3 ms·

I was in the same boat, until very recently. I am the founder of OpenPnP, an Open Source SMT pick and place platform. I eschewed 3D printing for my design work

I was in the same boat, until very recently. I am the founder of OpenPnP, an Open Source SMT pick and place platform. I eschewed 3D printing for my design work for several years thinking that it was not accurate enough, not strong enough, etc. Having experience with CNC mills I kept comparing 3D printed parts to ones cut accurately from aluminum and found them lacking. What I recently came to realize is that the power of 3D printing is in it's instant turnaround and the ability to quickly iterate. Now, I design my parts for 3D printing. They look and function differently than they would if I had cut them from aluminum and I have to take the limitations of 3D printing into account, but they work. And most importantly, I can test a new design simply by hitting "Print" and waiting an hour or two. I agree that much of the consumer market is dominated by people who buy a 3D printer and then use it to print trinkets until they get bored, but there are also a lot of people out there who are engineering new devices and machines using the ability to quickly test new designs on a 3D printer.

nkurz 12y ago
Are there advantages to the 3D printing process besides the speed? That is, if a fool-proof CNC mill was available for the same price, would you switch back? Is the price difference of the consumables a significant factor? I have trouble shaking the feeling that printing 3D parts with little dabs of plastic has a lot in common with putting ink on pages with a dot-matrix printer. While they were revolutionary for the time, you don't see many dot-matrix printers these days.
- vonnieda 12y ago
  The primary advantage is that a 3D printer is truly able to create features in any orientation in 3D while a typical mill cannot. The price of consumables isn't really something I consider important, especially when prototyping. The thing that a lot of people don't realize about traditional machining operations is just how long they take to set up. I didn't, myself, until I bought a CNC mill. I thought it was just a matter of sticking a big hunk of metal in it, hitting Go and then coming back when it's done. The first problem is that for a typical 3D axis milling machine you have to find a way to mount the material you intend to cut without getting in the way of the cutter, and if your part is at all complex this can be very tricky. Different materials and thicknesses all require different methods of mounting, and learning how to mount and setup a part is an education in itself. The second problem is that a 3 axis mill can really only cut down. That means if you want a hole in the up/down Z axis, you are fine. If you want one in the X/Y axes you are out of luck. You have to finish your Z axis operations, unmount the part, turn it, find a new way to mount it, zero the machine to the new part configuration and then do more operations. If you have a part that has, for instance, mounting holes on several sides you are looking at a LOT of manual work to complete that part. And each time you remount the part you have to be able to tell the machine exactly how the part is mounted so that everything lines up. Industrial machine shops get around this by using 5 or more axis mills. These are insanely expensive and not really available to the home / hobby engineer, although I am quite interested in what http://www.pocketnc.com/ http://www.pocketnc.com/ is doing. 3D printers, on the other hand, are truly 3D. You can have features in almost any configuration and it's no more difficult to print than a simple cube. It is literally a matter of starting it up and coming back when it's done. I don't think 3D printing is the be all end all of machining, especially FFF, but for the home or hobby engineer it's an incredibly powerful and easy to use technology right now.

nkurz 12y ago

Are there advantages to the 3D printing process besides the speed? That is, if a fool-proof CNC mill was available for the same price, would you switch back? Is the price difference of the consumables a significant factor? I have trouble shaking the feeling that printing 3D parts with little dabs of plastic has a lot in common with putting ink on pages with a dot-matrix printer. While they were revolutionary for the time, you don't see many dot-matrix printers these days.

vonnieda 12y ago
The primary advantage is that a 3D printer is truly able to create features in any orientation in 3D while a typical mill cannot. The price of consumables isn't really something I consider important, especially when prototyping. The thing that a lot of people don't realize about traditional machining operations is just how long they take to set up. I didn't, myself, until I bought a CNC mill. I thought it was just a matter of sticking a big hunk of metal in it, hitting Go and then coming back when it's done. The first problem is that for a typical 3D axis milling machine you have to find a way to mount the material you intend to cut without getting in the way of the cutter, and if your part is at all complex this can be very tricky. Different materials and thicknesses all require different methods of mounting, and learning how to mount and setup a part is an education in itself. The second problem is that a 3 axis mill can really only cut down. That means if you want a hole in the up/down Z axis, you are fine. If you want one in the X/Y axes you are out of luck. You have to finish your Z axis operations, unmount the part, turn it, find a new way to mount it, zero the machine to the new part configuration and then do more operations. If you have a part that has, for instance, mounting holes on several sides you are looking at a LOT of manual work to complete that part. And each time you remount the part you have to be able to tell the machine exactly how the part is mounted so that everything lines up. Industrial machine shops get around this by using 5 or more axis mills. These are insanely expensive and not really available to the home / hobby engineer, although I am quite interested in what http://www.pocketnc.com/ http://www.pocketnc.com/ is doing. 3D printers, on the other hand, are truly 3D. You can have features in almost any configuration and it's no more difficult to print than a simple cube. It is literally a matter of starting it up and coming back when it's done. I don't think 3D printing is the be all end all of machining, especially FFF, but for the home or hobby engineer it's an incredibly powerful and easy to use technology right now.