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3D Printer Owner's Network Puts Together Buyer's Guide
Lucas123 writes: Thousands of 3D printer owners who are part of a distributed online network were tapped for a buyer's guide, rating dozens of machines from tiny startups to major manufacturers. Surprisingly, the big-name 3D printer makers were nowhere to be found in the top picks. More obscure companies, like Makergear, a 12-person start-up in Ohio, or Zortrax, a Polish company that began as a Kickstarter project, took top spots in the reviews. The buyer's guide, put together by 3D Hubs, contains five different categories: Enthusiast Printers, Plug-n-Play Printers, Kit/DIY Printers, Budget Printers and Resin Printers. In all, 18 models made it to the top of the user communities' list, and only printers with more than 10 reviews were included in the buyer's guide. 3D Hubs also added a secondary "Printer Index" that includes 58 3D Printers that didn't make it to the top of their categories. Printers with more than five reviews are displayed in the index.
This is exactly the kind of resource I want when starting a new hobby; And it just so happens to be one I was considering.
Agreed. Wake me when they're called "matter compilers".
There is an opportunity cost here though. 3D printers have been around for decades and have just gone through a massive price drop relative to their capabilities. This will probably continue, but if one has an actual use (even if it is a hobby) and can get something out of having one, well, every year you spend waiting for something better to come along is a year that you are losing out on that capability. Given that human lifespans are pretty damn finite, the tradeoff may or may not be worth it.
While a good guide, the interesting question will be, how well does it represent the needs of markets that 3D printers (specifically the 'big names') are expanding into? One thing I found lacking in reviews a few years back was that they came from the perspective of people who were interested in the devices for their own sake, which put certain weights on issues like calibration and tinkering that would be very different from hobby to hobby. This made them great reviews for some segments but less helpful for others. These reviews and discussions tended to mark the 'big brand' (in so far as there are any) devices poorly since ease of use 'ready to go'ness was not a priority while difficulty in tinkering with said devices (which is less of a concern to other hobbies) was a heavily weighted drawback.
Can I print a 3D version of the buyer's guide?
I work for schools. We don't have a huge budget, but a 3D printer is a good "show-off" item. The kids can make something in Google Sketchup, throw it to the printer, and take it home at the end of term after we've used it on a display for parent's evening.
We bought the Cubify Cube3D. It does the job. It's robust enough, cheap enough, works well enough. For what most people would ever use a plastic 3D printer for, it fits.
All we need is the price to come down to inket-printer costs and people will start buying them for home.
Problem is, quite how many people want to print out large Christmas-cracker toys at great expense?
The correct formula is a cost / opportunity cost model. Of course, you'll never know what opportunity costs are, because you miss them. IF you can get to a point where you can MEASURE a break even point, there is usually unforeseen opportunities you'll also capture that will get you beyond break even.
Back in the day, when I sold $3000 computers, I used this model all the time. Could you justify, breaking even, on a $3000 computer (25 years ago), verses not having a computer at all. Most people understood that if you could reasonably figure out break even value, the opportunities to gain on competitors was huge unknown, but also something that should be fit into the equation.
At some point, the price drops, and the opportunities disappear because they are captured by more people in the market. Early adopters often reap huge rewards if they can find the right niche. And when new markets are emerging, niche is very profitable.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Perhaps not yet. But since you can print anything, the value isn't what you can pick up at Walmart, but rather printing the thing you can't pick up there. Printing the 3D plastic clip you just broke on some older thing you own, and having it that day, instead of throwing the old broken thing away is worth something, even to you. I can't tell you how many plastic clips I've broken and tossed the old broken thing away, that I now can fix and have it remain useful.
Not to mention, the creative types who are prototyping new and interesting inventions that weren't cost effective if sent to milling houses.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The big reason for the huge price drops in the past couple of years is a whole bunch of the patents expiring. At this point the primary limitations to making them cheaper are technical, not legal. This means we shouldn't expect to see the same magnitude of price reduction going forward that we've seen in the recent past. The only area where I expect to see significant movement is on the filament, which still strikes me as overpriced for what it is. It's only a matter of time till some factory in China is spitting that stuff out by the ton and undercutting everybody.
I read the internet for the articles.
The Chinese already are spitting that stuff by the ton and undercutting everybody. Except that this time, they seem to understand and are not undercutting themselves as well. Why sell something for 90% less when you can still sell for only 10% less?
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Chinese factories already do spit that stuff out by the ton. It is outrageous that 1kg of filament costs $35 to $50, when 1kg of plastic pellets costs $4 to $8.
One of the first things the hackerspace I belong to bought was a FilaStruder so we can make our own filament. We figure it'll pay for itself after 10 spools.
What do you mean by "iPhone designed website"? Their website looks just fine on my desktop monitor.
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what Normal, Usable thing can be produced by 3d printer? and less expencive than the same thing from Walmart ?
My daughter uses mine to make furniture for her dollhouse.
I play D&D and plan to get one to print custom game pieces / figures. Maybe even dice.
It seems the main proponents of 3D printing are people that break a lot of stuff. OK, everybody breaks stuff, but most people just tape (or glue) the broken thing back on, which is way cheaper and quicker than printing a new one will ever be.
I am still waiting for the 'killer' 3D printing idea, that would make ordinary people care at all about 3D printing.
I believe he wasa talking about the hacks needed to run most early PCs, messing with jumpers, add on cards, even breadboards. C64 while early, was not "early"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It wasn't like in the early days of home computers that somehow every C64 gave a slightly different answer to 2+2, and some crashed, or that they consistently answered 4.1 while Apples gave 3.9 and Ataris answered "blue".
Obviously you missed some of the early computers I used... :)
What's the reliability of that FilaStruder, the tolerances of the extruded filament and what types of plastics have you extruded so far?
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Here's another idea:
www.Dungeonstone.com
I'm sure someone already has an open-source version of this idea for 3D printers somewhere on the Internet.
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I believe he was also talking about the same attitude back then, which was basically "why would I want a computer?" which is similar to the current attitude toward 3D printers.
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Yeah, going to Maker Faire makes you think the only thing anyone ever prints are tchotchkes from Thingverse.
One application is to reproduce plastic parts that are otherwise unobtainable. Example:
I have a turntable microwave oven that was built almost 25 years ago. There's a piece of plastic about the size of a pair of dice that 's effectively the turntable spindle. Somebody turned the thing by hand and snapped that piece of plastic. I have a part number for it but nobody sells it any more. A chunk of the part is missing, but its shape isn't too complicated, and enough of it is still there, that I can make an STL file for it.
That in itself is not enough to make buying a 3D printer worthwhile, but I can contract that out to someone on 3D Hubs to print it for me out of ABS.
It is also possible that since we are closer to mass (as opposed to specialized) demand, more R&D will go into finding new combinations of materials. Plastics are an area where a fairly small amount of tweaking (and a REALLY large search space) in process and ingredients can result in really different capabilities and price points. So that is an area I really could see a significant shift in the near future.
Stop trying to protect Intel's feeling and just say it already: Pentium FDIV bug.
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what Normal, Usable thing can be produced by 3d printer?
and less expencive than the same thing from Walmart ?
I have a printrbot simple metal and the longer I have it the more use it seems to have.
I have printed shelving brackets, coat hanging hooks, soap bottle and spray can wallmounts, parts for my kid's rc cars (seriously, we have 3d printed wheels on one of the tamiyas because my boy wanted his name cut through the wheel structure), soldering spool holder, tablet wall mounts, picture frame corners (I have some JAMMA arcade boards as hanging wall art using these), a spoon, rapid buckle clips when my dogs broke their buckle, lots of gopro mountings for various applications, a monster tail loom, we just ran off the 8 bit nintendo star's for my kids xmas tree's.
And moving into the shop (I run a load of serious metal cutting machines for my other hobby), I've printed off morse taper tooling wall mounts, digital caliper holders, discharge wire guides for my wire edm, cable ties and a battery strap in ninjaflex, multifix toolholder wall mounting system, etc.
For halloween we had a blast too, I had printed off two animie tentacles in glow in the dark and made them into a headband, printed off a load of pentacles and skulls in blood red pla all sorts, my daughter got a glow in the dark elsa from frozen crown, boy had glowing vampire teeth etc, it was cool and a LOT of fun. And unlike the dangerous potentially fatal machines in the shop, something I'm comfortable sharing with my kids until they're big enough to not loose a finger to a lathe or mill.
More examples, we had a broken washing machine knob, special shape $180 for the entire panel module, modelled it in solidworks, saved it as a stl and printed a new one out, running today still. I printed a new handle for a $100 steam mop when it broke, cupholders and a laptop shelf for our camper van, nameplate badges for the kids school bags, hell even my cup mat on my desk here is our company logo in glow in the dark/black printed out. I have currently got a 3 monitor setup thats wall mounted and the bracketry to carry 3 hannspree 19" monitors is also 3d printed out. USB slots from the monitor mounted pc's come out to wall mounted usb blocks also printed out.
Theres just so much that can be done. You've just got to have a bit of imagination. And enough filament to cope with that.
Just heared it stop, its been printing off "carl the driver" 3d anatomical model from grabcad, at 1/8th scale, so we can have drivers sat in our tamiya boomerang rc car someone gave me in a bag as a pile of bits, converted into a awd monster baja vw camper, with 3d printed wheels and blackfoot tyres.
Not to mention, the creative types who are prototyping new and interesting inventions that weren't cost effective if sent to milling houses.
This is the use I'm most interested in. I have a couple of dual head Printrbot 2.1's. personally I rather like dual head printers since I'm no contsrained to print shapes where support material can easily be picked off. I favour ABS and HIPS as the latter dissolves easily.
I'm part of a startup. We're going through a rapid ieration phase for a wearable medical device. We can get a small batch of circuit boards done, then do a bunch of iterations on the case, print out the "final" cases and get that round of devices out and tested.
Works amazingly well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What about repairing other broken stuff? I don't break things myself, but I do fix a lot of things. My current coffee grinder was a commercial unit gifted to me because the indexing pin went missing so you couldn't lock the grind at a specific setting. A $1 spring and a 3D printed index pin later and I just paid off my 3D printer in not having to buy a coffee grinder (at least I would have if I had a 3D printer rather than asking a friend to print it).
But the 'killer' idea is not just the ability to replace stupidly expensive bits of fragile plastic, but rather make your own useful stuff.
I converted a $100 GoPro Gimbal from bottom mount to front mount using a 3D printed clip. Lighter than metal, stronger than wood, and front mount gimbals were $300 and up at the time. I also tinker with electronics so I 3D print cases for my projects.
The 'killer' idea is your own imagination. I sincerely hope that your problem is that your imagination isn't worth the cost of a printer, rather than not having one.
What normal usable thing can you produce with a welder?
What normal usable thing can you produce with a sheet of ply and a jigsaw?
Sure you can buy pretty much anything from Walmart but some of us have imaginations that involve making things. I'm just waiting for the price to be right and a 3D printer can find it's spot in my workshop next to all my wood and metal working tools.
So far we've only run ABS in it. The tolerances with the 1.75mm nozzle are pretty tight, no less than 1.63mm. This is very dependent on how stable the filament is between coming out of the nozzle and resolidifying. We got a FilaWinder to take care of that.