Can I have one please?

[flat broke]

Check this out:

http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/...tml?vid=944641

I wonder how long the Chinese will take to "duplicate" the technology and sell it back to us at 1/3 the price?

[-pru-]

Thanks for the link! Reverse engineering for ~$3000! Now I wonder how much the "printer" runs?

[jerry freeman]

The smallest printers start at $18,000 and go up from there. You can use them in you office if you want. They are pretty cool machines for prototyping parts.

Jerry

[rmccown]

Want want want want want want want want

[PaulT]

The thing that seemed coolest was that the cresent wrench was made as one piece but worked somehow? How did they do that?

Paul

[dc]

I still can't wrap my brain around the steam engine that was essentially carved out of one piece and is completely functional with no assembly.

Unbelievably cool.

[rmccown]

From what I've seen of these things, they use a kind of plastic that will dissolve in a chemical bath, and use that to 'space' the bits that are all assembled. So it comes out of the 'printer' as one piece, but after the bath, the 'filler' dissolves,and you have a working part.

[TimW]

F1 teams have been using stereo lithography to create their wind tunnel model test pieces. The material that is used from the 3d printers is not very robust, but does allow fit & interference assessment in 3D rather than 2D on a screen. You can have the pieces plated, by my sponsor , so they are more durable for more sophisticated use. The wind tunnel pieces are generally plated before use.

Tim

[cooleyjb]

I used one of those scanning dinosaur bones in grad school. The printer we used made the stuff out of a potato based material.

Our hand operated scanner with it's tripod and arm was ballpark 75k.

Very cool stuff.

[PaulT]

I get it now. It is building the item up not cutting away from a bigger block. The nozzle must have two materials it out output, stuff that stays and stuff that will dissolve in the bath. There must also be some minimum clearance then.

Very Cool
Paul

[Steve Demeter]

Stereo Lith is very old (early 1990's) technology.

3D laser scanning is not that new.

And the Chinese have been making knock off cars for some time.

Autoweek had an article by a guy who specializes in protecting legitimate manufacturers from knock offs.

someone told him about this Chinese outfit and he asked about several cars. No problem here is the price was the response.

Then he asked them a toughie (A Maybach IIRC)
2 days later the response was would you like long or short wheelbase.

[Bob Coury]

We sub out this kind of stuff at work. Very cool. A lot of companies use these to reverse engineer spare turbine parts.

[Rick Kirchner]

I watched a 1st gen stereo litho machine several years ago. We have a couple of 'em in the shop here. One makes parts out of stacks of paper by burning the excess away. Another makes the plastic parts. There's a surface plate in a bath of liquid plastic. the plate sits with a thin layer of the liquid on the surface. Two lasers (the stereo part) fire and where they impinge the plastic cures. A layer is deposited and then the table sinks a couple thousandths of an inch and the process repeats for that layer. When done, the table comes back up and your part is standing there like a statue.

The plastic is pretty brittle.

[Jonathan Hirst]

FB - we have that same unit at the University and a 3D scanning camera as well. It is the same idea as what that gentleman was demonstrating however there is usually some amount of data clean up required on setups that use the stand alone rotating podium for supporting the object being scanned (like in the video). It isn't exactly a scan and print operation as the video indicates.

Before Christmas we were messing around with scanning our heads and making models of custom fit helmet inserts.

We also spent some time comparing different software programs that would import the cloud of data points and correctly model those points into 3D surfaces. In most cases, one program was better at interpreting the point cloud yet another was functionally better at handling CAD surface models.


I will bring over a piece next time I see you.



Jonathan

[Keith Carter]

I have an SLA'd Porsche 911 and Godzilla on my monitor at work.

We have a 3DSystems unit that we got when I first started working for my company in 1996 or so. The resins used have come a long way, but still not perfect. Really trick though that the 3D scanner is less than $3k. It's only going to get cheaper too! Pretty soon, you'll be able to put something in a little box and have a duplicate pop out on the other end sitting on your desk right next to your color laser printer.

[WRD]

Heres another story for you.

We used these things in F1 all the time, mainly for wind tunnel parts, they would just bash out widgets, flip ups, all the other stuff, tape them on to the model, run a test, change them out and on, and on, and on...... We even had one that sintered together Aluminium particles and we actually ran these parts on the car, speed sensor brackets etc..... One day we were joking about putting cocoa powder in there and making F1 Christmas presents for our friends!!!!!!

Anyway, in 2000 we were having oil pick up problems in the gearbox so we used one of these machines to make a complete gearbox case, the style that Rick talks about above with the layers, but out of some kind of resin, can't remember exactly what.

So, we sent this thing out and had it machined, fitted it up with some internals and put it on a dyno in the R+D department. We dyed the oil red and filmed it while we rotated this thing through all kinds of angles to simulate the G-loads. Obviously it wouldn't be a test if we didn't spin it at full speed so we had one of these cases with an 18000 RPM input while we are all standing around watching it to figure out the oil flow!!! Probably not the most sensible thing in the world but it worked, we ended up with a system that held gearbox oil pressure for 98% of a lap at Barcelona that year, it only dropped out in that final right hander onto the start finish straight. I think I have a picture of this somewhere, I'll try and find it, It was really spectacular when it was running!!!!!

[mousecatcher]

if you are lucky enough to be in norcal you can use techshop's printer (http://techshop.ws/).

[Billy Wight]

Rapid prototyped plastic parts are nice for fit checks (especially with injection molded parts) and wind tunnel parts, but electron-beam melted Titanium parts can be made in a similar process and are usable in structural applications. Typically a bit pricy though...

http://synergeering.com/ebm.php