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MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment
First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"
Would this be referring to the Star Trek Replicators (SWEET!) or the Stargate Replications (RUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!)?
Hahaha idiot. You can print ABS plastic with these things, for starters. You can make real stuff with them. These will become the next common home appliance. The age of fragile prototypes is long gone.
And corporations will be up in arms. Want Lego? Why pay $30 for $1 worth of blocks when you can print them for a couple dollar's worth of material. Want a body kit or some lightweight/cheap replacement body panels (although even common cars now have plastic body panels) for your car but don't want to pay so much? A printer with a big enough build volume can do that too, and you can get an exact copy of a commercial product. Want a custom computer case or a copy of an expensive commercial model? Knock yourself out. Want some cheap/custom furniture? Plastic built into the right structures can be very strong. See: milk crates. Except it won't look ghetto because that will just be the under-structure of your custom furniture.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - including making it easy and cheap for anyone to produce it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on /. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity, then you really shoudn't be taking issue with personal stereolithography.
I don't see why everyone's so fascinated with those extruding printers. They're extremely complex, extremely slow and their output is very low resolution. They have to fill solid parts with extruded material in a zig-zag pattern... takes forever and the output is a joke.
This, on the other hand, almost looks like magic. This thing makes one whole layer at a time with extreme precision. It's also extremely simple in design: a single motor on one axis, one projector and a container for liquid resin.
Compare the output of the two types of machines. If you still prefer the MakerBot-type machines after seeing the video and the photos, please explain because I can't see any reason for the MakerBot to even exist. It's like wanting Windows 3.11 instead of Linux or Mac OS X.
Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level.
Right around 1980 or so you could have said the exact same thing about personal computers, and it would have been true.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.
By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top ) uses as a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers
If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - make non-entertainment companies assume you have stolen from them?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
To say that these things can not make anything useful is very far from correct. Checkout RepRap which is a very similar device to makerbot. Its firmware has the code built in to print the parts it is made from and is one of the tenants of the project. The video on the RepRap home page explaining the project is brilliant. These projects are indeed very worthy of getting funded.
My understanding is that the most agonizing part of fiberglassing is making molds. If my jackass brothers could make surfboards, I'll bet you can glass into a mold. So... print molds, then smooth them out for actual use, and then lay fiberglass, or vacuform some lexan... I like Lexan because you can paint the inside and it looks awesome. You could even fade the paint to transparency and/or mask off sections to leave transparent windows to the understructure where it looks cool. But fiberglass doesn't require a big oven...
I'd also settle for nothing but vacuforming the interior pieces if they're not made of metal. That's how the big boys do it. You can do it with a shop-vac. In my acrylics class way back in junior high we had a locally made oven constructed from sheet metal, insulated with fiberglass, and filled with heat lamps. Any jackhole ought to be able to build one of those. I've priced a hand roll/break and you can get one for $200 that will handle the sheet metal you'd need to conveniently build one big enough to handle a whole dashboard.
My dream toy car is a tube-frame Lancer with a TDI+Quattro drivetrain...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Additive machining is cute, but not a miracle. It's a slow process. Building up objects one layer at a time takes forever. The consumables are rather expensive. Injection molding and casting are probably 100x cheaper in quantity.
High-end additive machining system are getting to be quite good. The low-end machines, though, are not yet very useful. The precision is too low, the surface quality is poor, and the material options are too limited. TechShop has both a high-end commercial machine, which is usually busy, and a machine at the MakerBot level, which is almost never used. If you're making tiny parts, you need high precision.
The big advantage of many of the additive processes is that they don't have work-holding problems. The big limitation of CNC machining is that you have to clamp down the workpiece, and the clamps get in the way of what you're doing. Some part of the workpiece will be inaccessible. So most work requires multiple setups, each of which has to be aligned with the previous setup to 0.001in or better. Designs have to be planned to be clampable.
The more interesting processes can work metals. But they need 500W to 6KW lasers. If you're going to work in steel, you need enough power to melt steel.
For comparison, here's a high speed stamping press. This is how most of the small metal parts in the world are made. Once you get the tooling set up, parts come out at machine-gun speeds.