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.'"

Comments

Re:Question on the cutting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Question on the cutting

[RPI Geek]

There's a few reasons.

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.

This isn't 3D printing, sorry

[panurge]

You need a block of stone in the first place, from which you remove stuff. It's exactly the same as standard sculpture except that instead of apprentices, laborers and great big stone saws, they're using a milling machine to get a high quality rough. And (RTFA) this does produce a rough: hand finishing is required, just as special finishing is required with the output of most machine tools. The comments this is getting suggest to me that too many people nowadays don't have a clue about manufacturing - and we in the West will surely regret this one day.

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.

Re:DIY

[Solder Fumes]

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.