| The Breakroom > The Water Cooler |
| 3D printing |
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| Joules:
Alas vtsteam, I have not cast anything but should have said lost wax style, not implied lost foam. The plastic is too dense to even contemplate molten metal burn out, even as a shell print. The best I could attempt here is burn out plaster mould then cast in lead.... An ideal gear material :lol: Anyone local to team up with for some lost wax style PLA casting experiments ? http://3dtopo.com/lostPLA/ |
| Joules:
picclock, not sure if this one is outside your budget or a bit too big. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/e3dbigbox/the-e3d-bigbox-3d-printer Its a project E3D are involved in. I should have first hand experience of one in December if the project runs to plan. My mates getting one, it looks more promising in perspex than plywood. Best of all it will be Open Source after the Kickstarter. |
| awemawson:
That looks quite a beast - I hope it comes to fruition as it looks the sort of thing I'm looking for. |
| vtsteam:
Joules, it seems to me that that a mold melt-out filament material should be pretty easy to do, actually, since the pattern needs no special strength or longevity and the temperature for the extruder can be moderate. The main requirement being that material be able to melt (and burn) out of an investment mold completely with no ash or residue, and ideally do so with low fumes. Recovery for recycling would be nice, so actually a filament isn't the ideal form, rather, a hot chamber. Seems like somebody ought to develop that, if they haven't already. I'd like to see someone here develop a DIY 3D printer using an available commercial head, since the rest of the machine is straightforward. I don't get why they are generally built so flimsy compared to, say, a simple CNC router. Welded square steel tube for the base structure, and lightweight but high stiffness traveling components -- aluminum or even epoxy coated box section birch ply structure for the gantry would have very high specific modulus. Basically light aircraft construction, would be the way I'd go. It seeems people are enamored of the concept of the machines building their own components so they try to design complex plastic structures, but plastic is so elastic it seems a bad idea to me. I realize birch is considered antiquated in our so-called high tech society, but it does have very good stiffness and fatigue properties compared to other materials, at low density, and I personally have no prejudices against mixing materials to achieve a superior performance goal. Wood can also, depending on the design, do a good job of damping the ringing that seems to be a problem |
| picclock:
Hi Joules That's interesting, though I think a bit too large for me. I notice it uses the same head as the Prusa I3, along with 2 Z motors. Research on the internet has confirmed that unless you mount the prusa on something flat it will have to be recalibrated every time its moved. I know a guy who cuts stone kitchen tops to size and he has loads of scrap pieces in his yard. As we are likely to order our next kitchen tops from him I would think a granite or synthetic stone base would sort out that issue. The other thing I didn't like was that the end stops used on these machines are microswitches. Replacing these with opto sensors, especially the smd variety will give orders of improvement. Likely only really necessary on the z axis. Just need more hours in a day to get the time to play with this technology. Best Regards picclock |
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