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squeegee started this discussion 11 years ago#41,027
i expect if y'all did you might have mentioned it before, but the prices have really come down on some of these. They are still not "household appliance" price yet, but i expect in the next year or so we'll start seeing a lot more drop under $500. it's quite likely that we'll be getting one in the near future at work, but they're not looking at any kind of consumer version. i've been giving a lot of thought to getting one and learning to use it because it could be useful to have some experience with them. plus they are cool as fuck.
That being said, locally Dallas has a maker space where offer classes on like welding and cnc stuff
and they have some 3d printers and teach people how to use them. I checked it out, but the night i went they were having a "closed to memebers only" meeting and i got a brief tour. it's a pretty big place actually. so i'll have to go back and see what'll cost to mess with 3d printer setups.
hamfist !t5TYQ9eJPs joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 1 hour later[^][v]#545,449
i ant one so i can print anime figures
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 1 minute later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#545,450
Someone should print a 3d printer.
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 42 minutes later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#545,452
My friend has 2 of them. Apparently the first lego he made with them was from a botched blueprint which creates a proprietary brick that only fits together with other bricks from the same blueprint. He ended up having to tweak it to make bricks that would fit with real legos/megablocks.
Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 1 hour later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,461
i want one though im not sure what it'd use it for
i had an idea for a business where it would operate in the sense that people would pay a business to use their array of 3D printers but apparently someone already thought of that idea and it wasn't actually a very good one
they operate a store as well but shit is so goddamn expensive, yeah dude lemme pay 40 bucks for a 1x1 inch cube, nice!!
squeegee (OP) replied with this 11 years ago, 4 hours later, 7 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,478
@previous (E)
yeah, 3D print Kinkos type places exist, there was/is one in dallas i heard of. But, i really doubt many consumers have much need for prototyping.
@545,452 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
that's cool. he must make custom shaped bricks. that's a neat use of a printer.
@545,449 (hamfist !t5TYQ9eJPs)
i want one to make plastic dies for tooling and molds for fiberglass/carbon fiber casts
Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 16 minutes later, 7 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,480
My work has been toying with getting 3D scanning rigs and printers. I'd love to get into it and play around in something like SolidWorks. There's talk of playing with 6-axis CNC stuff, but nothing has really materialized yet. (We mostly do design work: molding and casting in urethane, epoxy, and silicone; fiberglassing parts and molds; and sculpting prototypes in clay, Bondo, Play-Doh, spit, surfboard foam, and whatever else is handy.) I'll alert you if this 3D thing becomes a reality for me.
Anonymous G joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 7 minutes later, 8 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,481
I played with a 3d printer at a make place. It was ok, the guy taking the class taught how to draw simple shapes in a browser 3d modeler. He then converted the shapes to, I'm not sure, a path file or something. They are not solid plastic either, they have varying amounts of a hex or lattice work internal structure and a smooth outer shell.
This was the extruded or hot plastic wire from a reel type of printer. It was a very temperamental process, the room should be at a constant temperature, no breeze, low humidity etc. I was surprised to hear just how much those things affected the final print, especially at higher becresolutions, finer filaments and prints that took hours.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 11 years ago, 3 minutes later, 8 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,482
@545,480 (F)
sweet. we actually do molding with bondo and cast with various "resins" which i don't know the chemical names of. we've got mills but farm out cnc stuff to a partner. we've been looking at 3d scanning rigs for duplication purposes and it looks really promising, i wouldn't be surprised if we got a whole setup at work by the end of the year. it'll make impossible jobs possible, basically. i'm stoked about it, because i can see it allowing for work we never would have touched before. and since there's so little game in town we can charge a real mint for it.
oh yeah, the big problem with the extruded plastic type of printer is that the plastic they print in are relatively lightweight and actually kinda brittle. we'd need something that prints in a heavier plastic if we want to make "parts for use" and not just print dies for milling the parts.
but anyway, just having the ability to easily knock out a pattern without having to like mill it out of brass would be amazing. using a mill to make a die to then make other things is pretty labor intensive, but there can be a lot more hand work than just milling something too. so making a die can take all day
(Edited 5 minutes later.)
squeegee (OP) double-posted this 11 years ago, 11 minutes later, 8 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,483
@545,481 (G)
yeah, i've heard it's actually pretty easy to fuck up a print. maker spaces are pretty cool, no?
i could learn blacksmithing if i wanted too
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 11 years ago, 21 minutes later, 8 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,484
@545,452 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
I think you misunderstand what proprietary means. Lego is proprietary. Some design you find on the internet is just shit.
Anonymous F replied with this 11 years ago, 1 hour later, 9 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,486
@545,482 (squeegee) > sweet. we actually do molding with bondo and cast with various "resins" which i don't know the chemical names of.
Wow. We do casting, and I probably have leftovers of most of those resins on my pants right now, We still glass shit by hand, mostly motorcycle bodies and crap. But yeah, we're looking to 3D print some of the prototyping stuff one day. If I ever play with it, and I'll probably be the one to play with it if we get it, I'll make a thread.
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 11 years ago, 3 hours later, 13 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,531
@545,484 (H)
My point was that Lego is the standard that Megablocks are made to be compatible with, but the 3D model was only compatible with itself.
squeegee (OP) replied with this 11 years ago, 9 hours later, 22 hours after the original post[^][v]#545,680
@545,486 (F)
i don't do any of the casting or make any molds personally, we've got people who specialize in that but i'm versed in the process and it's all pretty low tech stuff. releasing compounds and bondo are like 90% of what they use for what we do. duplicating things is pretty easy, but mirroring a duplicated part is 100% impossible to do perfectly. we farm that out, actually, to someone that has those skills. probably these days they are scanning and then milling parts that are simply flipped by software. if not then they are literally doing it by some hand method (which i doubt). i'd love to be able to cut out the middle man and do that work in-house. And in a lot of instances the cost involved in making some parts is absurd because there's like 10 guys in the whole country that do the kind of work we require from time to time. and they are fucking proud of their work if their prices are any indication.