3d printing getting advanced!

Has anyone checked out the makerbot z18? It looks promising.

I saw the presentation they gave at CES. My concern on a product like that is build stability as you start printing something tall. I'd almost prefer to separate my model into smaller pieces so if anything goes wrong I'm not starting from scratch again. The price tag wasn't too appealing either.

I did really like the built in camera functionality though. I'd love to be able to start a print and be able to keep an eye on it from my phone at anytime. The new snap on extruder was kinda neat too.

I imagine the price tag has to with Stratasys acquiring Makerbot. But if they have added their experience and quality to this model it could be more then worth it. I know I wish I had the Z18 when making my Cecil armor.

I don't know, its still a PLA extrusion printer, and I cant seem to get excited by them. The resolution is low, thin or flat pieces never come out very well, and you always end up needing to sand and fill parts that come out of these printers before the quality is good enough to use. If I had a part to print, I'd much rather send the file off to a specialised company with industrial nylon printers. To me, these things are like the 80s/90s printers that took the sheets of paper with a perforated edge. They could print a word document in a pinch, but you wouldn't dream of printing a photograph with them.

Advanced? Does is have soluble support?

If not.... it is not advanced.

That is what makes you feel 3-d printing is getting advanced? Go check out Bilogical 3-d printing that is some Star Trek Star Wars Shizzznit right there.

lol When they can literally peel off your face and print out a brand new one or a copy of any exsisting face ever seen, I think that would be where it becomes Advanced. or better when they can extract your lung or your heart or your ? and within 6 -12 hours print you a brand new one using some bio gel and dna from your own body to produce it, that is amazing.

All said and done I want a 3-d printer I`m willing to trade my first born even though he`s 18 and no longer new lol

Gphalen said:

All said and done I want a 3-d printer I`m willing to trade my first born even though he`s 18 and no longer new lol

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With a little Bio Gel and Dna you can print a new kid....Instant Baby

Until I can print myself a Ferrari...these are not advanced enough...

We have the Makerbot II. Looks like this new one has vastly improved the size and deff the UI. But since they failed to mention it, I bet it still takes bloody ages to print anything.

wiIIiam said:

I don't know, its still a PLA extrusion printer, and I cant seem to get excited by them. The resolution is low, thin or flat pieces never come out very well, and you always end up needing to sand and fill parts that come out of these printers before the quality is good enough to use. If I had a part to print, I'd much rather send the file off to a specialised company with industrial nylon printers. To me, these things are like the 80s/90s printers that took the sheets of paper with a perforated edge. They could print a word document in a pinch, but you wouldn't dream of printing a photograph with them.

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I completely agree with wiIIiam's assessment of FDM printers. We have one at work and the best you can hope for are really crude, striated prototypes. For my money I would stay away from FDM and go for the new SLA desktop machine from formlabs, Formlabs - High Resolution Desktop 3D Printer

The build area is much smaller but the resolution can't be beat.

I feel like right now we are in the Atari era of 3d printing. Very rapidly the technology is going to advance and hopefully in ten years we will all be able to afford a nice home polyjet

I haven't looked at all the specs on both now, but I just saw that the FormLabs product looks like the same tech that the new Full Spectrum Laser 3D printer is using. It's actually in KickStarter now and I think the units are going for about $2300. I've kind of had a blind eye towards 3D printing until recently because I work in such a fine scale, most of the time it would never be able to make a passable product for me. But the resin harening versions are looking much closer to where I'll probably jump in.

I'm glad to see some other companies making a similar product so that I have some options.

Avoid Makerbot and FSL, both companies are rubbish. Makerbot takes an open source design, makes a few tweaks then closes the designs and bumps the price up. Now they(Makerbot and Stratasys) are forcing smaller companies out of business with their overly broad patents. As for FSL, they have terrible customer service, pretty poor machines and will do there best to avoid repairing under warranty.

The form1 resin machines are fantastic and the UP! PLA style printer is pretty good too. The Reprap is a very good choice too as the start of the home 3d printing

Philly said:

Avoid Makerbot and FSL, both companies are rubbish.

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Mine is going strong with over 200 hours of print time on it. So I dont understand why you dont like it.

I came across an interesting page: Lost PLA Casting from 3D Prints.

Like "Lost Wax Casting", but with PLA plastic: Print the part in PLA, cast in Plaster of Paris, burn out the PLA and then pour aluminium into the plaster mould.

I suppose that the air pockets inside the prints help burn it out.
BTW, the parts that the guy printed were not perfect and the other one could just as well have been routed.

I've done a LOT of research on printers lately and while some folks manage to product nice results using prosumer machines, for my uses there isn't anything sub $10K that will do what I need it to.

Formlabs looked promising for a while, but the F1 doesn't really hold up imo when all is said and done. Too many failed prints and upkeep to be worth it. The company seems to have bad communication, are extremely far behind on delivery and if they go belly-up the F1 essentially becomes a paperweight. The current available resin for it also seems to be incredibly brittle.

I also looked into Ultimaker2 which seems to be the best FDM printer out there by a fairly wide margin, for doing larger simple pieces but I'm not really 100% sold on that either. I was planning to use it to help make the master for the Firefly VERA kit Morganthirteen and I are doing since sending out a job that big would cost major dollars. However, I'm finding that PLA is a chore to work with (and ABS shrinks and warps, so that is out). I had hopes of maybe trying HDPS but apparently there's talk of hazardous fumes when printing with it. (Goes for a lot of the printing materials, actually... not sure it's a good idea to have a box melting plastic in the office!)

I've also found that most companies offering printers are VERY sketchy when it comes to communication and being transparent on what their machines are capable of and how easy they are to use. There's too much obfuscation going on. The truth is that if everyone knew how much work it is to actually keep the things running there would be a lot less printers sold. The helmet on display in the Z18? I'd like to see it raw, as it's printing, so see what it REALLY looks like. (I'd also like to know how much experimenting and testing was needed to produce it in the first place.)

There's an Italian maker that got a bit of hype at the CES (DWS-lab) that has an interesting machine in the works, but again- there's talk and hype and there's actual truth of product. I e-mailed them a week ago asking for information and they have yet to respond.

With the commercial vendors I use, I know what I'll be getting and if a print comes out bad, I know they'll fix it. Yes, it's more costly up front than if I had printed at home but if you value time in money the difference is largely negated. If I save a week of work by sending out for a print, I can put that time to working on the next project...

Don't get me wrong, I love where the tech is going, but I'm not optimistic that it will get there as fast as people think or hope. (For one, there are a few important patents still being held that are stopping other companies from entering the marked on a large enough scale so that prices will come down.)

When we can get Objet 30 quality for under $2K, THEN we will be getting somewhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if we're still 5-8 years away from that.

Darth Lars said:

I came across an interesting page: Lost PLA Casting from 3D Prints.

Like "Lost Wax Casting", but with PLA plastic: Print the part in PLA, cast in Plaster of Paris, burn out the PLA and then pour aluminium into the plaster mould.

I suppose that the air pockets inside the prints help burn it out.
BTW, the parts that the guy printed were not perfect and the other one could just as well have been routed.

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I was doing this at mercury Marine 10 years ago. I was making custom props for the race team and pouring stainless in the molds. Two days start to prop.

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hi all
I have a rep2 from makerbot ..and after months of tweaking and upgrading and replacing stuff I finally got a decent machine
one of the great things about having these machines is that you can test your ideas prior to getting it outsourced for a much higher detail level of printing
heres an example of a recent test
now imagine making this model and sending it out to be printed ..one of the most difficult things is to make sure everything fits and the parts have all the holes and errors fixed . this is one of the big problems with 3d printing ..its knowing how to create the model ..this is a 1/6th scale plus the costs sky rocket if your prototyping to a company with high end systems
but my little replicator made a great job of it at 100 microns ...and all the parts on this are functional those pedals are smaller than your little pinky nail
so if you think they are not up too par take a closer look ....I can get a lot of detail in my prototypes ..sometimes I don't even send them out because the finish is totally good enough ..I think a lot of the skill is tweaking the model to get as much out of it as you can then ..taking time to test and tweak your printer to get the best out of it ...and I like many people feel utterly disappointed with maker bot ..but I learned a lot and learned to have even more patience when it comes to 3d printing ..(its reeeeellee slow)

These tweaks, I would love to hear about them and since you are apparently another 1/6 scale maker, do you use your's for head sculpts?

Hi koipond
well as for tweaks I had a friend make me a new extruder mechanism as the design on the makerbot was awful a delring plunger is possibly the worst way an extrusion system can work mine is now a constant pressure spring and bearing mechanism I also got a glass build plate and aluminum support arms for the build plate support arms , put heat extractors on the steppers ..replaced the extrusion cradle with an aluminum one also keeping your pla in a warm dry place helps i am using makerware again as it is stable and the print resolution is good now as for the 3d side I use netfabb basic to export obj files to stl ..this help show up any errors in the modelling ... and lastly I am not really a 1/6th builder it just happened to be a good size for the chopper so I can put an action man on it wearing doc martins and shaggy70's hair hehe

Hey is that a Fastback!!
I had one of those )