Awesome Stuff: Print Stuff, Make Stuff
from the make-stuff-in-your-home dept
One of the biggest and most important trends right now is the increasing ability for people to make physical stuff that used to be impossible to make themselves. 3D printing is, obviously, a big part of that, but a variety of other advancements are happening at the same time. We're in the very early days, but machines that help you make stuff are getting cheaper and cheaper, as they get more and more powerful. There are a ton of these kinds of things showing up on crowdfunding platforms, so let's take a look at a few:- 3D Print on the cheap: The interestingly named Buccaneer 3D printer from the also interestingly named Pirate3D Inc. is one of the cheapest 3D printers around these days, running a bit less than $400. And I remember when people were excited that such printers finally got under $2,000! There are a few other 3D printers around a similar price out there, but it's nice to see that the Buccaneer is focused on both ease of use of the 3D printer, while also trying to make the device itself look nicer than many other 3D printers. Cheaper, easier, nicer looking? Those are things that help 3D printing go mainstream.
- 3D print without 3D printed parts: Honestly, I just found this project more amusing for the fact that it's a 3D printer where the makers spend a lot of time mocking 3D printer output. It's the OpenBeam Kossel Pro, a 3D printer without any parts manufactured by a 3D printer. As the creators point out, 3D printing is great for rapid prototyping, but sometimes good old fashioned mass produced injected molded parts are the right tool for the job, and can make things cheaper on a mass scale. So they've made a 3D printer that is too elitist for its own parts.
- Make by cutting down, not building up 3D printing is great for building stuff, but sometimes you have to work in the other direction. The folks at Otherlab in San Francisco have built the Othermill, a small, relatively inexpensive CNC mill device so that you can build stuff, such as electrical parts/circuit boards etc.
- Print on stuff: Okay, so the first items above are all about building stuff, but what do you do with that stuff once it's built? Well, you might want to label it, and that's where Tag On That has you covered. It's a printer that lets you label, well, pretty much anything. They claim that it takes the same technology that puts labels on things like phones, computers and keyboards, and puts that into the hands of the everyday consumer. I have to admit, the first time I saw the "print head" template "squash" into the item it was printing on it, it made me smile. I had no idea that's how you do that.
- Print money. Oh, and finally, just because it's funny, we'll link to Regular Everyday Normal Guy Jon Lajoie planning out his Kickstarter campaign to make himself super rich rather than just pretty damn rich. Videos possibly NSFW depending on where you work.
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Filed Under: 3d printing, awesome stuff, cnc, crowdfunding, home production, innovation, milling
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All those cheap 3D printers could be even better if they could just pick up different heads to print different materials and do finish work with drills, and it is not that difficult, it would add in parts just the cost of a rotary magazine(think of the heads as giant bullets and you get the gist of it) and a lock/release mechanism, the rest is software controlled.
The next 3D printer could be called Hydra3DP3000 :)
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They're kind of the opposite of CNC machines. CNC machines grind down the material while 3D printers build it up.
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Any tool controlled by a computer can and is usually called a CNC, not just the usual automated milling machines, but cutters(e.g.: bandsaws, disk saws, reciprocating saws, laser cutters, water cutters, etc) and 3D printing machines.
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To your point, a combined additive, subtractive, parts placement, assembly "robot" would be awesome.
-CF
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I think that is an old photo of an old CNC milling machine head magazine, some modern ones keep the heads on the walls now in several racing tracks.
This is what manufacturers of those devices still didn't realize, you don't need to build one head to do all jobs you need to build a custom body head that attaches to several instruments and keep a lot of them so the machine just picks up what it needs.
It can be a drill bit, it can be a laser cutter, spray nozzle, hydraulic press, extruder, pippets, vacuum succing cups, basically anything there is a hand tool that exists can be put in there.
One 3D printer can pick up a circuit board, mill it, blow off the dust, pick up components, place them and solder it, while printing the enclosure, one could do chromatography with it, is just mind boggling what could be done.
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Youtube: (4) MakerBot Replicator - Model Finishing Tricks - Acetone Wash
Youtube: Acetone Vapor Smoothing on 3D printed ABS parts from my Printrbot
Youtube: So Make It - Acetone Vapour Smoothing of ABS 3D Printed Parts, at UK
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It offers the possibility of citizen manufacturing and a start to moving away from corporate dependency.
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Also some of them could probably surprise you in how they work and you could learn a thing or two from others.
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The biggest issue however is the delay between funding and actual product delivery. There is a big enough gap here that, on a product with perhaps wider market appeal, that bigger companies could come in and mass produce long before the original product really makes it to market. Not only does that limit the business plan of the original creator, but it also has a knock on effect of hurting future kickstarter projects. Some people may feel that betting on kickstarter ends up being a very poor bet, not a good one.
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Some will argue that it takes LONGER to secure patents than it does to go to market. Others will be fundamentally against patents for all the issues that the TD readership will be more than happy to tell you about.
Regardless, that IS the reason that the patent system was created. To give inventors a *temporary* monopoly in order to allow them time to bring their product to market without some large corporation burring them before they even get off the ground.
-CF
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Yes big guys can copy you, and you can copy them in an open market, in a closed the guy with more legal resources wins almost every single time.
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Most big manufacturers think like you, small runs are of no consequence, there is no demand for it and bla bla bla, when they finally can be certain that something work they can't just enter the market, the little guy is already there making a name for itself.
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Limitations of Three-D Printing-- The Special Case of Guns.
The business about making guns in Three-D printers has attracted a lot of press attention, and has become a symbol of what Three-D printers can do. However, this is merely a matter of officialdom making an extremely poor choice of the part which they consider to define as a gun. Officialdom chose the lower receiver, when it should have chosen the barrel. No doubt this error will be rectified. The makers of gun barrels will start stamping numbers on them, and keeping track of the numbers. A gun will have two serial numbers instead of just one.
I found a curious anecdote in Thor Heyerdahl's _Fatu Hiva_. While doing fieldwork in the Marquesas Islands of the Pacific, during the 1930's, Heyerdahl had the opportunity to buy a Winchester rifle which had purportedly belonged to Paul Gauguin. That's as it may be, but at any rate, the shoulder stock had been artistically carved in a not-incompatible style. When Heyerdahl brought the rifle back to civilization, he ran into French colonial officialdom, and gun control. So he unbolted the shoulder stock, and surrendered the rest of the rifle as contraband. The officials accepted this, because obviously some native could carve a new shoulder stock. The steel parts of the rifle were what a native could not easily replicate, and official policy was more or less to keep modern firearms out of tribal feuds.
Here is another example, from the economic mobilization and war production during the Second World War. It emerged that gun barrels were a choke point. Their extreme length and narrowness dictated specialized machine tools, rather than general-purpose machine tools which might have been used to make other things during peacetime, and the pressure the barrels were subjected to during firing meant that stamped metal could not be substituted for machining. Consulting a couple of books on custom gunsmithing, I find that custom gunsmiths buy barrels from a handful of specialized manufacturers, that being the one part they cannot make for themselves. What a gunsmith can easily do is to convert a semi-automatic rifle to full-automatic fire. That is basically a matter of mechanical clockwork.
Still more fundamentally, the best solution is probably to control ammunition. Automatic weapons use a lot of ammunition, and, for practical purposes, they cease to be automatic weapons if they don't have a lot of ammunition. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons tend to damage cartridge cases in the course of firing, because they use the cartridge's own power to extract it from the chamber. The cartridge is not particularly well adapted for functioning as a piston. Let us say that the diameter of a brass cartridge is a tenth of a millimeter greater after being fired than it was before. That can be enough. It requires a little bit more force to move the cartridge from the magazine to the chamber, and then to extract it. In automatic firing, it only takes one "dud" out of twenty to hopelessly jam the gun. It is unlikely that a home-ammunition-reloader would be able to achieve the required degree of quality-control.
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Re: Limitations of Three-D Printing-- The Special Case of Guns.
Home 3D printing although not capable of printing metal directly can print wax parts that can then be heat treated to have the desired characteristics it needs.
With simple tools available to everyone you can make any small metal parts one could possibly need.
Youtube: Lost PLA 3D Print to Metal Casting; Complete
Ammunition can be made as easily using any carjack to create a forming press, maybe not even that since the bullets walls are not that thick, or metal spinning, again using the carjack to create a cutting press and spin forming the case on a lathe.
Now here is the thing.
All industrial machines that do that kind of stuff are really just speciallized CNC machines, when those little home machines start having several heads for each job, a 3D printer start being a multi-purpose machine.
Modern CNC milling machine head magazine.
http://www.colourbox.com/image/a-cnc-milling-machine-milling-heads-in-metal-industry-imag e-3283943
Instead of milling imagine those little 3D home machines being able to print in several materials, milling, buffing, spray coating, laser cutting and more.
It becomes a mini-industrial park on its own right.
3D home printing it is in its infancy, looking ahead things can get scary or wonderful it all depends in which way you want to look at it.
Nonetheless it is good enough to be really useful for almost any purpose, it may not be able to directly produce something but it greatly helps out, its like having a master artisan in your home that can shape things to any form you desire.
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Re: Re: Limitations of Three-D Printing-- The Special Case of Guns.
I know a bit about the process of making a pre-industrial craft rifle, a Kentucky Rifle such as Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett might have carried, and have indeed visited with a gunsmith who was making such a rifle. Without much specific knowledge of the modern barrel-making process, in engineering terms, I can imagine how one might adapt the old techniques to make a modern rifle barrel, of much smaller bore, to operate at much higher pressures, for example, using certain types of electric welding instead of a blacksmith's weld, and using X-ray equipment inspect the completeness of the weld. One would have to bring selected bits of metal to full melting point, so that they could undergo crystalline reorganization. Ordinary gas welding does not produce this result-- it produces a comparatively porous material which has caveats about its strength.
A second point is materials. Lead, or various alloys of lead, such as solder, are commonly used for decorative metal objects because they melt at a modest temperature, six hundred degrees F or less. Indeed, reading through the table of metals and alloys in Perry's Engineering Manual, I found one alloy which melts at only a hundred and twenty degrees F. Steel, and its alloys, however, are something quite different. A typical melting temperature is about twenty-eight hundred degrees F. That is literally as hot as fire. It's not something you can do in your bedroom.
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Re: Limitations of Three-D Printing-- The Special Case of Guns.
The solution to what problem, exactly?
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about stuff
sooooo nice
thanks
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On The Limitations of Fabricating Electrical Circuits.
At some point, a micro-controller is going to have to acquire its own little LCD or OLED video screen (say, 100 X 50 Pixels, on a one-inch display), and this will be able to communicate information in a more satisfactory way than blinking lights could ever do. There should be provision for six buttons, next to the screen, which constitute a minimal general command input (up/down/left/right/yes/no) Furthermore, the small screen is not locked into a particular project-- it is one of the general capabilities of the small computer. The leading edge of consumer electronics went through a LED stage about thirty or forty years ago, just before a computer with a screen became economically feasible. There were things like dedicated chess computers, which would blink their LED's to indicate the move. History is simply repeating itself at a smaller scale.
There is something of a case for making an Arduino which resembles a desktop computer's power supply. That is, a little box, which is designed to be bolted over a hole in a larger box, and which has various things which are meant to be externally accessible fitted in the portion of the little box which corresponds to the hole. Things which are not meant to be externally accessible would be on the other side, and, as in the case of the power supply, they might well take the form of little cables rather than pins. There would be two different models, one for battery power, in which case the battery compartment would be designed to be externally accessible, and one for plugging into an electric socket via a cord. In the latter case, it would probably be convenient to have two modules, one for the front of the case, and one for the back, connected by a suitably insulated and shielded cable harness. This would make it possible for the whole business to be UL and FCC certified.
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