3D Printing, And Its Coming Impact On The Industry And Hobby.

[Mr King]

I posted this on Facebook. It is 3D printed, and then it got me to thinking of the impact cheap, mass produced, 3D printers will have on the modeling industry and hobby. I imagine it is going to be pretty damn significant.

[Ifor]

I'm sure I read somewhere that Airbus use 3d parts? I certainly hope it makes kits cheaper, it's anyone's guess how youngsters are able to afford to get into hobby.

I'm just wondering if they'll ever come up with a 3d printer for organic materials, I could the make copy of she who has to be obeyed without a certain facial orifice! But wait a minute, that means someone could produce hundreds of her. Feel a bit sick now, just going to lay down.

[Ssnake]

At this point the variety of printing materials, the cost of the printer itself, its finicky setup and maintenance, and the limited resolution of the prints make it uninteresting for small miniatures (e.g. inch-sized human figures); larger objects with smooth surfaces and no undercuts are quite feasible already.

 

That said, I agree with the trend - it's only a matter of time.

[Wiedzmin]

working with same things in Russia, but based on 3d scans

Edited September 6, 2015 by Wiedzmin

[Ssnake]

Are these printed?

Certainly not with a consumer grade printer...?!

 

Laser scan, then creating a plastic mold, I can certainly imagine that. But the gun barrel is way too thin and delicate to be 3D printed from ABS or similar.

[Wiedzmin]

it's cast(neighboring company is engaged in this) IIRC(our company make only 3d and can print 3d in gypsum form) but we have printer too, it's not laser scan, photogrammetry scanner

[Fritz]

Are these printed?

Certainly not with a consumer grade printer...?!

 

Laser scan, then creating a plastic mold, I can certainly imagine that. But the gun barrel is way too thin and delicate to be 3D printed from ABS or similar.

 

SLA can do this level of detail but this is clearly cast.

[Mr King]

Think of the custom models that can be made, and the kind of abstract minutia modelers can make for their models and dioramas with a 3D printer and some know how.

[Ssnake]

...except that we're not there yet; by far not. At least for 1:35 and smaller scales. Buildings, building parts (ruins), boulders, surfaces - yes. But the amount of effort to create the digital model first is disproportionate. The whole 3D printing business offers the biggest benefit in small scale serial production where you don't have the enormous costs of injection mold creation yet want to produce more than a single specimen. The individual diorama may not profit that much unless you have access to a 3D model library that is actually designed for 3D print (closed surfaces everywhere, no unsupported structures, size limits for the individual printer, ...)

 

Then you have the issue of printers currently neither being "foolproof" for the average user (printer calibration, temperature management, quality of moving parts (particularly the feed and the spindle, ...) nor cheap enough to allow for a larger target group than 3D printing enthusiasts and hobbyists with too much money.

 

The concept of 3D printing is enticing at first sight, but in practice we're not even where the nine pin needle printer was for consumer home printing in the mid 1980s, let alone the "affordable color laser printer".

[Mr King]

Right....that is why the title of the thread features the word "coming". We are not there yet, but I think the writing is on the wall. Amateurs churn out tons and tons of 3D modelling for hobbies like video game modding, I imagine once the technology is there and cheap for public access, there will be quite a community that springs up around 3D modeling specifically for 3D printers and it will readily bleed over into the world of hobbyist modeling.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Mr King

[TTK Ciar]

Printing in wax or LDPE would be great for making molds for sand-casting metal parts.

[Guest Jason L]

If you've got $1000 to burn you can get a pretty decent machine that'll print down to .3mm resolution out of PLA. Depending on what you're doing with it, you can easily justify/recoup that money in a month or so. I've made some great use of parts prototyped in PLA.

 

Not sure how that applies to the economics of modelling, where you can't really deal with the surface finish issues of price-accessible units.

 

I'm paying a student of mine a bit of cash to churn out a couple of printers over the summer. Kid is a mechanical genius.

 

My real issue is the range of plastics you can use. Some of the glass reinforced stuff is pretty decent, but otherwise meh.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Jason L

[Guest Jason L]

My last boss (whom I shall not name for he is a shameless self publicist) was banging on about how wonderful 3d printers were a good 7 years ago, before they were widely known. And he is right, they are a remarkable machine. Where I started to wonder what he was smoking is when he talking about future examples that would be able to replicate themselves without human intervention. Think it has a more an interesting premise for a PK Dick novel than actual reality though...

 

There are a couple of 3D printer designs which rely on 3D printed parts, and 3D printing upgrades to upgrade your 3D printer is pretty common these days. The Star Trek replicator is basically a molecular 3D printer. Nano-machine self assembly and printing has been a trope for over a generation of fiction.

 

The thing is, why is this terribly interesting? Machine tools have been making machine tools for literally hundreds of years. The story of the conventional machine tool is less precise machines making a follow on generation of machine that is more precise, more rigid, more powerful, and so on until today.

 

Conventional/subtractive machining will also never become obsolete. There are always going to be situations where it's cheaper to cut.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Jason L

[TTK Ciar]

Indeed, it sounds like those locomotive folks to whom Stuart linked are using both, printing and chipping methods.

 

From post #416:

Put a large lump of polystyrene under a huge milling machine, load in a cutting programme, turn on the machine and run for cover! What are you left with? 1 A huge pile of polystyrene bead waste 2 A pattern for a Patriot Outside Cylinder! Picture from Kevin West.

[Lieste]

Small, limited 'smallness' of parts in X-Y, but looks really interesting... It seems eminently affordable (order of magnitude lower than existing designs), and almost worth a punt as a neat toy... Resolution is high in the vertical plane, and it uses one of the standard spool sizes (the slightly smaller one IIRC).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiko3d/tiko-the-unibody-3d-printer/posts/1253846



Perhaps more interesting in the longer term was the new technology that hardens the model out of a liquid bath as it is raised, much faster than the additive methods build up their models. Though I have a feeling it is currently outrageously expensive for consumer applications. (Carbon3D).

For the conventional 'flat bed' printer, there is a multi-filament head "Palette" which feeds the existing extruder head with a custom filament made on the fly from 4 different source filaments merged end-end at the appropriate lengths to place the correct filament in the correct area of the model. *If* it works as demonstrated it would permit multi-colour printing (or circuit printing (etc)) from any simple printer. (Still the several thousand dollar price point for the basic machine and the additional cost for the head, make this a spendy prospect).

"Protocycler" is a potentially interesting filament extruder which can use plastic pellets to produce filament on demand in a potentially wider range of colours, and at a significantly lower per-spool/per-kg cost (roughly $5 per kg, vs $50). It can also shred waste materials from failed prints/print support structures etc, and use them to create new filament.

[Guest Jason L]

There are going to be lots of extruders that turn pellet/punchies into filament for very competitive costs per kg that will be coming to market.

 

For $200, I get one in a hearbeat even if I had other printers, but I don't kickstart.

[APF]

Well, we have of those riprap copys here and it's sort of meh! PLA isn't too bad (lower melting point) but ABS is usually only doable for special models. After all the fabreication is some sort of welding thin strands of plastic wire on on top of the other, so what you get is a hot upper part of the model on top of an allready-cooled lower part and therefore lots of warpage once the whole model is cold. Looks quite nice as long as it need not fit, and countersunk screw holes look as if some drunk bastard hand-crafted them with a chisel. They remind me of the time my then-boss wanted to buy a tape-caster for SOFCs until I told him that labor costs until there's enough expertise to use it is probably the expensive part

 

I'll pass for at least another five years.

[Guest Jason L]

Well, we have of those riprap copys here and it's sort of meh! PLA isn't too bad (lower melting point) but ABS is usually only doable for special models. After all the fabreication is some sort of welding thin strands of plastic wire on on top of the other, so what you get is a hot upper part of the model on top of an allready-cooled lower part and therefore lots of warpage once the whole model is cold. Looks quite nice as long as it need not fit, and countersunk screw holes look as if some drunk bastard hand-crafted them with a chisel. They remind me of the time my then-boss wanted to buy a tape-caster for SOFCs until I told him that labor costs until there's enough expertise to use it is probably the expensive part

 

I'll pass for at least another five years.

 

Have you tried a heated base plate? I've only made relatively squat stuff that's mostly hollow. Came to acceptable tolerance.

[Lieste]

There are going to be lots of extruders that turn pellet/punchies into filament for very competitive costs per kg that will be coming to market.

 

For $200, I get one in a hearbeat even if I had other printers, but I don't kickstart.

Kickstart is long over... the product is coming to market soon (though there will be some time before excess product is available to purchase, as there was a significant take up in the fund raising).

 

Keep an eye out for it when it goes retail though.

[APF]

 

Well, we have of those riprap copys here and it's sort of meh! PLA isn't too bad (lower melting point) but ABS is usually only doable for special models. After all the fabreication is some sort of welding thin strands of plastic wire on on top of the other, so what you get is a hot upper part of the model on top of an allready-cooled lower part and therefore lots of warpage once the whole model is cold. Looks quite nice as long as it need not fit, and countersunk screw holes look as if some drunk bastard hand-crafted them with a chisel. They remind me of the time my then-boss wanted to buy a tape-caster for SOFCs until I told him that labor costs until there's enough expertise to use it is probably the expensive part

 

I'll pass for at least another five years.

 

Have you tried a heated base plate? I've only made relatively squat stuff that's mostly hollow. Came to acceptable tolerance.

 

To be honest I'm a onlooker right now, and what I did see was both fascinating (the few times it worked) and OMG (most of the time). Yes, the printer has a heated base plate and those who play with it tried all sorts of magic (put some film on the plate, put no film on the plate, higher temps, lower temps etc.). By now I think it'd probably be the best course to heat the whole printing room to a temperature close to the melting point of the material so that the whole deposition is done as near to isothermal as possible and cool the whole object down slowly afterwards. It shouldn't stick to the base plate for this to work, of course.

 

But right now external printing (ex. shapeways) is so cheap there has to be a really good reason to do it yourself. Like hobby or something like this.

Edited July 10, 2015 by APF

[Ssnake]

Also, Shapeways gives you a wider range of materials.

[Roman Alymov]

last winter we have installed 3d-printed detail (generator leads separator) into Kubinka's Pz III. Device used for it was 3D printer self-assembled by one of our members from ready-available components....

[Mr King]

last winter we have installed 3d-printed detail (generator leads separator) into Kubinka's Pz III. Device used for it was 3D printer self-assembled by one of our members from ready-available components....

 

That is really awesome.

[Colin]

[PCallahan]

Also, Shapeways gives you a wider range of materials.

 

I buy a lot of 1/285 models from Shapeways. Right now, the technology isn't quite up to the standards of the better cast materials. If you order items in their highly-detailed materials, they look great, but still aren't really smoothed. If you use the cheaper plastic, it just isn't worth doing.

 

That said, the quality of models available on the site is often excellent, and the material and print quality seems to improve pretty consistently. I suspet that within two years it will at least be as good as cast material.

 

Pat

 

Here are some models that I've painted up. They are designed by "Masters of Military" and printed with the best quality materials.