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3D Printer - Printrbot, etc

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ivymike

ivymike

Mechanical
Nov 9, 2000
5,653
Somebody pointed out to me that there are relatively inexpensive 3D printers on the market these days... and so I went out and bought one. I bought a Printrbot Plus kit (see ) and put the thing together. It took a few evenings. Now I've had the thing up and running for a week and a day, and after daily tweaking, modifying, upgrading, etc.. I'm finally starting to get good-ish parts off of it. It's definitely not a load file & print setup. I'm printing with ABS at the moment, and I hear that PLA will give me less troubles during printing (I always like the pla dishes at Thai restaurants, so that makes sense!) but that it'll be a brittle part in the end...which spoils the fun for me, since I'm not making D&D figurines.

Today I printed out a fan duct and fan mount (single object) to help cool the y-axis stepper motor, which was becoming too hot to touch during printing. The part was about 85mm by 80mm by 70mm, to fit an 80mm fan above and channel airflow around a 42mm motor body. I had to overcome some thermal distortion issues - either the corners would pull off the print table and the part would wobble (turning it into spaghetti as progressive layers printed cattywampus) or the corners would hold but the individual layers would pop apart and curl up. In the end I modified the part to include thin (removable) tabs at each corner to keep the corners stuck better, and staggered notches in the big walls to break up the layers into subsegments which I imagined would reduce the internal tension due to cooling by a fair bit. The thing didn't delaminate nor pop corners, so I guess it worked.

As I type it's printing a bracket to hold a 120mm fan for the extruder motor (I would've used another 80mm, but Best Buy had only two and I needed 3)

Does anyone else have such a gizmo (printer)? (and if so...care to swap pointers?)
 
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3D printing is something I've been thinking about for some time now, but I am apprehensive to get involved, as even though printers have become affordable, it seems that the materials for actually producing the model parts remain expensive. As you mention as well, I am unsure of how suitable for purpose any components I produced might actually be. I'm not sure I would have been able to solve your layer separation problem at the corners. I have also been unable to find the time necessary to do some basic research into making up even a short list of what printers would be worth considering further. Lastly, as I wouldn't have any specific job-connected use for it, so if producing 3D print objects turned out to be more expensive than I thought, I'd have to trash the whole idea, or try to turn it into a business, ... or something. Are you doing this for job, or profit related activities, or as a hobby? Would it be an affordable hobby? Why did you get involved in it? Anyway I love the idea of having a "minifactory" that could build anything, but I'm not so sure I would wind up building anything more than doll house furniture.

"People will work for you with blood and sweat and tears if they work for what they believe in......" - Simon Sinek
 
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or making aquarium pumps!

"People will work for you with blood and sweat and tears if they work for what they believe in......" - Simon Sinek
 
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Just because it sounded cool, really. I spent about a week pestering my coworkers for project ideas and then decided it would be a cool way to make party favors for my son's birthday...and maybe some cookie cutters.

There are a few product ideas I've had in mind for a few years and not pursued, with the printer on the desk I might just give 'em a try.

There's no way that my boss would ever spend a penny on anything I made on this printer, so it's all on me. Spools of ABS run about $45/kilo, which means that little parts are about $0.10 and ones the size of my hand might be a buck or two. I've so far used about $20 worth of material and made only 6 good parts and a giant pile of red spaghetti. Maybe a good future project would be a scrap recycling machine to melt my scraps and extrude them back into 3mm stock?
 
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You are on the slippery slope now. read "Makers" by Cory Doctorow, free download or $5 h/b, worth about that or slightly less.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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ABS is about 3 to $4/Kg for virgin resin, so the greater portion of the cost must me in converting, marketing, distribution and profit. Maybe that is why the printers are becoming cheap. Sell them at a loss to create a market for the consumables.

Regards
Pat
See FAQ731-376 for tips on use of eng-tips by professional engineers &
for site rules
 
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nah, I think printers are becoming cheap because of Kickstarter.com

So... how much for 3mm ABS filament on a spool? Here's the price to beat:
 
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The other day I put in an order for a Solidoodle 3 printer (
A co-worker has a Solidoodle and the quality of the parts he was bringing in had me sold. The material is pricy at $30-$45 / kg, but the slicing software has some pretty clever "fill" patterns that make for fairly sturdy parts that are still lightweight.

He and another co-worker are entering into a contest to design and build a plastic extruder that's capable of converting ABS pellets into 1.75mm diameter filament for <$250. The contest prize is $40k and a bunch of cool toys. The most promising thing is that the resultant design has to go open source, thus allowing "anyone" to build an extruder. What this will do to the prices of raw ABS, who knows.

Once I get it (~8 week lead time) and start printing some parts, I'll let you know how it goes!
 
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I thought that contest had already expired a year ago?

which slicer are you using? I used to use Slic3r, but have moved to Kisslicer recently.

 
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I'm playing with Slic3r right now (no printer yet!).

As I understand it, the contest registration goes to May 2013 and is still open.
 
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For my first project I'm working on a set of "instructional" models for teaching concepts of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing. My alma mater has me come back twice a year to teach solidworks to first/second year students, and I'm expanding it to GD&T in the fall.

The demo set is inspired by a set of blocks that my metrology instructor had in college. As I'm a very visual and very hands on person, I've yet to see a tool as effective at teaching GD&T (other than an angry machinist).

Hope to have some pics uploaded soon. Ultimately I'm planning to upload the set to Thingiverse.
 
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Which rev of Slic3r? Either 9.6 or 9.7 introduced a bug stopping retraction after creating support material...made for some very blobby parts. That was the bug that sent me to kisslicer. You ought to check it out too. Its a very different experience.
 
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justkeepgivener, that's a killer idea. VLPS also for:

"I've yet to see a tool as effective at teaching GD&T (other than an angry machinist)."
 
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I was just thinking that this would be a cool way to make an elliptical nut and bolt, one set assembled, one set disassembled. Or square, if that would be easier.

Another appliction would be for modeling as in model railroad layouts.
 
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