be great for making aluminum casting molds.
These work in plastic as far as I know. Pretty cool. Not really priced for the home user but I could see a small job shop getting one to compete with the big boys. Our local Tech School has one that is made available to small businesses through a state run program. It's pretty cool stuff. Since you are working with plastics (Polymers) I would like to see how the price of the part compared to a CNC made part.
About 15 years ago I was prototyping a injection molded clothing stud setting machine (yes, like that dorky apprentice lady hawks on TV). It was cost prohibitive to do it then, it was over $5K.
under 5K! that is cheap. We used to use them a lot in architecture school, since a lot of students would experiment with buildings with organic freeform shapes, this was a great way to build physical 3d modelS of your project. I think the guy we used to go to spent like 40K for his machine. He probably made it back though because he would do huge massing models for frank gehry's architecture office (the office that designed the curvy disney concert hall bulding). The size was limited to 8x8x8" though. The first ones he had would make the models out of powder and starch or something, the other machine he had would use an ABS plastic "thread" which was way stronger than the powder stuff. Something like this would be perfect for making molds etc. for smaller custom parts like shifter knobs, tailights (you could make a mold and pour it out of resin), molds for cast aluminum stuff, like club plaques etc, really your imagination is the only limitation.
Speaking of CNC machines, have you seen this one? One of my architecture nerd friends sent it to me. Not a bad price either... http://www.sears.com/sr/javasr/product.do?vertical=TOOL&pid=00921754000&adCell=P2&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes
I wonder how much the cartridges will be!! LOL!! A company that I used to work at considered "rapid prototyping" (another name for 3D printing basically) and we were going to buy one to work with our SolidWorks software. $35K! Refills were like $1000 or something each. They came in and gave us samples of our products "printed out" and it was impressive. Ended up not being beficial to us, but it was neat to see the product produced. I think the biggest problem is the actual printing volume. Even the really expesive ones can only print out a part that's so big in size. Will be neat to see what comes out though. Might be something worth having for business reasons.
The Jalopy Journal
