Anyone know much about 3d printers?

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gnat
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Wed Dec 26, 2018 2:39 pm

Probably should have taken a picture of it, but printed a highly detailed lightsaber for my BIL for x-mas. He loved it and his mom and her husband who are into cosplay (yes they are in their 60s and into cosplay...) are jealous.

After calculating out that my plans of a ~34" tall Voltron were shattered due to the printing taking well over a year, I decided to go for doing just his head at 300%. Here is the first part (it's about 220mm long) which took 55 hours to print. Took me about 3 hours to remove all the support material and who the hell knows how long all the sanding is going to take before I can start painting :o
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32wildbilly
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 32wildbilly » Wed Dec 26, 2018 5:34 pm

gnat wrote: Wed Dec 26, 2018 2:39 pm Probably should have taken a picture of it, but printed a highly detailed lightsaber for my BIL for x-mas. He loved it and his mom and her husband who are into cosplay (yes they are in their 60s and into cosplay...) are jealous.

After calculating out that my plans of a ~34" tall Voltron were shattered due to the printing taking well over a year, I decided to go for doing just his head at 300%. Here is the first part (it's about 220mm long) which took 55 hours to print. Took me about 3 hours to remove all the support material and who the hell knows how long all the sanding is going to take before I can start painting :o
Damn! That's some neat sh!t! Would have loved to see the lightsaber! What color was the "blade" when activated? :roll:
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Wed Dec 26, 2018 5:53 pm

Heh. Funny you mention the blade: https://shop.prusa3d.com/forum/hardware ... 26624.html

I wouldn't have bothered even printing the blade if I had realized that's what it was (the part that got ejected as well as the one in the later pic growing hair.

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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Thu Dec 27, 2018 11:14 am

19 hours for the face, lower jaw, and the pin that will hold it all together. In the pic showing his face you can see the final print starting which is his horns and neck. Will only take 26 hours :(
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Fri Dec 28, 2018 1:08 pm

And I'll form the head!

Only took 4 days to print :roll:

Of course in my rush to assemble it I busted up the pin (you can see the damage in the side shot) as it and the holes need a lot more cleaning for a proper fit. :( So I'll have to reprint that (but I'll do it standing on end this time so it should need far less cleanup)
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32wildbilly
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 32wildbilly » Fri Dec 28, 2018 4:41 pm

gnat wrote: Fri Dec 28, 2018 1:08 pm And I'll form the head!

Only took 4 days to print :roll:

Of course in my rush to assemble it I busted up the pin (you can see the damage in the side shot) as it and the holes need a lot more cleaning for a proper fit. :( So I'll have to reprint that (but I'll do it standing on end this time so it should need far less cleanup)
I don't grok 3D printers, but Holy Crap that thing is neat!
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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Fri Dec 28, 2018 6:49 pm

32wildbilly wrote: Fri Dec 28, 2018 4:41 pm
gnat wrote: Fri Dec 28, 2018 1:08 pm And I'll form the head!

Only took 4 days to print :roll:

Of course in my rush to assemble it I busted up the pin (you can see the damage in the side shot) as it and the holes need a lot more cleaning for a proper fit. :( So I'll have to reprint that (but I'll do it standing on end this time so it should need far less cleanup)
I don't grok 3D printers, but Holy Crap that thing is neat!
Even though I really wanted to play with it, the appearance of barrier to entry kept me from it for a long time. In the early days you really did have to know a lot about all aspects to have success. Now, however, you can buy pre-built units from $200 to $5000 where all you have to do is feed it a file and it's off and running.

I'm been amazed at how easy the official Prusa (there are a lot of clones out there) system is. Part of that, however, is that they build both the printer and the recommended slicing software. I recognize that there is much further I can go, but so far the defaults are good enough.

The real question is "what are you going to print". There are plenty of models out there, but most are just bobbles of limited use. Then you start talking about making your own models, but from what I can tell the state of CAD isn't much different that AutoCAD from the 90s (painful learning curve).

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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Fri Jan 04, 2019 1:00 pm

This is pretty cool: http://cfg.mit.edu/content/inversecsg-a ... -csg-trees

As someone that is finding it impossible to teach himself CAD or CSG I find this really cool as it would allow you to find a model that contains something you are trying to do, reverse engineer the model to code, and then use the code for the section of interest as an example to go by and learn from.

Even more cool would be to couple this with the tricks using cameras to generate a 3D representation of a real object and then using this decomposition tool to give you access to the basics for tweaking it to meet your needs.

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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by gnat » Mon Jan 28, 2019 9:04 am

So my printer happened to arrive the day of my electricity billing cycle and that month saw an increase of $40 which is entirely attributable to printing. I didn't record every print, but I'd say that is for printing the equiv of 2-2.5 weeks at 24x7.

While that sounds like a lot (and it was an unexpected shock) that averages out to $8 per final print (obviously some took longer than others and some had a number of test prints to tweak my designs so it is actually substantially different per print) which I don't think is terrible. If the things I generated were actually available commercially they would likely cost substantially more so not really so bad after all.

Voltron Head = ~$25
Model my 6yr old created = ~$7
SD card holder = ~$3
USB Charger Carrier = ~$7
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3384010 = ~$22 (this actually is mostly in the new billing cycle)

The only one where there is a commercial option would be the SD card holder and you can find some in the range of the total cost (power, time, filament), but I modeled this one to fit exactly as I needed which counts for something....

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Re: Anyone know much about 3d printers?

Post by 5chn3ll » Mon Jan 28, 2019 10:24 am

I bet a shit ton of your electricity is going into the heat bed...can you print PLA without heating the print bed?

If you have a clamp-on ammeter, you might want to see how much current the print bed heating element is drawing...

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