Dremel Releases 3D Printer

Lucas123 writes Power tool maker Dremel today announced it's now selling a desktop 3D printer that it said is targeted at "the masses" with a $1,000 price tag and intuitive software. Dremel's 3D Idea Builder is a fused deposition modeling (FDM) machine that can use only one type of polymer filament, polylactide (PLA) and that comes in 10 colors. The new 3D printer has a 9-in. x 5.9-in. x 5.5-in. build area housed in a self-contained box with a detachable lid and side panels. Dremel's currently selling its machine on Amazon and The Home Depot's website, but it plans brick and mortar store sales this November.

Comments

Underspecced?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Is it me or does it sound a bit underwhelming for $1000? I don't mean the price is non-competitive, it just seems like I'd want something more capable if I was going to take the plunge. Burn $1000 and in a week won't you be hankering for a much more capable machine?

Re:This is so 2012.

[rijrunner]

"Dremel 3D pre-sale starts Sept. 18, 2014, on homedepot.com and amazon.com, with in-store availability at select The Home Depot® stores in early November."

That's a WOW right there.

I've been through the PC boom in the late 70's and the Internet boom in the 90's. That "no one points at 3D printers" is no more true than when it was said about PC's in 1979 or the Internet in 1994. (I heard that exact sentiment expressed those years).

This is what a boom looks like right before it goes off.

Re:Too expensive

[Em Adespoton]

Have you ever used a dremel tool?
For the most part they're crap. Perhaps before the '80s thay had good stuff but it's been downhill for a long time.

I'll bite. I've used a Dremel-brand dremel tool in the late 90's, and found it solid (if made of a lot of plastic), dependable, and accurate. The accessories were way too expensive, but Black & Decker accessories are of the same quality and fit in the Dremel opening.

B&D, Ryobi, Makita and similar manufacturer's dremel tools though -- I've found to be underpowered, made of cheap components, and have a shaft locking mechanism that is abysmal, not holding the shaft in a centred manner at all. DeWalt is also pretty good.

Likewise, I've had hit-and-miss experience with Dremel's other offerings -- some are good, some aren't. But their original tool still works as well as it ever did.

Re:Wrong type of machine for Dremel

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure he could ask, so you've never used a CNC machiene?

3-D printing, while it can be challenging, is just a matter of how fast the head can move while "printing". With CNC you have to know how big of a bite your bit can take out of your current material, what the stress loads are at different speeds and it changes while going around corners. How big of a bite you can take with your bit based on the bit, material, and speed of rotation.

Now for some additional fun. Just because you can make it work on a CNC doesn't mean it won't destroy your expensive bits quickly. Also you want it to be productive so you can't run too conservative a tool path or a 4 hour job will take 12 hours and cut your productivity to 30%. Not to mention if you mess up the calculations you might just outright destroy bits when you run. Not likely to destory your 3D print head because you took a turn too quickly.

So yes, using a 3-D printer is MUCH easier. He didn't say it was simple, he just claimed it was easier.

HEY NOTCH!!!

[xeno]

The killer app for a commodity 3D printer would be a MineCraft-like interface. I was talking to my teenage kids and their friends about the 3D printer that sits unused in their school lab, and they all complained that the software was incomprehensible. But since they all create amazing structures in MineCraft, I suggested the obvious.... the idea of a crafting UI for 3D design had them jumping up and down yelling “HELL YES we would use that to build amazing things.”

Notch? Are you busy just now? Don't you have some spare cash and free time?
Howzabout a 3D crafting UI that looks like a holodeck room and adopts the standard controls for MineCraft to frame up basic block structures, plus some of the better mod controls for curves, smoothing, and multi-size blocks?

User scenarios would follow something like this:
- Adjust the size of the room you want to work in,
- Rough design using building blocks off the hot bar,
- managing multiple materials or colors from the inventory,
- more complex design with other objects (maybe compound objects) from the crafting table,
- fill/smoothing/spanning following the methods/controls of some of the better mods,
- view/flythrough, save functions, import, export, etc...,
- .... and finally printing.

I’d buy it. Seriously, I would plunk down a grand for the hardware in a heartbeat if the design GUI was fun to use.
(And HP needs to get on the stick, if they want to extend their "ink" market... :)

NOTCH!!! Seriously, you need to get on this.
DREMEL!!!?! Seriously, you need to talk to Notch.