hawt

[Jordan Miller]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/b9creations/b9creator-a-high-resolution-3d-printer?ref=discover_rec



Jordan

[Sean McBeth]

OMG! This could be an actual, working 3D printer. I could get behind a 3D printer that ACTUALLY worked. And by "works", I mean "useful for completing projects". And by "projects" I mean "anything that isn't a 3D printer."

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Jordan Miller <jsmi...@seas.upenn.edu> wrote:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/b9creations/b9creator-a-high-resolution-3d-printer?ref=discover_rec



Jordan



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[Chris Thompson]

Every printer works if it's for a funding video and the inventor is in the room.

-- 

Chris Thompson

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[Sean McBeth]

but this one has so many fewer moving parts. How hard is it to get a single axis of movement right?

[Sean McBeth]

And no extruder jawn. How much of the time is spent just trying to get heat and flow and tension right in the extruder head?

[Chris Thompson]

Just as hard as it is to focus a projector perfectly? I dunno. Every printer breaks. Success is based on the ease of repair. 

The extruder is not so much a problem on Bronzebot. Money is the problem. I don't have any to buy nice machined pulleys, so I use the shitty cast ones.

-- 

Chris Thompson

Sent with Sparrow

[Sean McBeth]

The limitations of FDM as a general concept, let alone specific examples of printers, are pretty numerous. All FDM printers are garbage. The print resolution will never scale much past what we currently have, and the print size will also never scale well. It's just a simple matter of mathematics, the higher-res, more dense, wider, and taller you go, FDM gets exponentially slower.

[Jordan Miller]

FDM will always be the least expensive, though. That's why it was the initial focus of RepRap.

Photopolymer is expensive. Even the cheap "homebrew" ones don't talk about the lifetime of the liquid, how to keep the viscosity constant and prevent it drying out, how to clean it off the parts, how to dispose of it without killing fish or clogging your household plumbing. The glass surface functionalization required on the bottom plate for keeping it non-adhesive and on the top-plate for keeping it adhesive also wear down with each print. That glass surface chemistry is expensive and hard to do so you can expect significant markup costs on top of that for those plates.

If you've got $4000 lying around, you could also get the Veloso photopolymerization station:
http://www.indiegogo.com/veloso3dprinter

The Veloso one was supposed to be open source but he close-sourced it before releasing anything after he realized there was a solid market for his setup. What a joker.

The LemonCurry (what a horrible misnomer) is the RepRap variant of photopolymerization printers:
http://code.google.com/p/lemoncurry/wiki/main
http://reprap.org/wiki/Lemon_Curry

jordan

[Chris Thompson]

The resin printers are even slower and have the same support limitations.

Why are you shit talking something you've never used or shown any interest in?

ALL PRINTERS SUCK ALWAYS. But some make 3D objects, so we tolerate it slightly more.

-- 

Chris Thompson

Sent with Sparrow

[Adam Kaufman]

lolrus

[Sean McBeth]

All *things* suck, all the time, just some things suck more or less than others. Certain things have not yet reached a critical mass of suckitude to warrant complaining/doing something about it. Inkjet printers politically suck, but at least in their first year or two of life I can count on them to do what they claim to do. 3D printers, for all of the heartache I've watched you put into them, are apparently of extremely high suckitude.

And you are right, even with this thing, I wouldn't care to use it, because I doubt the software end is going to be any better either. I don't have the patience to sit there and noodle around with multiple prints of objects because there is no way of knowing ahead of time what the right settings are going to be for any particular model. I care because I hate having broken tools lie around. 

I would care to have an actually working, actually useful 3D printer, because if we did, maybe people would spend less time fixing them (and I count figuring out config settings as "fixing") and more time... I don't know, actually getting stuff done. So I see a problem in our space, and since some people seem to think that every hackerspace needs a 3D printer, can't imagine a space without one, what the hell is a hackerspace without a god damn 3D printer, it makes just getting rid of the problem impossible. So the next best solution is to fix the problem. And the problem is apparently that 3D printers cannot be counted on as a tool for project completion. 

If you can show me a bunch of useful things (i.e. not City Hall) that you have made that aren't 3D printer parts (like how History majors graduate and become History professors to graduate more History majors), and they have been made with a reasonable expectation of success (i.e. you're not sitting there, tweaking settings, printing numerous times until the thing comes out right), then I will eat these words. On paper, printed in ink. 

Or maybe I just have the concept wrong. Maybe people don't care to actually make things. Maybe all people want to do is dick around with Python scripts and config settings. If that's the case, great, play in that sandbox. But as soon as I can get to it, I'm destroying and discarding the Stratasys. Nobody is working on it, it's taking up space, and I already promised to do it. I don't care who so-and-so said they'd take it. They haven't, and as I said back in February, I sincerely doubt it WILL happen. Oh yeah, that does bring another issue up that I need to post about... but I'll carve it off to its own thread.

[David Morfin]

They were talking about this a lot in #reprap for the last few months, debating on what resin to use, etc.  It is a bit slow, and it looks to have different limitations on the shapes of the things that it can make, but there is always a place for multiple technologies that complement eachother.

I certainly plan to use my printer to print things other than a 3D printer once I settle down on a model.  I'm definitely leaning towards ordbot right now, if I can find somebody to make the parts (i.e. if the inventables thing looks like it is really going to happen in a reasonable time frame).

[Dave]

I use my Stratasys at work many times a week to make very functional and durable structural parts, with nearly no maintenance ever. It's an old one too. The homebrew ones need to catch up, but they seem to be making progress.

Photopolymer-based printing is cool (older than FDM by quite a bit I believe), but has many limitations as well. The resins are often sensitizing, so you could find yourself with a debilitating allergy to it if you come into contact with the uncured stuff. The support structure generally has to be built into the part (not a huge deal). One big downside is that the resins slowly cure more over time with exposure to UV, and eventually become brittle, discolored, and break easier.

Still, they are no doubt cool.