Domain: formlabs.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to formlabs.com.
Comments · 7
-
Resin
I would look into resin 3D printers like: http://formlabs.com/products/3...
-
Re:whoops
As you'll note above, I said it is worth investigating, but for the time being there's no evidence that it is harmful to humans.
They liquid form is definitely harmful, according to Formlab material safety sheets (bottom of page). A more interesting question is: what if you wash the object first? After all, the Form 1 printer solidifies the object inside a tank filled with the liquid form, so it'll inevitably end up carrying some for a while after manufacture. So does the harmful effect come from the solid object itself (that is, material dissolving from it) or from leftover liquid resin, which will wear off pretty soon (and could potentially be solved by re-lasering the finished object)?
-
Re:frost
Not sure you could call SLA or CLIP printers extruders.
http://formlabs.com/products/f...
http://3dprint.com/51566/carbo... -
They'd better ship the thing.
They'd better ship the thing. There have been some large, overfunded Kickstarter projects that never shipped. Remember "Clang and the Pitfalls of Kickstarter"? Then there was the Form 1 low-cost 3D printer. Despite being way overfunded, the delivery date always seems to be four months away. It was four months away last December, and it's four months away now.
-
Extruder-type 3D printing just sucks
Extruder-based machines aren't a very good technology. The fundamental problem is that you're trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. Welding metals that way produces flawed joints, and soldering that way produces cold solder joints. Heating the build platform helps a little, but once you've built something of any height, the heater is too far from the action. Some of the machines have better temperature control of the build area than others, but they're all rather flaky. TechShop has tried four different brands, and they range from mediocre (Replicator2 ) to useless (the Up).
The UV polymerization machines seem to work quite well. The high-end machines produce consistent results and don't need to be watched while running. They're still slow, though. The Form1 printer may get there, if they ever really ship the thing in quantity. The ship date has slipped from April 2013 to October 2013, even though their Kickstarter funding was way oversubscribed. They also charge $149/liter for their custom resin. (I suspect that resin for 3D printers is going to be a similar racket as ink for inkjet printers. The stuff isn't inherently expensive; a slightly different formulation is routinely used for making printing plates, where it costs about a quarter of the price.)
-
Oh yeah, how about that resinFrom http://formlabs.com/pages/material (emphasis and reductio ad absurdum style worst case scenarios added):
Long shelf life when not exposed to light (like vampires, it bursts into flame in direct sunlight?)
Safe to use in a controlled environment (a hermetically sealed laboratory?)
Low environmental impact with proper disposal (encased in lead and stored in an abandoned mine which is subsequently sealed with concrete?)
The qualifiers make it sound like a software EULA.
-
Flaky technology solving wrong problem
The problem with these ABS extruders is not building the frame. The problem is not building a 3-axis positioning system. The problem is that you're welding a hot thing to a cold thing. That's always going to be a marginal operation. Without a better welding process (I've suggested aiming a small laser at the weld point) this will continue to be a flaky technology. I've seen about five versions of this technology in action, and they all sort-of work, but don't yield consistently strong parts.
The ultraviolet stereolithography technology yields much better part quality, but still costs too much. Formlabs may succeed in getting the cost down to $3500 or so. They're demoing at CES.