10 ms·

I really don't understand the appeal of this sort of machine. I have a pretty big (300x300x300mm) and very fast printer, and large prints are still annoyingly s

by msds 6y ago

I really don't understand the appeal of this sort of machine. I have a pretty big (300x300x300mm) and very fast printer, and large prints are still annoyingly slow and expensive. I can't ever imagine FDM printing (especially with a small, filament-fed hotend) being an appropriate way to make "arbitrarily long" objects. Other people have scaled the platform I have up to 500mm and 700mm, and get great results on genuinely large objects too, not just on long things. Furthermore, the volume production stuff is just silly. If I'm printing a bunch of small objects, I'd rather fill a build tray with them, and then swap it out every 8 hours when it's done. The belt release stuff really seems to have reliability issues. Or, just use an appropriate manufacturing technique for high volumes... Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon with bad memories of belt build surfaces from a Thing-O-Matic.

IgorPartola 6y ago
Long objects I think are the main draw in that this is one of the very few ways to make them at home. Whether it will work or not isn’t clear but it certainly is one of the cool things. The continuous production is neat in that you might not want to print the same thing over and over. Say you are printing miniatures that you sell on Etsy. Order comes in, goes straight into the printer queue and all you have to do is toss it into a box and ship it when it’s done. Of course if you are producing thousands of identical objects then something like injection molding will be better. But if you are producing thousands of not quite identical objects, this would be a fantastic system.
- janoc 6y ago
  The long objects idea neglects basic physics - unless the part hanging off the side is very light, at certain point it is going to drop down and peel the other side from the belt, ruining the print. So in practice such machine will be limited to printing objects with maybe 2x the length of the belt max before the belt deformation and objects peeling off become a problem. You really wouldn't want to do continuous production like this - the printing surface needs to be cleaned too, glue or whatever you are using for adhesion re-applied, otherwise the adhesion and finish will suck over time, causing problems. How are you going to do it on a moving belt while the machine is running? Sure, it can be solved but the Creality machine doesn't have any provisions for it. And if you are producing thousands of not quite identical objects, buy three or four printers instead - the production will be much faster and more reliable than this belt nonsense, especially today when a printer can be had for less than $300 ...
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Just put a roller stand or two at the end adjusted to the right height.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    > The long objects idea neglects basic physics - unless the part hanging off the side is very light, at certain point it is going to drop down and peel the other side from the belt, ruining the print. Well this man made the unfortunate mistake of printing an 8ft long object twice and merged the resulting halves into one object and thereby violated janoc's laws of physics. https://youtu.be/wm9H_ApiidM https://youtu.be/wm9H_ApiidM
sydd 6y ago
As someone who is quite deep into this as hobby I have to agree. "endless" printing is a niche feature that would barely see any use. The reasons are: 1. Just look around you: Where do you see bigger than 300mm^3 (around the maximum size of common FDM printers) plastic objects? Barely any. Larger single-piece objects (or parts of them) are made from metal, wood etc. 2. To make things worse FDM parts are weaker than injection molded ones, your big parts will be very brittle. 3. FDM printing is inherently an unreliable process. There are lots of moving parts (the simplest FDM printer needs 4 motors, lots of belts, idlers, gears etc) and very tight tolerances (e.g. the print needs to begin 0.08-0.12mm above the printing plate; the whole priting plate needs to be very level and parallell to the printhead.). This is achievable at surprisingly low cost today (an entry level Creality printer is <200$), but it needs constant maintenance - meaning you need to adjust something around every 20-50 print hours. (I guess industry grade machines are better, but Creality is aiming for the hobbyist market.). So in practice your "endless" print will likely go wrong after a day or so making it useless. 4. If they dont go wrong slight misconfiguration or misalignment causes your prints to be ugly/faulty. And even a perfectly tuned FDM printer cannot reach the precision of an injection molded part. Just to get a picture heres a link that shows how many things can go wrong: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshooting/ https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshoo... I am starting to think that FDM based printing is a dead end in the history of 3D printing (mainly because of reason #3). Likely the future is resin - a simple LCD resin printer has 1 moving part. But they need to solve the issue that most resins are nasty, toxic materials that you dont want to have around in your home.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  I like resin but doesn’t that limit your choices of materials? And isn’t there a lot of post processing?
  - rkagerer 6y ago
    An increasing library of materials is becoming available for SLA, e.g. I've used those with properties resembling clear acrylic, silicon, rubber, ABS-ish, bio-compatibility for dental, "nano-dispersions" for tinting and even some exotics infused with glass powder or with high temperature-resistance (HDT of 238°C @ 0.45 MPa). But FDM still offers more variety (e.g. carbon fiber infused filaments). There's post-processing if you do prints that require supports (overhangs, etc). I've gotten good at designing within the constraints of the process to eliminate that as much as possible, but yes, it's still a pain. A typical advantage of SLA over FDM or SLS is a smoother surface finish. But I think the industry will ultimately land on a material jetting design (akin to an inkjet) that can dispense multiple types of polymers and dissolvable supporting material. The NexD1 had promised to be the first consumer-grade printer to do this but it was a scam.
monocasa 6y ago
I liked the example from Naomi Wu's twitter, that used it as an assembly line to print many identical pieces (or each slightly different) and drop them into a bin. https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1301437773899919360 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/130143777389991936... I also use my printer as the first step to a lost wax casting technique. A much longer print volume might make some steps easier, not having to connect multiple (or maybe just not as many in some cases) prints together before encasing in plaster. Sure I could just use a larger volume printer, but this is an interesting optimization to me that might fit in my shop.
- post_break 6y ago
  Can’t you do that with a regular printer and the last line use the print head with a shovel thing attachment to push it off the bed at the end?
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Maybe, though you risk breaking the print head if the print is stuck to the print surface.
  - jack_h 6y ago
    I've done this before where we were printing thousands of small objects for a small scale production build. I attached a kicker plate to the print head and modified the gcode to pop it off into a chute before printing the next one. This only really worked because the print was small with little surface area adhering to the print bed. In all honesty injection molding makes far more sense once you get into high enough numbers assuming the geometry is amenable to that.
errantspark 6y ago
I have no actual experience with a belt-bed printer so this is pure speculation. I would absolutely believe adhesion/warping etc would be harder to control with a belt, but I also bet it's still within the scope of the usual 3D printer tweaking necessary to get good output. I imagine there are some exciting uses for this sort of printer. I'm imagining a 100mm x 100mm x belt or so sized printer, for the sorts of custom tchotchke applications that hobbyist 3D printers get used for these days it seems like a good fit. It's maybe easier to make one for each of your friends with something like that vs a Makerbot or Prusa. I bet repeatability in part quality would also be slightly easier to dial in vs printing multiple across a full bed. It would also be useful for more serious applications. There are plenty of situations where you want many small parts to just come off a conveyor belt after you hit print on your CAD file. Articulated cable guides and fasteners, wing ribs, connectors for extrusions. Sure it's no revolution, but there are projects I would definitely be more excited to take on if I could automatically manufacture a lot of small parts. I interpret this as a step in that direction. That's appealing.
atrus 6y ago
I make cookie cutters, and I want this exactly for that purpose. Each cutter take between 1-2 hours to print, and with a large variety. It would be just wonderful to have a customer order a cookie cutter, have it added to a print queue. I'm not sure people complaints about printer reliability, since I run my printers at 500+ hours without anything to them, but even still a little maintenance is to be expected in any machine.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  How much of a pain in the butt is making sure your prints are food-safe?
  - OJFord 6y ago
    My expectation: Actual issues - 0h Reddit (/HN) comments - inf. (As much time as you care to spend.) What do you think is the food safety issue? Don't use a toxic material, contact time is brief anyway, bacterial/fungal build-up in any crevices is getting baked off anyway. Okay, maybe don't 3D print your own spoons, but cookie cutters? Don't waste time worrying about it.
d1plo1d 6y ago
Hello fellow 3D print curmudgeon, The Makerbot Automated Build Platform was terrible in many ways so an eternity ago I forked ReplicatorG and got it printing continuously from a queue. Once I did that I really appreciated being able to leave my printer running all day and have it produce bins full of parts. I especially appreciated being able to add prints to the queue while iterating on my CAD designs. So, shameless plug: Inspired by that experience with the Makerbot I've been writing an entirely new print conveyor-ready print queue for the raspberry pi. Coming this fall at https://tegapp.io/ https://tegapp.io/
jack_h 6y ago
> Furthermore, the volume production stuff is just silly. If I'm printing a bunch of small objects, I'd rather fill a build tray with them, and then swap it out every 8 hours when it's done. The belt release stuff really seems to have reliability issues. Or, just use an appropriate manufacturing technique for high volumes... As I stated in another comment I've done this before. The problem with a build tray full of objects is if one object screws up, e.g. it pops off the build plate, the entire build will end up being scrap. If you're printing a lot then maintenance of the build plate becomes a pretty large issue. I definitely agree that more appropriate manufacturing techniques like injection molding is better after a specific point.

by msds 6y ago

IgorPartola 6y ago

Long objects I think are the main draw in that this is one of the very few ways to make them at home. Whether it will work or not isn’t clear but it certainly is one of the cool things. The continuous production is neat in that you might not want to print the same thing over and over. Say you are printing miniatures that you sell on Etsy. Order comes in, goes straight into the printer queue and all you have to do is toss it into a box and ship it when it’s done. Of course if you are producing thousands of identical objects then something like injection molding will be better. But if you are producing thousands of not quite identical objects, this would be a fantastic system.

janoc 6y ago
The long objects idea neglects basic physics - unless the part hanging off the side is very light, at certain point it is going to drop down and peel the other side from the belt, ruining the print. So in practice such machine will be limited to printing objects with maybe 2x the length of the belt max before the belt deformation and objects peeling off become a problem. You really wouldn't want to do continuous production like this - the printing surface needs to be cleaned too, glue or whatever you are using for adhesion re-applied, otherwise the adhesion and finish will suck over time, causing problems. How are you going to do it on a moving belt while the machine is running? Sure, it can be solved but the Creality machine doesn't have any provisions for it. And if you are producing thousands of not quite identical objects, buy three or four printers instead - the production will be much faster and more reliable than this belt nonsense, especially today when a printer can be had for less than $300 ...
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Just put a roller stand or two at the end adjusted to the right height.
- imtringued 6y ago
  > The long objects idea neglects basic physics - unless the part hanging off the side is very light, at certain point it is going to drop down and peel the other side from the belt, ruining the print. Well this man made the unfortunate mistake of printing an 8ft long object twice and merged the resulting halves into one object and thereby violated janoc's laws of physics. https://youtu.be/wm9H_ApiidM https://youtu.be/wm9H_ApiidM

sydd 6y ago

As someone who is quite deep into this as hobby I have to agree. "endless" printing is a niche feature that would barely see any use. The reasons are: 1. Just look around you: Where do you see bigger than 300mm^3 (around the maximum size of common FDM printers) plastic objects? Barely any. Larger single-piece objects (or parts of them) are made from metal, wood etc. 2. To make things worse FDM parts are weaker than injection molded ones, your big parts will be very brittle. 3. FDM printing is inherently an unreliable process. There are lots of moving parts (the simplest FDM printer needs 4 motors, lots of belts, idlers, gears etc) and very tight tolerances (e.g. the print needs to begin 0.08-0.12mm above the printing plate; the whole priting plate needs to be very level and parallell to the printhead.). This is achievable at surprisingly low cost today (an entry level Creality printer is <200$), but it needs constant maintenance - meaning you need to adjust something around every 20-50 print hours. (I guess industry grade machines are better, but Creality is aiming for the hobbyist market.). So in practice your "endless" print will likely go wrong after a day or so making it useless. 4. If they dont go wrong slight misconfiguration or misalignment causes your prints to be ugly/faulty. And even a perfectly tuned FDM printer cannot reach the precision of an injection molded part. Just to get a picture heres a link that shows how many things can go wrong: https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshooting/ https://www.simplify3d.com/support/print-quality-troubleshoo... I am starting to think that FDM based printing is a dead end in the history of 3D printing (mainly because of reason #3). Likely the future is resin - a simple LCD resin printer has 1 moving part. But they need to solve the issue that most resins are nasty, toxic materials that you dont want to have around in your home.

mrfusion 6y ago
I like resin but doesn’t that limit your choices of materials? And isn’t there a lot of post processing?
- rkagerer 6y ago
  An increasing library of materials is becoming available for SLA, e.g. I've used those with properties resembling clear acrylic, silicon, rubber, ABS-ish, bio-compatibility for dental, "nano-dispersions" for tinting and even some exotics infused with glass powder or with high temperature-resistance (HDT of 238°C @ 0.45 MPa). But FDM still offers more variety (e.g. carbon fiber infused filaments). There's post-processing if you do prints that require supports (overhangs, etc). I've gotten good at designing within the constraints of the process to eliminate that as much as possible, but yes, it's still a pain. A typical advantage of SLA over FDM or SLS is a smoother surface finish. But I think the industry will ultimately land on a material jetting design (akin to an inkjet) that can dispense multiple types of polymers and dissolvable supporting material. The NexD1 had promised to be the first consumer-grade printer to do this but it was a scam.

monocasa 6y ago

I liked the example from Naomi Wu's twitter, that used it as an assembly line to print many identical pieces (or each slightly different) and drop them into a bin. https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1301437773899919360 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/130143777389991936... I also use my printer as the first step to a lost wax casting technique. A much longer print volume might make some steps easier, not having to connect multiple (or maybe just not as many in some cases) prints together before encasing in plaster. Sure I could just use a larger volume printer, but this is an interesting optimization to me that might fit in my shop.

post_break 6y ago
Can’t you do that with a regular printer and the last line use the print head with a shovel thing attachment to push it off the bed at the end?
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Maybe, though you risk breaking the print head if the print is stuck to the print surface.
- jack_h 6y ago
  I've done this before where we were printing thousands of small objects for a small scale production build. I attached a kicker plate to the print head and modified the gcode to pop it off into a chute before printing the next one. This only really worked because the print was small with little surface area adhering to the print bed. In all honesty injection molding makes far more sense once you get into high enough numbers assuming the geometry is amenable to that.

errantspark 6y ago

I have no actual experience with a belt-bed printer so this is pure speculation. I would absolutely believe adhesion/warping etc would be harder to control with a belt, but I also bet it's still within the scope of the usual 3D printer tweaking necessary to get good output. I imagine there are some exciting uses for this sort of printer. I'm imagining a 100mm x 100mm x belt or so sized printer, for the sorts of custom tchotchke applications that hobbyist 3D printers get used for these days it seems like a good fit. It's maybe easier to make one for each of your friends with something like that vs a Makerbot or Prusa. I bet repeatability in part quality would also be slightly easier to dial in vs printing multiple across a full bed. It would also be useful for more serious applications. There are plenty of situations where you want many small parts to just come off a conveyor belt after you hit print on your CAD file. Articulated cable guides and fasteners, wing ribs, connectors for extrusions. Sure it's no revolution, but there are projects I would definitely be more excited to take on if I could automatically manufacture a lot of small parts. I interpret this as a step in that direction. That's appealing.

atrus 6y ago

I make cookie cutters, and I want this exactly for that purpose. Each cutter take between 1-2 hours to print, and with a large variety. It would be just wonderful to have a customer order a cookie cutter, have it added to a print queue. I'm not sure people complaints about printer reliability, since I run my printers at 500+ hours without anything to them, but even still a little maintenance is to be expected in any machine.

egypturnash 6y ago
How much of a pain in the butt is making sure your prints are food-safe?
- OJFord 6y ago
  My expectation: Actual issues - 0h Reddit (/HN) comments - inf. (As much time as you care to spend.) What do you think is the food safety issue? Don't use a toxic material, contact time is brief anyway, bacterial/fungal build-up in any crevices is getting baked off anyway. Okay, maybe don't 3D print your own spoons, but cookie cutters? Don't waste time worrying about it.

d1plo1d 6y ago

Hello fellow 3D print curmudgeon, The Makerbot Automated Build Platform was terrible in many ways so an eternity ago I forked ReplicatorG and got it printing continuously from a queue. Once I did that I really appreciated being able to leave my printer running all day and have it produce bins full of parts. I especially appreciated being able to add prints to the queue while iterating on my CAD designs. So, shameless plug: Inspired by that experience with the Makerbot I've been writing an entirely new print conveyor-ready print queue for the raspberry pi. Coming this fall at https://tegapp.io/ https://tegapp.io/

jack_h 6y ago

> Furthermore, the volume production stuff is just silly. If I'm printing a bunch of small objects, I'd rather fill a build tray with them, and then swap it out every 8 hours when it's done. The belt release stuff really seems to have reliability issues. Or, just use an appropriate manufacturing technique for high volumes... As I stated in another comment I've done this before. The problem with a build tray full of objects is if one object screws up, e.g. it pops off the build plate, the entire build will end up being scrap. If you're printing a lot then maintenance of the build plate becomes a pretty large issue. I definitely agree that more appropriate manufacturing techniques like injection molding is better after a specific point.