Hands On With MakerBot's 3D-Printed Wood

angry tapir writes: 3D printing has lost a bit of its novelty value, but new printing materials that MakerBot plans to release will soon make it a lot more interesting again. MakerBot is one of the best-known makers of desktop 3D printers, and at CES this week it announced that late this year its products will be able to print objects using composite materials that combine plastic with wood, metal or stone.

Comments

Laywood

[gringer]

3D printing with wood? Oh, a bit like Laywood then.

The other composites are something I'm less familiar with, but I know that shapeways already has alumide as a printable medium.

Re:Laywood

[gl4ss]

well, yeah, makerbot announcing printing in materials that people have been printing with already for a while.

woodfill is pretty common as is bronzefill etc. "conductive" carbon filled filament is fairly common too as is carbon fibre filled filaments, there's also glass filled nylon on the market. basically all these filaments are certain % of whatever filler and the rest is plastic.

HOWEVER! if they were going to announce that they have a new extruder for their 5th gen products that doesn't have stated lifespan of 150 hours(hahaha if you're lucky) before needing replacement at 220-300 euros a pop. that would be news.

if you're a 3d printer guy then PET filaments are something to look into.. prints fairly well.

(yes the 5th gen extruder sucks, widely known fact.)

Re:Laywood

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Out of curiosity, how well do the fibre-filled filaments actually work? Given the way the plastic is deposited(basically a long continuous strand, ideally adhering more or less seamlessly when it touches itself, unlike an injection mould where a more or less homogenous mass of plastic is shot into the mould all at once), I'd be inclined to imagine that the fibre would definitely strengthen the piece along the length of the filament; but that getting the fiber to cross-link and reinforce the contact points between filament edges would be much less likely, leaving the piece stronger in a few details; but no more resistant to delaminating than unfilled plastic.

Is that so, or does the fibre work better than I would expect?

Re:Laywood

[Charliemopps]

Yea, but using wood in this context is stupid. They should use fiberglass, carbon fiber, or something else artificial.

Re:Laywood

[rmdingler]

Cross-linking of the added material would (seemingly) be essential for the finished product to benefit from a material's properties, such as strength, flexibility, and durability.

Though not particularly helpful with wood or non-ferrous metals, a future generation 3D printer may well align bits of injected ferrous metals by creating a simple magnetic field.

Re:Laywood

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not necessarily. The motives are more about appearance and cost than any sort of heroic material properties; but using 'wood flour' as a filler to modify the appearance (and cheaply bulk out) polymers is old and common. Given that the stuff is basically just sawdust with quality control it isn't terribly pricey and it has proven adequate to the job over decades of use.

Not very glamorous; and if Makerbot is selling this sort of filament as a 'premium' option compared to ordinary dyed stuff they are probably playing you for a sucker; but a perfectly sensible adoption of an established practice.

Re:Laywood

[mrchaotica]

Why? Wood fibers are pretty darn strong in tension, and cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than fiberglass or carbon fiber.

Re:Laywood

[cdrudge]

I can't comment on glass or carbon fiber filled filaments, but for Laywood and Laybrick (more like sandstone than brick) it's more about texture and appearance than physical strength properties.

I was at a 3D printing show last year and saw several architectural prints that used Laybrick and they looked amazing. And several Laywood organic designs looked equally impressive. Upon examination you could tell that they weren't actually wood (at least solid wood) but the weight, shading variations, and texture made it feel different than just a piece of normal filament.

Re:Laywood

[laird]

I've uses laywood, bronzefill, etc., and in general the structural element is the PLA, and the material mixed into it really just affect the appearance or other properties (magnetism, surface texture, etc.). But since it's the PLA that is what bonds it all together, you aren't really "printing with metal" the way you are with an SLS printer - you are "printing with PLA, with metal powder mixed in".

For example, with laywood, the resulting print really does feel and look like wood. And bronzefill is very heavy and soft/flexible, which is a lot like bronze. There's also a material with iron in it, so it sticks to magnets, etc.

So if you're interested in structural strength, not appearance or feel, these materials won't help you. Instead, look at Taulman's filament (for example) which have really amazing structural properties.

Re:Laywood

[laird]

There are "magnetic" filaments, such as https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... and the iron and stainless steel from http://www.proto-pasta.com/ . They have iron or stainless steel particles mixed into PLA, so magnets stick to the printed parts, you can magnetize them, etc.

Re:Laywood

[DrXym]

I bought a Sprig toy for my kid about 8 years ago which was formed from a mix of recycled wood & plastic. It smelt lovely and had a nice texture (although the toy sucked for other reasons). I'm sure it's not a big deal to turn wood / plastic into a filament providing the wood is basically dust and mixed to the correct ratio. Same for metal, stone, brick etc.

Re:Laywood

[MobyDisk]

I have a jammed extruder on my Makerbot Replicator as a result of printing in laywoo-d3. For whatever reason it stopped extruding while I wasn't watching, and when I came back I found it permanently jammed. No amount of unloading or loading will fix it. At this point I will have to resort to some of the more difficult measures such as running acetone through the extruder, or drilling it out, or something like that. The trouble is that I don't know what resin is in the laywoo-d3 so I'm not sure if acetone will work in this case or if I need something else.

I am not sure if my experience is typical or not. While everyone says that Makerbot's announcement is not a big deal, it really is important because it means they have tested and endorse the product. If you just run experimental filaments through your printer you do so at your own risk.

Also note that the failure here might not be the filament at all. Printers need to be able to detect extruder failures and stop the print before the extruder becomes permanently stuck. I think this is coming in newer models, as it is certainly on the professional products.

Lastly: The stuff really doesn't look much like wood. I tried the "cherry" color and it looks more like weak reddish-brown plastic. You can run scripts that adjust the temperature to get a gradient effect, but it just isn't very realistic. The material is very soft and I don't recommend it for most purposes.

Re:Laywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Or nanocellulose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanocellulose

Re:Laywood

[Anonymous Coward]

3D printing with wood? Oh, a bit like Laywood, then.

3D printing can take quite a while. It's difficult to keep it up the entire time. Sometimes it goes flaccid.

And I've never heard anyone call it "laywood", but I guess it sounds fitting.

Re:Laywood

[Immerman]

Not necessarily. Certainly cross-linking is essential to *maximizing* the strength of the material - but assuming cross-linking remains roughly unchanged, increasing the linear strength of the deposited filament would still be of benefit. Especially if the object design / printing pattern took into account the asymmetric strength differences.

In fact after being extruded the hydrocarbon chains in a single line of plastic are probably reasonably well aligned and interlinked so that, even with good adhesion between layers, there will be pronounced directional asymmetries in strength.

Re:Laywood

[prelelat]

I just put in a new extruder today and it didn't even work out of the box. Keeps jamming. I wish I had never bought one based on previous model qualities I thought it would be good.

Re:Laywood

[laird]

This device http://tunell.us/ detects filament tangles, jams, and end-of-filament, and pauses the print. The price is pretty reasonable, given the stress reduction.

Note that it cannot detect cases where the print fails but filament continues to feed. So you still need to keep an eye out on your print. But it certainly reduces the stress involved in hitting the end of a spool of filament.

Re:Laywood

[gl4ss]

laywood has a bad rep for jamming extruders...

what you can try is quitar string(small) and push it to the nozzle when the nozzle is hot.

another thing, if you remove the nozzle you can torch it(high temp torch).

5th gen has a jam detection system built in, but it's so buggy and badly done it's worthless. for earlier rep1/and rep2 there's an aftermarket filament jam/no-feeding detector and support in the sailfish firmware for that.

Re:Laywood

[gl4ss]

the carbon/glass fibers are chopped up to be smaller in length than the printer orifice. they do however help the structure in layer bonding(small parts of the fibers end up crossing the layer lines(the layer that the next layer is getting laid on does melt slightly when the next layer is extruded on it, making the whole fdm process feasible) and some other properties.

so it's short chopped fibers, not one length of it (that would make moving from place to place harder, clog up the nozzle etc).

the wood fills are basically sawdust, and in that the filler is for feel and appearance mostly(and well, it affects the heat shrink a little bit too).

Re:Laywood

[MobyDisk]

Thank you for all that information! I meant to post in the Makerbot operators Google group and get their opinions, so it was nice to get a free head-start on that.

Re:Laywood

[MobyDisk]

Thanks, I'll look into that.

The real questiion

[jellomizer]

Will it have properties of the material. If I printed a 3d pan. Will it melt? Will it have magnetic qualities? Will it be strong enough to do the tasks. Or will it just look like wood, stone and metal but suffer from the same drawbacks that plastic has.

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it have properties of the material. If I printed a 3d pan. Will it melt? Will it have magnetic qualities? Will it be strong enough to do the tasks. Or will it just look like wood, stone and metal but suffer from the same drawbacks that plastic has.

Apart from certain magnetic qualities being possible and maybe having some conductive/capacitive qualities it will mostly likely have the structural properties of the plastic they use to hold the metallic/wooden grains.
I would imagine that when bending/shearing it behaves mostly as the plastic. When piercing or sawing in it the composite will be slightly more apparent.

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd guess the same (abrasion resistance might be quite better for those compounds than for pure plastic, though).

Still the really interesting question would be: how (electrically) conductive are the "metals"? Can I print PCBs with that?

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have all your real printing questions answered in the FAQ at Shapeways.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

Look up "alumide", it's been around in the 3d printing world for a very long time. Primarily you need to think "plastic" in terms of its properties. But that said it does generally have mildly better heat tolerance and higher stiffness than most plastics you'll work with. It generally looks dull and sandy (yet smooth), but iMaterialize now has a sparkly version. Alumide is not like metal, but on the upside its not every expensive either.

You can get real 3d printed metal out there from a variety of services. Laser sintering is the best but it's ridiculously priced. If you want a custom titanium bone implant or a specialty part for a space probe or the like, that's what you want; otherwise, it's probably not for you. The more affordable metals (still much more expensive than plastic but not too expensive for general use in small objects for custom needs) are made by lost wax casting, with a 3d printed mould. The best selection of metals (and finishes) is iMaterialize, but Shapeways is a bit cheaper. Both have rather long turnaround times, but they're improving. The quality however is already superb for both of them.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic; the aluminum particles are not interconnected into a mesh or anything. When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with. Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic. Which means that its resistivity is still in the plastic range, certainly higher than less effective but still insulating materials like glass.

Think "sandy-looking plastic", and you'll understand alumide. Sorry, I know you want something that's like metal, but this is not it. If you want metal, you need to print out of metal - say, laser sintering, or printing a mould for lost wax casting. Not printing a plastic that has some dust mixed in. *Maybe* you could get more metallic properties if the metal in the plastic was in the form of whiskers rather than dust. Maybe.

Oh, hey, here's a better analogy for you for what alumide is like: paint. Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts. Among the types of dust in paints can include metals, especially if they're trying to make the paint have a more textured or sparkly look to it. Aluminum dust is for example a common additive to car paint.

So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.

Re:The real questiion

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is a second question of interest, if you are willing to sacrifice the sci-fi and do some postprocessing work:

A number of material fabrication techniques involve starting with a shape made of some material that is pretty lousy; but easy to work with, and then either heat treating it to change its properties or using it, like a sponge, to guide the absorption of a more suitable material.

Ceramics are one example: during initial shaping, the material is a slurry or semisolid of mixed mineral particles in water and has fairly pitiful mechanical properties even when dried. Barely better than mud. If fired, though, it hardens up quite nicely.

Sintered metals are another one, where you start with a largely unsuitable powder and heat treat your way to a solid piece(sometimes impregnating it with a molten metal of lower melting point, to control porosity).

There are applications where fillers in plastic are directly useful, and that's certainly something that you could use this for; but there is also a lot of interesting potential in using the 3d printer(capable of complex geometry; but lousy choice of materials, especially nice ones) to produce inputs for traditional processes(firing, lost-wax casting, sintering, etc.) that give you access to nice materials but consume a suitably precisely shaped input.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

Here's another way to put it. Alumide has a thermal conductivity of around 0,5W/(m*K). Regular nylon is about 0,25W/(m*K) and high density polyethylene is about 0,4-0,5W/(m*K). But aluminum is 237W/(m*K). So nowhere even close ;) 0,5W/(m*k) is about half the thermal conductivity of glass (0,8-1.4) and about 1/6th that of granite (1,75-4). You'd literally get better thermal conductivity out of a brick than alumide.

Think plastic, not metal ;)

Re:The real questiion

[jellomizer]

If you have a 3D printers for Plastic, Metal, Ceramics, Wood
A 2d auto weaver for fabric. You can make most non-electronic devices.
But that is hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery, and the cost of raw material.

The Makerbot, even with postprocessing work is still only good for mostly toys, and the occasional replacement part (Replace a keyboard key, a clip on your printer, a replacement gear) however the rest of the stuff is mostly toys and nic-naks. Great if you are kid, where you can expand your action figure universe, or fully equipt your doll house. But as an adult, not much of interests.

Re:The real questiion

[laird]

For structural purposes, these materials all give you a PLA print. The fact that it's got particles of something else mixed in just makes it a bit weaker because the print is full of "holes". So if you care about the structural properties, these filaments won't help you - look at Taulman filaments, etc., that have different base materials with different material properties.

In terms of appearance, or other properties, the particles matter. For example, if you print with BronzeFill, then sand it down a bit to wear away the outer PLA, you reveal the bronze particles, and the result is quite striking. Or if you print with iron or stainless steel particles, you get a part that magnets stick to. And wood particles change color depending on the print temp, so you can give prints a "wood grain" appearance, and of course they feel like wood, which is very nice.

Re:The real questiion

[ShanghaiBill]

What would be really slick is a 3D printer that can start with a metal skeleton and extrude plastic in/onto/around it. This would require a six-axis extruder, and much more complicated control software than the current layer-by-layer XY extruders. But it would enable production of many very useful things.

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong

I can't speak for any particular consumer composite, but the abrasion resistance can vary quite a bit depending on exactly what particles are suspended in it and how much. This can vary from making abrasion resistance worse because the particles don't bind well and make it easier for bits to be scratched off, to making it "quite a bit better" even without initial contact between particles, because they can pile up when abrasion starts.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

Everyone is stuck on the concept of extruders. What I want to see is a 3d printer based on thermal spraying, a technique mainly used today for applying coatings.

1. First off, you don't have to be only the tiniest height above your workpiece like you do with an extruder - you have some degree of distance range (your precision decreases with distance, but there's a tradeoff and it depends on the situation). Your precision vs. flow rate can be chosen by your choice of nozzle size.

2. By varying the fuel and air partial pressures, you can create a radically different propulsion environments and choose whatever impact speeds and temperatures you want for your material - from over a thousand meters per second to a couple meters per second, from thousands of degrees to room temperature. This means your printing materials choice is almost, so long as they can be blown through the nozzle and caused - at some temperature/impact speed combination - to stick to the target. Plastic, metal, fibers, glasses, blends of materials, even food - almost anything, from the same printer.

3. Contrary to extrusion printing which generally produces parts inferior to molding, thermal spraying is used because it produces layers *superior* in properties to what can be otherwise achieved. Major factors in this are the capability to have the particles impact at high speed where desirable and to use materials in situations that normally cannot be done any other way

4. Thermal spraying gives you the ability to do the finishing work from the printer itself. That is after all what it's most commonly used for in the first place - coating with layers to resist scratching, water, corrosion, etc. By proper choice of materials, the same device could paint or sandblast your structure, even sandblasting away temporary supports if your control algorithm was smart enough. You could paint wires onto a PCB, texture a gripping surface into a piece of plastic, pretty much anything.

5. In terms of users providing their own material to print with, a coffee grinder and a sieve is all that one should need for a spraying-based printer. Rolling your own filaments for an extrusion printer, by contrast, is anything but trivial.

Downsides of course would include heat, fuel requirements (either a natural gas connection or fuel bottles), noise (requires a compressor), and potential dust or gas byproducts, depending on how you'd be using it. Hence it would have to be enclosed with filters and sound dampening, and probably be much more suitable for a garage or industrial setting than sitting on the desk next to your computer. Also, the nozzles don't last forever, but then again extrusion printers have set the bar pretty darn low on that one. Lastly, it's not a very fast process. On the upside, that means more precision on your Z axis.

Anyway, I have trouble picturing any other technology for laying down materials that offers that kind of potential versaility. Now, it wouldn't be everything - t's not going to do lithography, it's not going to assemble pieces that need to be made out of multiple parts, etc. But nonetheless, I simply can't envision extrusion as being the tech that ultimately gives people what they dream of from 3d printing (something close to a "replicator"). This potentially could be that.

Re:The real questiion

[drinkypoo]

When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with.

Well, no. This depends on the particulate size. If it's very small, that's true. If it's larger than the typical deformation of the plastic, then it's not true. The metal will tend to work as an ablative. Semi-metallic brake pads otherwise wouldn't work, they're made out of metal and resin.

Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic.

And this depends on both the shape and the quantity of the metal particles. Surely you've heard of conductive epoxy. They even have that worked out so well that you can buy epoxy that only conducts where it's been squished, anisotropic conductive adhesive. It can be used for making prototype SMT PCBs without soldering, or for that matter making repairs to such PCBs without having to run a board back through the oven, which can require removal of components unrelated to the repair. But there are a number of conductive epoxies which don't require any compression, there's no particular reason why you shouldn't be able to print a nicely conductive trace.

Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts.

All paints are basically a binder of some kind, containing various dusts. But if you put enough of them in, they dramatically change the character of the paint. You can for example add flex promoters which literally make the paint more flexible. But if you simply add enough metal flake to the paint for it to be continuous, and then spray it wet enough for the flakes to lie down and align themselves to one another, then those polymer-based paints become conductive.

So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.

That's going to depend on what that PCB is being used for. You could probably make something low-voltage by using paint by cramming enough metal flake and graphite into the paint, and using very fat traces. A simple power supply built out of discrete components is likely a very realizable goal, but get much more complicated and you'd be far better off reaching for your conductive pen.

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it have properties of the material. If I printed a 3d pan. Will it melt? Will it have magnetic qualities? Will it be strong enough to do the tasks. Or will it just look like wood, stone and metal but suffer from the same drawbacks that plastic has.

What do you think, there, genius?

If you 3D print a woman, do you think she will automatically smell like tuna?

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

So, go for it. Develop a thermal spray head to replace the extruder on one of the many DIY 3D printers, and let's see what it does. Come on, man, let's see a design, or even a proof-of-concept!

Re:The real questiion

[weiserfireman]

I work in a machine shop. I have seen an ad for a machine that uses a combination of milling and thermal spray to produce parts.

Re:The real questiion

[laird]

It's true that a printer that extrudes plastic can only make plastic things. But I think that there are many use cases beyond "expand your action figure universe, or fully equipt your doll house".

Yes, you could limit your 3D printing to toys (and toys can be fun), but it can be a lot more.

For example, 3D printed prosthetics (http://enablingthefuture.org) really change people's lives. And I've saved a fortune printing replacement parts that manufacturers wanted many, many hundreds of dollars for. And, of course, there's the creative and aesthetic ability to make anything that unleashes creativity, which has great value. And now that you can (for example) 3D print a statue that really looks and feels like Bronze, or iron, or stainless steel, or wood, it's even better! And if all you care about are the "functional" aspects, there are also materials, like Taulman3D's filament, with amazing strength, clarity, flexibility, etc., which people are using for 3D printing with very real world medical and engineering applications. There are things that are being 3D printed, like a strong, light flying wing with the motor and solar cells inside the wing, that couldn't reasonably be manufactured other ways.

Re:The real questiion

[ShanghaiBill]

I work in a machine shop. I have seen an ad for a machine that uses a combination of milling and thermal spray to produce parts.

I would be very interested in this. Can you provide a link or reference?

Re:The real questiion

[weiserfireman]

Here you go

http://www.mmsonline.com/blog/...

http://en.dmgmori.com/blob/176...

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

You're speaking in theoreticals. I'm speaking in facts. Alumide is *not* a conductor, and it is *not* unusually abrasion resistant vs. other hard plastics. Yes, it's possible to make plastic composites that have improved properties. For an extreme example, look to CFRP. This is nothing of the sort. The average grain size for Shapeways' alumide, for example, is 60 microns, so we're talking extremely tiny particles. Alumide's tensile strength is 48 MPA (typical of a hard plastic; metals are usually in the hundreds to thousands). The Shore D hardness is 48 (plastics range from 0 to around 120). The melting point is 172-180C (common rigid plastics are usually 70-260C; metals range into the thousands). And yes, despite the presence of aluminum dust, the resistivity is 3e14 ohms (plastics are broadly in the range of 1e12-24; bulk aluminum is 3e-8).

It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic, plain and simple. This isn't some theoretical. If you can make a PCB out of this stuff, you can make it out of common everyday plastics too.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

Very cool :) CNC to get you the rough shape of the large object, then spray to get complex details and advanced materials and coatings. They use a laser jet rather than combustion jet, but the principle is the same. And look at that deposition rate: 3.5 kilograms an hour! Even without the CNC you could print a 1-ton *car* in two weeks at those rate ;) Wide range of powders usable. Wall thickness down to 0,1mm - I didn't even think that it'd be able to be that precise. And the results are just beautiful.

I'm so glad to know that someone's working on this 3d printing technology! :) Whenever I write about this possibility I usually just get a bunch of smart-assed "well if it's such a great idea why don't you go build it yourself, genius?" as if it takes 30 seconds and some pocket change to go build a new type of 3d printer.

Little roving glue guns are never going to be the future. But this sort of technology could be.

Re:The real questiion

[Anonymous Coward]

Alumide is *not* a conductor, ...And yes, despite the presence of aluminum dust, the resistivity is 3e14 ohms (plastics are broadly in the range of 1e12-24; bulk aluminum is 3e-8).

Yes, speaking of specifics, you just pick a bad example. I've worked with extrusions of ABS down around 1 ohm-m that contain added carbon (you seemed to not use the correct units, but your numbers match ohm-m instead of ohm-cm). Some PE plastics, although harder to work with, go down to 0.05 ohm-m and some more exotic but off the shelf ones go down to 0.01 ohm-m. This is lower resistivity than seawater, and specifically avoiding the plastics that require careful alignment of metal fibres.

Yes, Alumide is not a conductor, but there are a bunch of off the shelf extrudables that are. You won't be making any compact power electronics with them, but they can be used for interconnections in a variety of hobby relevant circuits still. It is effective enough that I've used these materials at my job when prototyping various embedded sensors because it was cheaper than having someone hand wire them and good enough.

Re:The real questiion

[drinkypoo]

So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it. [...] You're speaking in theoreticals. I'm speaking in facts.

Oh, I see. That's how it is.

Alumide is *not* a conductor, and it is *not* unusually abrasion resistant vs. other hard plastics. Yes, it's possible to make plastic composites that have improved properties.

Yes, very good, that was my point. But you are still not getting a cookie.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

Yes, very good, that was my point. But you are still not getting a cookie.

Just because one *can* make plastic composites with significantly improved properties (for example, carbon fiber panels) doesn't mean it has relevance to 3d printers in general, and it certainly doesn't have any connection to what Makerbot is demoing here. Alumide is all about appearance, plain and simple. And it's not even a metalic appearance, it's more of a sandy appearance.

Re:The real questiion

[drinkypoo]

Just because one *can* make plastic composites with significantly improved properties (for example, carbon fiber panels) doesn't mean it has relevance to 3d printers in general

As sibling comment points out, these materials exist already. So yes, they are relevant to 3d printers in general.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

"Somewhat improved properties over plain plastic" is nothing on the order of hand-laid composites, or having properties like a metal, or anything of the sort. That you can print a very mildly-conductive plastic (which this stuff in the article is not) or mildly reinforcing fibers (which the stuff in this article is not) in some extrusion printers is making a mockery of what people *actually* want to print (actual metal, actual strong fibers, etc). And it's what people who didn't know any better were thinking of when they saw this article.

Re:The real questiion

[laird]

I think you're mistaking "what you want" for "what everyone wants". So while I agree that these press release tend to hand-wave over the difference between "printing in wood" and "printing in PLA with wood powder mixed in", I disagree with the idea that these composite materials aren't valid or interesting.

These sort of composite printing materials aren't very interesting from a structural perspective, because the mixed in particles aren't structural.

But they can have other interesting properties. For example, stainless steel and iron mixed into filament makes the filament look like metal, and magnets will stick to it. Mixing conductive materials in can yield (mildly) conductive 3d prints. Mixing wood in gives a material that feels and looks like wood. Bronze particles make the print look like bronze, and be extremely heavy. Heck, glow-in-the-dark is similarly a powder mixed into a base material. So is fire resistance. There are a near-infinite number of materials that are mixed into plastic to affect color, hardness, fire resistance, feel, ... all that's new is that people are figuring out how to take techniques from injection molding and casting of plastics and apply them to 3D printing. And that's a good thing!

And while you might only care about the structural properties, it's entirely legitimate that others might care about appearance, feel, weight, magnetism, glowing, etc.

Homemade particle board

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay!

We found our new title

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands On With MakerBot's 3D-Printed Wood

It sure beats the hell out of Dildo World 5.

Does it work?

[Enry]

Can you hammer a nail with it, or is it just for show?

Re:Does it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you hammer a nail with it, or is it just for show?

You can hammer a nail with almost anything that has a weight.
If the head of the nail is ten times larger than the pointy end the object you hit the nail with can be as soft as the object you want it to get stuck in.
Using one piece of wood to hammer in a nail in another is perfectly possible.

Re:Does it work?

[jklovanc]

Using one piece of wood to hammer in a nail in another is perfectly possible.

True but one will damage the wooden hammer in the process. The wooden hammer will become useless very quickly.

If the head of the nail is ten times larger than the pointy end the object you hit the nail with can be as soft as the object you want it to get stuck in.

Sorry but penetration resistance is only one aspect of the effort needed to hammer in a nail. As the nail is inserted the wood presses against the sides of the nail causing significant friction. The more nail in the wood the higher the friction. That is the reason that nails actually hold things together.

Here are some more detailed questions about the hammer.
Does hammering a nail into hard close grain wood damage the head? Does the head get dented, cracked, etc?
Does hammering require extra effort due to the low weight of the hammer?
Can one pull a large nail out of the wood without the handle breaking off?
Does the hammer deteriorate in the sun?
It may look like a hammer but is it a hammer that I can use like a conventional hammer year after year?

Composite materials are not new.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You can already buy quartz and plastic mixture by the yard, (ogive edging extra). There is this whole class of manufactured stone. Fiber-glass, glass fibers in a matrix of epoxy has been used to make everything from boats, aircraft to suitcases. So far we were limited in the way these composites could be structured. Isotropic (meaning uniform in all directions) like in countertops and fiber-glass with randomly cut short fibers, or orthotropic (similar to plywood strength varies in different directions).

This 3D printing allows us to precisely place and orient the components of the composites. At this point it can't be called composite materials but should be called composite structures , may be with some adjectives like micro or precision to distinguish them from plain old structures made with fiberglass. Even this is not really new. Circuit boards and IC Chips are theoretically custom made precision structures using a process similar to 3D printing.

To take full advantage of these precision built composite structures, we need similar breakthroughs in analysis methods. We would like to take some expensive material, place very small quantities of it strategically in a matrix of inexpensive materials and get very good thermal, strength or vibration characteristics.

Companies like Ansys, Ansoft, Nastran, SDRC (does it still exist?) should do well in the coming years, you need their design/analysis tools to design structures that could take advantage of this emerging technology.

Oh noes Makerbot!

[mnt]

Just a reminder: Makerbot is patenting community created inventions. Their printers are overpriced, and the new extruders wear out very quickly.

Re:Oh noes Makerbot!

[laird]

Nope, they filed patents on their original work, citing community created inventions as "prior art". People are reading the patents incorrectly and are interpreting the prior art section as if it's the claim - easy to do, as patents are pretty hard to read - but it doesn't help anything to repeat their incorrect analysis.

I agree that the new extruders suck, though. I like the idea that the extruder is an easy swap, but it's absurd that you can't open one up to clear a jam, so you have to swap the extruder for what should be routine maintenance.

As for the prices, well, it's far too high if you're happy with a cheap DIY-style printer, but there are many printers in the same price range as MBI (Ultimaker, for example) so I think that's probably a reasonable price if you want a professionally made printer with a real company behind it, with support, documentation, real R&D, etc. - remember, the price of the product has to support all of that for the company to be sustainable.

Still ripping shit off, eh?

[AndyKron]

They're ripping this off now? It's been done years ago. They ripped off the dis-solvable filament a little while ago too. Hell, everything they do is a ripoff. Fuck Makerbot (I own a Makerbot Rep1 BTW)

Re:Still ripping shit off, eh?

[tshawkins]

I bought a flashforge, who are ripping them off......

Re:Still ripping shit off, eh?

[laird]

To be clear, FlashForge is based on the open source Replicator 1 designs, so while it's certainly "cloning", it's entirely legal for them to do so, so IMO it's not "ripping off" MakerBot.

Printing with mixed in particles has been going on a while - Laywood, BronzeFill, etc., have been happening over the last year or two, from a number of companies. So now MBI is doing it, too. And it's entirely possible that MBI is OEM-ing filament from those companies to sell under their label, as companies do that sort of thing all the time, because it's often smarter to do a deal (and rapidly/easily make money selling product) than to spend time/money engineering a competing product. So no reason to assume that they're "ripping off" anyone.

Re:Still ripping shit off, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

and folks wonder why I am leaning to the Orion Delta. compatible with open source Rostok MAX, and with really good build quality.

plus deltas are neat looking.

Re:Still ripping shit off, eh?

[Megol]

Actually nobody wonders why, in fact nobody cares about you at all. /facts of life>

That's how we knew

[morgauxo]

That's how we knew that 3d printing is finally growing up...

back when it got it's first wood.

Well, that's a switch

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be just talking about 3D printing gave you wood!

I'm glad that the novelty has worn off, good lord was I tired of all the over-the-top hype. Yes yes yes, it's a post-scarcity replicator and we'll never buy anything again.

It's a hobby, like whittling.

-QA

Printing exotic wood

[RogueWarrior65]

Imagine being able to print reproductions of exotic or extinct wood e.g. tiger or fiddleback maple.

Re:Printing exotic wood

[Anonymous Coward]

they do that already, its called plastic laminate by formica ! ! !

Makerbot: A day late, a couple dollars overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out, composite filaments have been around for quite a while: wood, stone, metal, etc.

Makerbot's prices are typically way marked up. I wanted some orange-colored filament in a hurry and the local Microcenter only had it on Makerbot spools at $20/0.2 kg, vs other "generic" filament I've bought at Microcenter for $20/1.0 kg. Probably the only thing new about this announcement is that you can now get Laywood, etc, rewound onto smaller Makerbot spools for a mere 400% markup.

Re:Makerbot: A day late, a couple dollars overpric

[laird]

Amazon Prime is _fantastic_ for filament. There are many suppliers, the review system lets you weed out the bad products, and you get free 2-day shipping. The free shipping is the "deal maker" for me - buying through other channels it often it costs as much as the filament to get it shipped quickly!

Keep in mind that you're not really buying "Amazon Filament" you're getting DeltaMaker, or MakerBot, or Taulman3D or eSUN, or Octave, etc. - Amazon is just a sales channel, and doing "pick, pack and ship" of the product. So you need to pay attention to the supplier!

Re:Makerbot: A day late, a couple dollars overpric

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a nice selection, some at quite reasonable prices.

Thanks for the tip!

LOL!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You made coffee come out my nose!!