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The 3D Printers of CES: Extruders, Nozzles, and Metal Medium (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: It's that time of year again, the Consumer Electronics Show leaks out of every media crevice. Although we've passed peak 3D Printing hype for the general public, the 3D Printer offerings being shown are notable in one way or another. Makerbot continues to flounder with questionable extruders, Lulzbot continues to excel with dual extrusion and by supporting a wide range of print materials, 3D Systems has an uber-expensive direct metal printer, but the entry level printer price floor keeps falling.
WTF is a nozel
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Should stick to the Queen's English: "knosles".
The printers are now so efficient, they only need one z.
The nozel-based printors may be cool new technolligy, but can they print metel with a nozel yet? So far I have only seene plasstec printid via nozel, and metels can only be printid using laisre cintering. It would be a maijer advance in rapped prototaiping if metel objicts could be fabrecaited with an extruzhen-like addetive prawsess. You know, like with a nozel. Whew. That was hard to write.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I've been waiting for 3d printers to get cheap enough to buy for amusement's sake, so I've been watching the low end of the market for one that would be afforable, yet more fun than a PITA. Most of the ones in that sub $500 range print reliably in PLA only; metal is totally out of the question.
But it makes me wonder -- why not print in some wax-like material instead? That would allow you to do lost-wax casting. If you were making things one-off you could even skip the moulding step and 3d print the model with the "spruing" (channels for molten material) in place. For home use you could make the final product with some kind of low melting point metal. Some fusible alloys melt at less than the boiling point of water; many cooking ovens get hot enough to melt useful lead-free tin/bismuth alloys. You can get tin/bismuth ingots for about $15/pound that melt at roughly the temperature you cook a turkey at -- well above the boiling point of water.
Is this just something people wouldn't be interested in? Or is there some technical reason it wouldn't be practical?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One of the hackers at my makerspace has successfully used lost-PLA casting to cast steel. The result was a functional part used in a battle bot. That's using a standard consumer 3D printer.
Jewelers have been using 3D printers for lost-wax casting for years; there are specialized 3D printers sold for this.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
it's just plastic.
makerbots new extruder: makes for "better" reliability. the old one on the 5th gen makerbots(that won best of the year awards at ces based on prints done with previous generation makerbots) was so bad that it would have bankrupted makerbot if stratasys had not bought them a little earlier(I am not kidding, huge consumer returns on the 5th gen line because it did not work reliably). the replicator 1 and 2 extruders were modifiable easily to be much, much, much more reliable. the fallout was so bad that they had to close their consumer support forums. those forums had provided users of previous generations with tips and tricks how to actually make the machines do what they are supposed to do, but due to design and closed source policy with the 5th generation the community was unable to do so.
ultimakers exchangeabe nozzle: yeah uh, the article says that this is a feature not seen commonly. but in real life, of the cheap sub 1000$ printers, almost all have changeable nozzles apart from cube line or other drm'd in some way or another systems. ultimakers extruder design was an outlier. in fact, even the mentioned makerbot has had changeable nozzles since forever.
lulzbot has a new dual extruder. they already had a dual extruder that seems pretty much the same in design. who cares.
the 3d systems laser sintering machine? here's a hint. the lineup of this generation has already 100, 200, and 300 models. just a new model in old line. cool, yes, new technology? no. consumer technology? fuck no.
nothing noteworthy to consumer was announced. absolutely nothing. none of the extruders are providing anything new. makerbots smart extruder+ is a band aid design change on their already on the market model(ironically still being inferior to their previous generation, while being way more expensive. it has nothing in it to justify the large price tag).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.