A new hobby!! Homemade 3d printer.

[Elfshadow]

So I stumbled on this little gem and think I found my new hobby.
http://reprapbook.appspot.com/

[Moonrunner]

Nice, under CC 3.0 license, too The Chinese will probably start building them and selling them dirt-cheap. Unless the governments crack down on this stuff, I can see exchange of plastic recipes and designs on the forums, plus piracy issues for manufacturing patented parts. That's where several things can happen..

1) Patent system reform (yeah right, interested parties have been pumping too much money into politicians making it ridiculously tight)

2) The consumers saying eff you, we don't need you, we can make our own - driving the patented design prices down with a flood of free (as in "beer" and as in "speech") designs

3) There is a mass shooting (real or staged) involving a gun that has some parts manufactured this way, moral panic, and the devices get controlled into becoming a fringe market

[billygoat22]

there's some silicone caulk based recipes on the instructables site. you can make rubberized parts with it.

There's also something called newbrite? that can make yellowed plastic clear again. household stuff, may try sometime on a yellowed tstat cover.

[Elfshadow]

http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=ar+15&sa=Search

It's allready started. Only a matter of time before DIY metal 3d printers start appearing though they are quite a bit harder to do.

[-80guru]

I am thinkin CNC machine

[zw17]

I am thinkin CNC machine

But instead of taking a large piece of stock and shaving it down to a shape (think a ton of wasted stock) you can build up to that shape, thus saving a ton of stock.

Just wait until they can do this with metal instead of plastics, it will open up a lot of opportunities and cut costs in half.

[Cooked]

I've modeled hundreds of different parts in SolidWorks software and printed them on various 3D printers. SolidWorks and other top end 3D modeling programs have a regular "Print" button and a "Print 3D button. We used to send iges files and stl files among others to a "service bureau" in Atlanta and have them shipped back to Texas. Eventually we were able to buy an Israeli 3D printer for about 20K and make our own prototype parts. One of the issues we had was resolution, we could couldn't keep a tolerance of .005" and .010" was the norm for most 3D printers. The parts we made in production were machined to .0005" and checked with a CMM.

Still the possibilities are tantalizing. And there are printers already out there that use a deposition process to create metal parts.

Nice video, thanks for posting!

Robert

[billygoat22]

I saw a $250k printer at a machine/tool shop this summer. it was printing out parts in black plastic. guy said was in the tens of thousandths range.
They also had cnc machines with turrents for "normal" machine work.

makes that engine lathe I used in the Navy feel like a relic, but we did piece work and as per sample parts.