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> There is a learning curve to 3D printing. It might be the steepest factor here, in fact. I love CAD but man do I hate 3D printing. It's a type of device that
by bambax 3y ago
> There is a learning curve to 3D printing. It might be the steepest factor here, in fact.
I love CAD but man do I hate 3D printing. It's a type of device that seems to have been invented to illustrate Murphy's law that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".
The print nozzle gets clogged. Every. Time. The filament breaks at the worst possible position and requires some disassembly to remove. The printing stops for no reason in the middle of a long print. The plate is never exactly even. You forgot to leave the wire spool with enough free spinning and when the machine pulls on the wire it makes the spool fall, itself pulling the whole machine down with it as a vengeance.
And of course, it takes hours.
I have been much more lucky with external providers that you can send your file to, and they send an object back. It's often expensive and takes even longer than doing it at home (days vs hours), but there's no price for peace of mind.
- organsnyder 3y agoGetting a machine that works well out-of-the-box is critical. While tinkering and troubleshooting is definitely part of the 3d printing experience, my Prusa Mini requires very little babysitting and maintenance.
- fidotron 3y agoThat is just how physical reality is. Everything breaks all the time and your process needs to be resilient to it. It is definitely the case that consumer 3D printers make that practically impossible though. (I tend to think home CNC is more interesting for this reason). For example, an industrial solution to some of the problems would be a checklist based inspection of the printer between every task, but this would be incredibly tedious. Software that has to directly interface with reality also has these problems.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoCould that be due to consumer vs industrial 3D printers? The external providers are probably using more expensive industrial printers designed for more frequent or continuous usage vs a typical consumer printer.
- hinkley 3y agoIt feels like we are trying too hard not to learn the lessons of metal casting. As metallurgy goes, casting is very old tech. I won't say it's the simplest thing, but it was simple enough that pre-industrial people were figuring it out, which says something about complexity. Lathe work starts out with cylinders or polyhedrons, which But we only carve shapes out of polyhedrons, or build them up from nothing. It seems more likely that for complex, concave or knotted objects, we should be using low resolution additive printing and high resolution subtractive printing in combination. We may also need CNC machines with a an additional degree of freedom. Perhaps not a fully 'prehensile tail' but the ability to tilt the cutting head to say 45º would probably reduce the gap between additive and subtractive manufacturing's achievable shapes by quite a bit.