Home Rapid Prototyping

[Giblet]

I have been considering purchasing one of these small rapid prototypers for some time. I wsa thinking as a small business venture, for local inventors to be able to make a physical mockup of their work, be it art, or a product of some kind.

I have a couple of things I would like to make as well to attempt to market. Having something in your hand is better than a drawing.

Who here has some knowledge that could help me in this quest? I know the machines have been getting better and cheaper. I can google as well as anyone but I assume that some people here have worked with them or maybe there is a full on RP geek here.

I am not looking to make a million, but I figure at this point in the life of RP there is a window right now to make money. It will be likely a generation or two before anyone considers these as a regular appliance or peripheral. Much like when I owned an external SCSI CD burner in 97. I was able to make it's money back, without even resorting to piracy. Burning CD's all day for local bands while the cost of purchasing one was still prohibitive for most bands.

Now you can get a whole PC with burner for less than I paid for the SCSI.

[flynfrog]

what would you like to know? I would recommend a Z corp machine or low cost and flexibility. http://www.zcorp.com/en/home.aspx

[Jersey Tom]

Depending on the type of rapid prototyping you're doing the machines, and the input materials can be very pricey.

Then again who am I to talk.. buddy and I just bought a vertical machining center..

[Giblet]

So it appears from them it would be about a 20k to 50k USD investment for a low end mono to middle of the road color output.

Funny how the cost is as low as 10 cents per cubic cm for material output.

Do you have any direct experience with them, ie this brand?

edit: thanks Tom. I hope to have customers swallow material costs, like any building

[Carlos]

There are some DIY machines that can be built for about 500USD.
I can't verify any of the content,have no experience with rapid prototyping, I just did a search with the idea of DIY, it struck me that any machine you can buy, some ingenious people have thought to do the same as a do it yourself project. There's a lot of very smart and industrious people out there beyond my internet window on the world



Parts Produced.

Related Links
http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
http://www.kith-kin.co.uk/shop/reprap/
http://www.prototypezone.com/rotational ... ng-machine
http://www.prototypezone.com/

This next link is just interesting
http://www.solidthinking.com/morphogenesis/

Tell me how you come along with the project,if you build 1 you might build as well build 2 . I may like one

[nfa]

several years back, ZCorp ran a promotion, making one part of your design for free. I believe the maximum allowed dimensions were 30cm x 30cm x 20cm.

Anyway, I submitted a scaled-down wheel design and was quite impressed by the result (mono colour, fairly accurate). The printout details put the cost of materials at approximately $30USD.

[PlatinumZealot]

You have 3D systems..

http://www.3dsystems.com/products/index.asp

[Ian P.]

An alternate jump directly to a finished part....

http://www.emachineshop.com/

I have not used them (cross border issures, thanks to the Cdn Govt.) but this outfit has been around for a few years.

[stolenmojo]

the type of machine certainly depends on what you intend to use the models for. like everything it's way more complicated than advertising makes it seem.

if you merely need decent models that couldn't be used in an assembly or were very tough the 3d printers are perfectly fine. this would be your lower cost "art". once you figure you want to actually use parts you need to be able to utilize materials like polycarb plastics and now you are in the heavy price range. the more flexibility you need in materials the more cost you have in the machines. stratasys makes a FDM machine (dimension) which on cost is similar to a small vertical CNC machine and will do decent materials, build size, and speed. the catch is the accuracy is a little off in comparison to their machines that cost 10x that much. in terms of the big suppliers this is the cheapest thing i've seen. the big SLA, LS, or FDM machines are going to cost more than a nice home purchase and require a couple of people to fully operate, clean parts, and finish parts.

i'm not a RP geek, just a motorsports engineer that is actually currently shopping for one of these machines for my team. and we use a lot of RP stuff for various projects.

[Dragonfly]

I am afraid a cheap or DIY machine is good for only making what I'd call '3D material sketches' or plastic details which are not very durable and do not require high accuracy like a mechanical part. Melted plastic depositing method is the least accurate.
Laser sintering of powdered polymer or bonding powdered substance with jet sprayed bonding agent (like ink jet printers do) produce much more precise details. But require accuracy of the mechanical part and expensive electronic devices so even DIY will not be low cost.
For five years now I've been digging deep into DIY CNC router making, built two machines and gathered a lot of knowledge both on the mechanical and software side. In the mechanics aspect they are very similar, if not the same, as the 3D printers. A 3 (or better 4) axis router is capable of producing real machine parts not only from plastic but metal too. Not that fast and not that easy though.

[Callum]

I'd make sure that there is not - or there will not soon be - a 'fab lab' in your area. It's likely that they may have good machines which you may not be able to compete with on cost/quality.

[flynfrog]

I am afraid a cheap or DIY machine is good for only making what I'd call '3D material sketches' or plastic details which are not very durable and do not require high accuracy like a mechanical part. Melted plastic depositing method is the least accurate.
Laser sintering of powdered polymer or bonding powdered substance with jet sprayed bonding agent (like ink jet printers do) produce much more precise details. But require accuracy of the mechanical part and expensive electronic devices so even DIY will not be low cost.
For five years now I've been digging deep into DIY CNC router making, built two machines and gathered a lot of knowledge both on the mechanical and software side. In the mechanics aspect they are very similar, if not the same, as the 3D printers. A 3 (or better 4) axis router is capable of producing real machine parts not only from plastic but metal too. Not that fast and not that easy though.

Would you mind writing up what you have learned? It makes threads like this a nice reference. Also look how far this tech has come in 5 years.

[Dragonfly]

Even if I tried, it would take a long time to write and nevertheless will be quite incomplete as this will be my personal 'invention of the bicycle' . There are dozens of dedicated forums on CNC machines in general and particularly for 3D printing too.
The largest one I know so far: http://www.cnczone.com/forums/forum.php
I literally got lost there and almost gave up initially . Now I write from time to time but mostly follow and read.
Here, I think, we will diverge quite from the forum's theme.
Rapid prototyping and even part manufacture is used in contemporary F1, especially in the aerodynamics of the car, but my guess is that their machinery is at the leading edge of technology.

[rjsa]

I have ran a couple Solid-Scape (now a subsidiary of Stratasys) machines for ten years, sold a few too.

My advice would be hire as service. Machines are expensive, high maintenance. The processes are messy. You need to run the machines hard for them to pay themselves. And each technology has pros and cons, no single one is the solution for all the possible needs.

There is a long way ahead yet until they get close to be useful, easy to use home appliances.

After I closed down the business I have used shapeways a few times with 100% success on personal projects. There must be more available.

[scottracing]

I used to work on additive layer systems for aerospace predominantly, producing prototype parts on EOS machines out of Nylon. One of the most interesting things that the team produced was a full 3d printed bicycle including all the bearings.
A lot of the teams use 3D systems machines to print wind tunnel models and sometimes small aero updates which can be bonded onto the carbon assemblies.

One new interesting machine which is low priced $5000 is the mark forged thermoplastic carbon printer, im looking into it for maybe some small projects at home, but as people have said above its cheaper and easier to use already setup companies or lease a decent stratasys polyjet machine, shapeways is very good and also other companies like laserlines can give quick and reasonable quotes.