[apeman88]

Saw this... totally cool! and for $750 and it is open source! First found it yesterday afternoon and it was in stock... fiddled my thumb for a few hours and by the time I want to order one 5 hours later... it's out of stock. I'm bummed.

I am also considering buying just the ABS Plastic extruder toolhead and mounting it on the Tormach's spindle kinda like how the high speed spindle is mounted. Anyone played with 3D printing for rapid prototype before?

http://store.makerbot.com/cupcake-cn...cnc-basic.html

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDEmz99okNs"]YouTube - MakerBot Dreams of Evil Darth Vader Heads[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zirHL_rRBu0"]YouTube - MakerBot[/ame]

Ken

[zephyr9900]

Cool find, Ken. I hadn't heard of MakerBot before, but have been following the similar Fab@Home for a couple of years now. It's looking like the DIY additive technology is on the edge of actually making useful parts.

Please do report if/when you build an extruder head. I think that's a fantastic idea, since the model-to-slices-to-gcode software is open source and freely available.

The closest I've come is adhesive/gasket dispensing using the old Isel gantry table. But this is a whole 'nuther level!

Randy

[keen]

Thanks Ken. Very interesting! Keep us posted with your progress.

Looks like the accuracy or resolution of the printed part is not fine enough yet.....to be able to compete with the expensive commercial machines for the rapid prototype industry. I wonder how much tweaking to the extruder head and axis slides/screw/nut/etc would be needed to get to those levels.

I suppose the Chinese will come up with quite cheap plug and play models very soon?.........

[Rick Tiglon Eng]

Hello,
Pardon my butting in, But, the resolution according to their website is the same as a commercial machine I used to contract in, to make some of our prototype models, the rough texture appears to be in part due to the lack of a support media for the "overhung" runs, this requires the addition of a second extruder, the machine we used to use made use of a water soluble material through a second extruder, I assume the water soluble material is pretty hard to get hold of , apart from the big industrial plastic extrusion machine suppliers, and lets face it the big guys are making a lot of money out of these machines at the moment and are unlikely to want to hand away their "edge"

I will be keeping a close eye on the technology, thanks for the link.
Best Regards
Rick

[mactec54]

That is very cool a little limited on it's size but I think you could make it any size you want

[Rick Tiglon Eng]

Hello all,
"The Makerbot" is based on the "Reprap" project and as a result yes you could make it any size you wish, I think that to some extent the makerbot and reprap are both limited a little by the use of the "open source, everything, concept" Open source, everything, is really admirable and it does give everyone access to all the information required to build your own, at whatever size you want, but if you were willing to use "high end" drivers and maybe some form of commercial extruder rather than the somewhat "makeshift" open source designs, the final product might be more "high end" as well.

I love these additive machines, at the end of the day it is a 3 axis positioning system with an extruder, so if you use the open source software to create the G code and fit an extruder to a bench top CNC mill you can create a much larger version out of the stuff you have laying around and that is way more exciting to me and probably the way i will build mine. the key is to get the support material and a second extruder, when you do that you end up with a professional quality unit. Another improvement to the system would be to enclose the build space and heat it, as i have read on the reprap site that they are having some issues with warping of the end product due to differential cooling. if you keep the whole thing warm and then cool it at the end I think that you will see less warpage.
Best Regards
Rick

[Charlie V]

I've owned one of the larger Dimension printers. Now they've got a smaller desktop version.

http://www.dimensionprinting.com/

It's a very useful tool for making prototypes although the parts are porous (I design SCUBA equipment, so that's a problem), and structurally weaker than solid ABS. Still, it's nice to be holding a reasonable prototype in a matter of an hour or two. Of course part size is limited by the machine size, but you can make your larger prototypes in pieces and then glue them together.