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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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 ;)

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.