thinking of buying a 3d printer

[Scuffler]

a little background on myself. i am(was) a cnc machinist. i operated, setup, and programmed my lathe at work. my plan was to buy a manual lathe for my house and start turning parts on the side to sell for people as custom orders or mass produce things like wind chimes or whatever else at flea markets.
i turned a bunch of whistles that sound like train whistles and tossed them to my buddy at work and he took them to a train show ans made quite a bit of money. well, about 2 months ago i cut one of my fingers off at work and sliced another one longways to the bone so i am out on comp and am no longer a machinist by trade.
so, 3d printer was my next idea.
for those that don't know what they are, they have been in manufacturing for years and they are now pretty affordable for the home use. what you can print is only limited by the capabilities of your printer and your programming skills.
3d printing is going to change everything.
here is how it works. instead of spraying ink, it sprays plastics/polymers in different thickness layers. lets say 100 microns thick. then a uv light makes a pass over to harden the layer, then another pass of spray. it literally prints an object from the bottom up. when finished, you have your piece.
for example there is a guy who set up a company in his garage with a 3d printer, printing parts to make another 3d printer. he assembled it and now has 2 printers printing parts... you see.

recently a guy/company printed a fully functional gun(please don't turn this into a gun chat...thanks)

you want an action figure for your child/ print it.
you need a plastic piece for your car? print it.
need a wrench to remove something but don't have it? print it.

just thought i'd talk about it...it's very cool

here is a time lapse of a bust of yoda being printed so you can get the idea

 

[charlief1]

Because of the fact that you can make firearms with them the feds are looking at restricting them severely. We're talking registration and background checks just to buy one and the supplies. They're really neat and I worked with one in college as well as CNC equipment but if you want 1 not you better get it before they get restricted.

 

[Scuffler]

Because of the fact that you can make firearms with them the feds are looking at restricting them severely. We're talking registration and background checks just to buy one and the supplies. They're really neat and I worked with one in college as well as CNC equipment but if you want 1 not you better get it before they get restricted.

yeah i know thats the talk but i think it's gonna take some time to restrict it and its going to be hard. you can use one printer to print parts to assemble more.
the materials you can use are getting pretty diverse too so hopefully they will be available for a bit.

 

[Pronto]

3d printing is getting very popular with the dental and jewelry fields for lost wax casting technique and pressing ceramics. Very cool stuff.

 

[ijames]

Another technology uses plastic string like a weed-wacker, and melts off little blobs to build up the item. You can buy kits that print parts up to about 5-7" cubes for $500-1000, and finished printers ready to go for $1500-2000. Most of these are based on an open-source diy design, most likely the one mentioned above where one printer was making parts to make the next one. Prices are definitely falling. Look at http://www.shapeways.com/ for one business model - they are a print shop, but they also let you put your items into a storefront, print one when someone orders one, ships the item and collects the money thru paypal, and deduct the print cost and send you your profit. Another consideration is 3D scanning, see http://www.david-laserscanner.com/ for a very low cost approach (the hardware is dirt cheap, they make their money selling $500 software). Anyway, neat technology to try to keep up with. If I could justify it I'd love to get one of the printer kits.

If you still want to do machining, even if you do buy a manual lathe for yourself definitely look into adding CNC controls. Otherwise you won't be able to compete on any job that requires more than 2 or 3 copies of something.