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3D Printing in Stone, or Copy a Sculpture in Rock
An anonymous reader writes "With all this design
your own parts and electronics
talk lately here on /., what about creating your own stone sculpture on
a PC or Copying a Stone Sculpture? You can do that with an outfit
called Studio Roc in CA. The New York Times has an
interesting article on this marriage of CAD, laser scanning, and rocks. 'Using a huge
Italian-made Omag Mill5 five-axis milling machine equipped with a
scanner and 30 interchangeable diamond-tipped bits and blades, the
Mill5 can record nearly any object in minutes and carve a duplicate in
any stone in a few hours.'"
Laser cutting (or abrasive waterjet) is usually for flat items like sheetmetal where you make the cut all the way through the material. If you need to make a partial cut, a mechanical device is your only choice.
Conventional millers are cheaper.
Lasers can't get inside features like hollowed-out areas (they can't control depth as well because they don't know the exact material properties inside the stone, and if it hit an unexpected soft spot, oops! there goes the whole thing.
A laser cutter would use much more energy to burn the material away than a conventional mill uses to just chip it.
Hope this helps.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Printing is a process that involves ADDING material to a substrate, not taking it away.
So yes, it's a nice application of one of those multi-axis machine tools the Italians do so well, but it's basically the same as any die-sinking process.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If they have laser scan capable CMMs (That's Coordinate Measuring Machines), just about any 5-Axis Vertical Milling Machine and some decent machine operators it can be done.
Heck, you could even have that milled out of high-quality Aircraft Aluminum, like a 7000-series. You could also go with tooling steel, like Cold Drawn 1018 Carbon Steel or S-7 Tooling Steel...
None of this is really new. The technology has been around for at least 10 years, from the laser scanning to the 5-Axis Mills.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
CNC can be had for much, much cheaper than $100,000. I built my own little CNC machine (bottom of page) from scratch for less than $250. That's not going to mill stone (very fast, anyway) but you can get a full-size Bridgeport or some Japanese mill for under $2,000 in some cases. For another $1,000 or less, and using the mill to build its own parts, you can retrofit the Bridgeport with servo or stepper drives, and use an obsolete desktop computer to control it using free software. Shops also turn over equipment like CNC machines pretty often, in order to keep up with everyone else. An expensive machine pays for itself many times over before it becomes obsolete. You may be able to find an older CNC mill, ready to run, for less than $5,000. I happen to know of one that, if I ever get the space, could be had for under $2,000. For all the information you need, try the CAD CAM EDM DRO Yahoo Group.
Clever.
Also check out:
http://www.precisionlaserart.com - uses lasers to make small fractures in glass;
http://www.prometal.com - uses metal powder to create arbitrary 3D forms;
http://bathsheba.com - artist who uses the above forms;
Note: I've used PrecisionLaserArt for some artwork and had a good experience, so I'm biased...