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Breaking Up With MakerBot
An anonymous reader writes "Sanders Kleinfeld explains how his experiences with a Makerbot device led him to the decision that 3-D printing hasn't quite arrived as a legitimate, consumer-friendly technology. Quoting: 'Waiting five hours for your Yoda feels like an eternity; you can play approximately sixty rounds of Candy Crush Saga in that same timeframe (although arguably, staring blankly at the MakerBot is equally intellectually stimulating). To make matters worse, I’d estimate MakerBot’s failure rate fell in the range of 25%–33%, which meant that there was around a one-in-three chance that two hours in, your Yoda print would fail, or that it would finish but once it was complete, you’d discover it was warped or otherwise defective. ... The first-generation MakerBot Replicator felt too much like a prototype, as opposed to a proven, refined piece of hardware. I look forward to the day when 3D printers are as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as their 2D inkjet printer counterparts.'"
There are several other great 3d printers out there. The Up! I first started using is still a fantastic printer.
Half of the fun of 3D printers is getting angry at them. If you want one to "Just Work" you are out of luck. Some are better than others, but they all are basically hot glue guns with some servo motors, there is no feedback, no control. You can however, print some really cool stuff. Sure I would not let my parents buy one, but I have loved mine personally.
I'm still waiting for my 2D inkjet printer to be as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as a pen and paper.
Even one the printing gets done, the job does not end there. It is like publishing a book using an inkjet. There are skilled steps that are required to finish the product. On the printer I used, it required that I manually removed supporting material. If the design does not take this into account, this process will lead to damage of the part. Other printers use ultrasonic cleaners to remove support material, but I hear this has issues as well.
I have been in the position to acquire some nice machines, but the support, cost, and payback never made since. I can image for the hobbying who wants to do something original it would be a good investment. I also imagine that, like my high speed color printer, it might see significantly decreased use after a period of time.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I remember the failure rates for burning CD's early on was probably around 40%. Now if I burn a CD or DVD I don't think I've had a failure in a couple years now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
"Waiting five hours for your Yoda feels like an eternity"
I just realized why online retail will never completely beat brick-and-mortar.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Stratasys, a company specializing in industrial 3d-printing will likely complete their acquisition of makerbot in the fall. For better or worse, this should change things in the consumer 3D printer space.
This is a technology in its infancy. We're just getting good at printing with one material at a time, we're just starting to mess with printing with multiple materials, 3d printing rigs generally only use a single technique in a given machine, etc etc. Give it some time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first personal computers were on the order of about 3 to 6 grand in price. You can now buy one far beyond the capabilities of those systems for $50.00 bucks new. Even in that day the price tag was worth it for some processes. I know a guy in aerospace that was able to prototype load handling for engine mounts on a vector graphics system in a matter of hours instead of days it took on the main frame. That was back in the early 80's. Imagine where the capabilities of these systems will be in ten or twenty years. You already have systems that can use two different plastics and removable filler materials. You have systems that doctors are able to print out bones that need to be moved into position. You have systems that can print custom art on cupcakes and some that print living tissue. There is a system that will print actual walls and another that prints glass bowls using the sun. And another that prints wood objects. Shoot Jay Leno is using them to prototype out parts for cars that they no longer make parts for. The expansion and the innovative designs is amazing. To blow the current systems off as just making garbage seems short sighted about where this technology really is and where it will be shortly.
Well, that's a tiny bit of an exaggeration. The harsh reality is that a 3D printer is a cool, fun, convenient way to make one-off and limited runs of plastic parts that would otherwise have to be injection-molded or extruded.
Yes, I know some systems can print starch that dissolves so you can (sort of) end up with spaces and gaps in the finished item, but in the real world, it's basically up to you to drill the precision holes, sand the rough edges, remove the burrs, and do the actual assembly yourself. We're a LONG way from "download the plans to some finished consumer good & stick it to The Man(tm) by printing yourself an unauthorized copy".
Buying a hobby-grade 3D printer today is kind of like spending $800 to buy a copy of Sculpt-Animate 4D for the Amiga 3000 20 years ago -- full of promise, totally cool, and the greatest Christmas gift someone could possibly get you... but at the end of the day, frustrating as hell.
Back then, you'd spend days, if not WEEKS, defining 3D objects, start a render at 2am before going to bed, crawl out of bed the next morning for school, be happy that you weren't greeted by 30-40 scanlines of black (indicating that it didn't like your lighting for some reason), spend the day at school praying obsessively that you'd be greeted by 2/3 of a badly-rendered image when you got home instead of a guru meditation number, and if you hit the jackpot... your preview didn't look like total shit, and vaguely resembled whatever it was you were trying to render.
A few days later, you'd go to render a raytraced preview the size of a postage stamp, then go away for the weekend, because that's about how long a 16-25MHz A3000 took to render a 80x50 thumbnail. Assuming it didn't crash, and there wasn't a thunderstorm to reboot the computer. OK, months passed, and you're about to go take a 2-week family vacation, so you launch into the Holy Grail -- a 320x200 HAM animation with 8-16 frames. You start the rendering job, go away, come home a few weeks later... and to your despair (but non-surprise), are greeted by either a guru meditation number or a rebooted computer courtesy of Florida Power & Light.
You screwed with it a few more times after that, but the magic was gone. The blue smoke evaporated. It just took too damn long to render anything meaningful, and the program had an 80% chance of crashing before it finished anyway. And when it didn't crash, it was Florida before UPSes became affordable, so 2-second power outages were almost guaranteed to nuke any multi-day rendering job before it finished even if the program DIDN'T crash. Such was life on the bleeding razor's edge of computer graphics ~20 years ago. Sigh.
" 'PC Load Filament'? What the fuck does that mean?"
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.)
There already are much faster printers, like the Ultimaker. The high failure rate might be from your individual setup, because that shouldn't happen that often.
After a few decades of existence, they still can't get the printers to cancel the operation properly. Lol
We geezers often get our decades confused.
Sintered metal 'printers' can make jet engine parts.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This is coming from someone who built his own lathe. My experience with building my own machine tools has taught me that not only does the algorithm (i.e. tool motion) matter, but also the properties of the material being machined.
With the traditional CNC machine, the method of material removal works the same irrespective of the stock material, with minor exceptions. A CNC mill can make parts from materials as soft as waxes to as hard as steel with little more than a bit change, and perhaps the addition of cooling lubricant.
A 3d printer, by contrast, is a deposition method which depends to a very large degree on the properties of the feed stock. Even at their best, they'll do no better than a mill.
And 3 hours to make a part is ridiculously long, especially given the failure rate. A trained machinist would instead choose the best tool(s) for the job and turn it out in short order.
Just for perspective: I spent one and a half hours building a molding machine from scratch. Rather than print out the part with a 3d printer, he could have made the molding machine and molds in the same amount of time, with the added advantage that he could make an almost arbitrary number of copies. Sometimes the old ways are just faster.
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Interestingly, I was talking to some Airbus designers, and they mentioned that they 3D print brackets used in ailerons out of sintered titanium. If they tried to machine the same part it would either weigh twice as much or cost twice as much for all the machining to lose the extra weight from its complex geometry. The 3D printing process let them only put material in the key loading directions the part had to be strong in, and nowhere it didn't. It made for a much better part.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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The whole notion is dumb. It's hit the peak now, it's downhill from here. [...] Then you get people comparing home 3D printing to word processing, as if they still don't get that you can't compare information processing to handling matter. It's not the same, and never will be.
I kindly disagree. Today's machines indeed are only really useful for a limited audience, but once the complexity of use - both in software and hardware - decreases sufficiently their usefulness will expand to fields not even thought of today. I am looking forward to using the 3D equivalent of facsimiles of historical material in history classes. Just consider the possibilities: Instead of showing a picture of a Stone Age arrowhead or a Pope's seal - or, looking at other subjects, molecules, DNA, bacteria, organs... - I could pass around a life-size replica. Not just one taken from the limited collection my school has seen fit to purchase, but one chosen specifically to fit into my topic.
Similarly we are currently evaluating different 3D printing options for the volunteer emergency service I am a member of for producing scaled models of damaged buildings, vehicle wrecks etc. for strategic training. It would open up scenarios currently infeasable to simulate with our hand-built models.
It still is a long way off. But so were ubiquous cheap colour print-outs just 20 years ago.
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We printed out dissertations in Graphics mode on needleprinters with Windows 1.03 which needed 10-12 hours and we liked it.
Kids nowadays can't wait a couple of hours until their new toys come out of the printer.
Get a grip.
I would tend to agree with Mr. Kleinfeld. 3D printing is a tweaky, fiddly process that requires a lot of time, energy, and specialized knowledge to get to work properly. The machines are finicky, the software requires far too much knowledge of detailed printer specs and the raw materials that feed printers are produced with little or no quality control resulting in unpredictable performance from the printer and frequent recalibration.
The printer designs are not particularly well done either, especially the bed leveling. Most use screws at the corners of the bed to do the leveling. That makes no sense as anyone who has had a geometry class will tell you. 3 points define a plane. Since one point can be fixed, there need only be two leveling screws. That is what I designed into my printer and it works perfectly. One screw adjusts tilt along the Y axis and the other adjusts tilt around the X axis and neither affects the other. Leveling took about 1 minute and now I can completely remove the print bed and replace it and never have to tweak the settings.
My printer is designed to print big(ish) stuff. The print bed is 300x300mm and vertical print capacity is 280mm. I designed it so that I could print full-sized human skulls from CT scan data. If you're going to print big stuff you have to have everything working reliably. I ran into the extruder problem early on and have been working on that for a while.
There seems to be two problems with extruder failures. One is the variations in quality of the filament and the other is in the design of the extruder itself. I can't do anything about the quality variations in the filament but I can make changes to the extruder design to make it more immune to those variations. My original extruder used a gear on a stepper to push filament into the hot-end. I found that the filament would often got hung up in the hot-end and the extruder would keep trying to push and the gear would carve a divot into the filament assuring that the extruder could never push that filament again. It is notable that I have never had the nozzle actually clog- every time the extruder has hung up I have been able to manually push the filament and have it come out the nozzle. My reedesign mimics a wire feeder in a MIG welder and uses two steppers to push the filament. Preliminary tests indicate that it is working, but further tests are ongoing.
Progress can be monitored here: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/milwaukeemakerspace and on the blog at http://milwaukeemakerspace.org/