3D Printing - General Thread

[eTraxx]

Those did come out nice Dave. Like I said .. part of the process (good part) is figuring out what works and what doesn't

[mabloodhound]

Ray, that Tiko looks promising.
Maybe we can get Ed to try one out although delivery isn't planned to start until this Fall.

[finescalerr]

I stumbled across this http://www.ottgallery.com/Woodruff.html a minute ago on the same site as another model a friend wanted me to see. It is an ornate HO scale passenger car with 3-D printed trucks, ends, and roof by Shapeways. Most other parts are laser cut. I long have thought that approach to be the future of mainstream modeling and it looks as though things already are starting to happen. -- Russ

[marc_reusser]

Finally had a moment to give these a quick cleaning, a few swipes of 400 sandpaper and some MR Surfacer 1200. One or two areas could use another swipe...but otherwise I think the print texture will work in my favor for hand sawn and cut stone. Next step would be to add more tooling marks and some chipped areas. (For scale, the steel block is 5cm tall)

[finescalerr]

They look like high quality molded parts. -- Russ

[lab-dad]

They look stoned to me 
Seriously though they do look the part.

May be sometime you could do a quick demo (on the sketch-up thread)  of how you did the sine curve on the one?

-Marty

[marc_reusser]

Thanks guys.

Marty, I do all the drawings for parts and components in AutoCAD in 2D, then import them into SU and just extrude, stretch and offset most of them as needed. Some areas and connections are drawn in SU, but those are the less detailed ones/areas.

If I had to do it in SU, I would probably do it by first drawing a plane, and then using the arc tools to draw connected arcs on that plane that gave me the shape I wanted.

If I knew the parameters of the curve I could first draw a bounding box and lines/grid that would give me some hard points to start/stop/connect at/from, with the subsequent arcs. It probably wouldn't give a mathematically perfect sine curve, but you could create one that visually would pass inspection.

[marc_reusser]

The SU "Extension Warehouse" has a free plug-in extension called "Curve Maker" that says it will allow you to create a variety of complex curves. I have not tried it.

Here is a screen-clip of what it supposedly can do.

[lab-dad]

Cool!
Thanks Marc!
I will give it a try and put my efforts on the right thread.

Marty

[Rail and Tie]

Thought I would post some photos of some early prints that I did with our new Projet 1200. This is a small format SLA printer from 3DSystems. About the size of a coffee maker. So far very impressed with it's ease of use and quality of prints.  Most of the time that I spent was trying to get the printer registered with 3DS over the Christmas season!!  Still a relatively expensive machine, but very straight forward to use. No calibrating, no fidgety set up, just plug and play.

Here are some first prints.  The Prius is in N Scale.  The other photo shows some HO and O scale bottles, a HO and O scale pot belly stove with separate base, door and interior carved out to accept some LED glowing embers. Also an N Scale ships boat and N Scale Windless in the lower left.

The layer ridges you see are 35 microns or so. In the photo they look huge, but remember the print area which is smaller than the platform is 1.69" X 1.06" and can be as high as 4 inches.  This build took about 45 minutes to print.

Cheers!

[Ray Dunakin]

Those look great!

[finescalerr]

Suppose you wanted to print a short 1/32-inch diameter rod sticking out of a little box (1:1 size). Or maybe an n-b-w about that size. Based on the prints you have made, would the rod likely print cleanly or would you be better off just using a length of brass? (I'm trying to get an idea of your printer's resolution.) The parts in the photos look very good. -- Russ

[Rail and Tie]

Hi Russ,

The 1/32" rod would print pretty cleanly if vertical. Horizontally you would see layering steps along the length of the rod at 0.0012" levels. So small you can almost sand with your fingerprint to burnish out the steps. If oriented at a 45degree angle, the rod would print with an pretty good level of detail and accuracy acceptable to the naked eye. Especially after priming.

In the attached picture below you can see an HO scale truck tire printed horizontally and vertically.  The vertical print is of a dual wheel so slightly different, though the bolt heads are the same in both prints (0.016" across the flats). The wheels are 0.391"diameter.

You will see the difference in the vertical vs horizontal accuracy as the material slumps ever so slightly during the print process (why the second print is smoother in the vertical. More notable in the vertical bolt heads. If this were 0.032" dia heads the detail would hold up very well.  I will try to do some comparison prints in size and orientation to provide comparison.

The little pins you see in the vertical print are supports that are generated for the print. You can have these auto generated or do them manually.  They look obtrusive, but these are the largest size supports that it can print. I have since been making the supports much smaller with a point that gets to about 0.005 at the separation point. The supports are required as the printing actually takes place upside down printing the support foundation first then the support pins and then the structure that you want printed. in this way you have to think about what to support and what not to.

The green material it is printed in is a UV cured Plastic Resin.

The conversation continues.....

[Bill Gill]

Nice examples. What is the green print material?

[finescalerr]

Thank you! Much better than I had expected, and quite impressive. Very nice work in every respect. Maybe there's hope for printing my little Plymouth gas mechanical .... -- Russ.