Not a question on what unit really, I can make my way through those technicalities.

But where do you get the source material (files)?

Not looking to make trinkets and decorative items.
My interest is productive or replacement item such as auto parts, other parts or whatever the material is good for.

I see there are hand scanners and whatnot that could be useful.
How hard is it to make a item to the specifications?

Other than buying a file online for something ~ like a Glock receiver etc.
And is there a good source for (files) items that a 3D printer might be appropriate to build.

thanks

Apologies… I’m just waiting for metal printing to get cheaper.

I typically draw my own CAD files… I’m not up with the new and latest on where to source these things handily?

We use Thingiverse. It is free usually, it definitely has trinket stuff you can find, but I have found many useful things, like a part for my F150 Reaer seat, Lots of useful household stuff, Suppressor tools etc . . .

https://www.thingiverse.com/

Not advanced enough to do our own 3D Scanning yet but probably will look into it eventually

quote:

Originally posted by amhaynie:
We use Thingiverse. It is free usually, it definitely has trinket stuff you can find, but I have found many useful things, like a part for my F150 Reaer seat, Lots of useful household stuff, Suppressor tools etc . . .

https://www.thingiverse.com/

Not advanced enough to do our own 3D Scanning yet but probably will look into it eventually

Ugh, now I'm going to need to buy a printer.
How easily can those files be modded to do multi-color over just the solid blue.

There are a few “repositories” for 3D parts and such (thingiverse the largest). I’ve found that some of those are great to import into your project and use. I’m not great at the tools but with some effort, you can have all of the elements come together.

If building you own and have some CAD or ability to measure or have dimensions of what you want anything is possible.

As for 2 color printing, most entry level printers have a single feed, you can get others that have multiple feeds and can change color on the fly, otherwise it’s a manual process. Using the Slicing app you take the 3D object and create the printer layers, there are codes to switch the material.

I will say that most 3D printers are DIY, but will need attention to detail of printing, bed leveling, material, feed speeds, tempature, etc. stick to basics and improve as you learn.

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:

quote:

Originally posted by amhaynie:
We use Thingiverse. It is free usually, it definitely has trinket stuff you can find, but I have found many useful things, like a part for my F150 Reaer seat, Lots of useful household stuff, Suppressor tools etc . . .

https://www.thingiverse.com/

Not advanced enough to do our own 3D Scanning yet but probably will look into it eventually

Ugh, now I'm going to need to buy a printer.
How easily can those files be modded to do multi-color over just the solid blue.

It requires a fairly advanced printer ($$$) that has multiple nozzels to feed the filiment individualy, but the cutting software can easily be used to "Cut" the 3D Model into multiple colors if you want to. There is a bit of a learning curve for sure. Mostly takes trial and error with your printer to get it figured out.

I asked a fella that has been printing for five years,
About the possibility of making a pistol magazine sleeve, for pocket carry.

After 25 minuets of describing ,explaining, theory and supposition.

He broke down the hourly plus materials and misc. Fees.
Figuring four prototypes,
$130.00 for the 1st one and $12.00 for each additional.

For what is basically an empty Pez dispenser
That slides over a gun magazine.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
I asked a fella that has been printing for five years,
About the possibility of making a pistol magazine sleeve, for pocket carry.

After 25 minuets of describing ,explaining, theory and supposition.

He broke down the hourly plus materials and misc. Fees.
Figuring four prototypes,
$130.00 for the 1st one and $12.00 for each additional.

For what is basically an empty Pez dispenser
That slides over a gun magazine.

Compared to other manufacturing methods, 3D printing (in plastic) has extremely low setup costs but medium-high per-unit production cost.

Machining has low (but not as low) setup costs and (usually MUCH) higher per-unit production costs. You could, for example, machine the magazine sleeve out of a block of nylon and it would be more expensive than that but not totally insane (if you could find a machine shop that would take a job that small).

3D printing has made producing prototypes or producing one or two or five custom parts (assuming the material properties of the plastic are sufficient for the part in question) much faster, more accessible, and less expensive than it used to be.

It's still not how you make things cheap.

$12 each probably sounds like a lot because you expect to be able to buy a random little plastic doodad like that for $5.

The reason you can buy a random little plastic doodad for $5 is that someone spent $10,000 machining an injection mold for the doodad, and then made 50,000 of the little doodad with an ongoing per-unit production cost of $0.05 each. Dividing the cost of the mold across the production run, the cost of the mold was $0.20 per unit, so overall, each unit cost $0.25 to make.

With the 3D printer, the 100th unit still costs $12 (or whatever) to make.

I draw my own files. Be careful these things breed. My 3d printer caused me to get a Cnc router. I’m eyeing a laser cutter/engraver next.

For multiple colors, you can add one of these https://www.mosaicmfg.com/products/palette-3-pro

I have the older 4 color version and it works pretty well.

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:

quote:

Originally posted by amhaynie:
We use Thingiverse. It is free usually, it definitely has trinket stuff you can find, but I have found many useful things, like a part for my F150 Reaer seat, Lots of useful household stuff, Suppressor tools etc . . .

https://www.thingiverse.com/

Not advanced enough to do our own 3D Scanning yet but probably will look into it eventually

Ugh, now I'm going to need to buy a printer.
How easily can those files be modded to do multi-color over just the solid blue.

When a non tech person see the words plastic and printer

His mind goes directly to quick ,easy and cheap.

And the news stories about the subject don't help at all.

Somebody pushes an Enter button on a keyboard ,
Says Voila
And four minutes later a needle poops out a track modle fork clandometer.
Bing bang boom

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
When a non tech person see the words plastic and printer

His mind goes directly to quick ,easy and cheap.

And the news stories about the subject don't help at all.

Somebody pushes an Enter button on a keyboard ,
Says Voila
And four minutes later a needle poops out a track modle fork clandometer.
Bing bang boom

Funny thing is… Absolutely nothing in the world works like that.

It’s a weird paradigm for sure … non-tech people trying to understand engineering and manufacturing. (Classic Dunning-Krueger.)

What's keeping me from pulling the trigger is that I would like it for making things that are useful.
I no interest in making trinkets as I mentioned above - the Chicoms do that well enough now for next to nothing.
Never did much CAD work and to spend hours to make a single use item isn't practical.
If the process was streamlined a bit I wouldn't hesitate on getting one.
I can endure some technical ramping up to learn a process, that isn't hard for me but not desiring to re-invent the wheel, just make one if I need to.
Was hoping to see how those 3D scanners work in the process as well as having a good source for someone who has already went through the work of developing a file and I have no problem compensating them for the effort within reason.

There are several different "3D scanning" technologies that are reasonably practical and effective, but none of them are anywhere close to hit-the-button-on-the-photocopier effortless.

Doing a "3D scan," regardless of which specific technology is in use, is not a trivial process, and for some combinations of technologies and objects-to-be-scanned may be difficult or impossible to do accurately.

Even a "3D scan" of an "easy" object will not necessarily produce a 3D-printable output - all consumer-friendly "3D scanning" technologies scan the surfaces of an object, and what you 3D print is a solid. Converting a collection of surfaces into a model of a solid object is a nontrivial problem even if you get a good scan of the object with no missing bits of surface. If you scan an irregular object, missing some bits of the surface becomes increasingly likely, and converting the scan into a printable solid model becomes even harder.

Then you have to figure out the best way to actually print it, which is also nontrivial.

We will probably eventually build software that does a pretty good job of handling all these issues automatically, but right now, the process takes a lot of skilled human input if you don't want a very high failure rate.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
What's keeping me from pulling the trigger is that I would like it for making things that are useful.
I no interest in making trinkets as I mentioned above - the Chicoms do that well enough now for next to nothing.
Never did much CAD work and to spend hours to make a single use item isn't practical.
If the process was streamlined a bit I wouldn't hesitate on getting one.
I can endure some technical ramping up to learn a process, that isn't hard for me but not desiring to re-invent the wheel, just make one if I need to.
Was hoping to see how those 3D scanners work in the process as well as having a good source for someone who has already went through the work of developing a file and I have no problem compensating them for the effort within reason.

You and about 7 billion others are waiting for the same thing
The printing is the easy, simple part. That's assuming the process & material meet your requirements (at lot of times it doesn't)
3D scanners are expensive or inaccurate, pick your poison.
CAD requires time & expertise, therefore expensive.

Most people would choke when they hear the numbers bendable mentioned above, but they are pretty much in-line from what I have seen for something 1-off.
If I were to make a 'pez dispenser that slides over a gun magazine', I would estimate 20-30 minutes CAD time, maybe an hour of printing. Honestly, if I had the mag in my hand, I could probably have a usable print coming off the printer in an hour. Probably $0.50 cents of plastic (I use the cheapest I can get) and I don't pay for the electricity. what's not detailed out in that estimate is the knowledge/experience of knowing what inside radii work well, wall thickness so it won't bend/break, etc. That took a whole helluva lot longer than 20-30 minutes to learn (and probably filled a decent sized dumpster with failed prints). I shudder when I search my amazon orders for 'ABS' & see the 10 pages of 1kg reels that I've ordered. I haven't used ABS in a few years, now PETG & PLA are catching up.....

About four years behind, but some info-
Son #2 really dove into 3D printing, using files, edited files and his own.
Both sons began on an entry level machine and built some quite involved prints- this is a Pipboy underway on a basic Da Vinci.



It was used for many Cosplay components.
They then tried using a Christmas gift 3D scanning camera, but we immediately discovered the limitations as you can see from this scan of his head. (Him wearing a camo boonie hat sitting in a chair).
That hole is where the freehand camera lost it's place and the software attempted to "fill in".



The limitation THEN (dunno about now) primarily revolved around the resolution and data rate of the scan (USB) and your patience in precisely maneuvering the camera for mapping.

I have seen film and industrial 3d camera scanners that worked beautifully, but that requires $$$.

Son #2 built quite a bit, but after building his own 2nd printer, finally decided he would wait until metal capability tech came around.

I think a practical “hobby” metal 3D printer is a long way off. (Depending on your definition of “hobby” - for my purposes, let’s say 1/10th the cost of a decent car.)

The common hobby 3D printers are basically a hobby CNC milling machine with a fancy hot glue gun instead of a cutting tool.

All of the practical metal 3D printers I am aware of use either a powerful laser or an electron beam ($$$$$) to sinter/fuse finely powdered metal with a consistent powder size ($$$$$) and require a mechanism to distribute thin layers of metal powder ($$$$$).

There have been experiments with other, lower-cost processes, like using a plastic 3D printer with powdered metal in a binder in the media used to print, then burning out the binder and sintering the powder in a kiln, but I don’t know of any that have worked particularly well.

Even if a more practical method is found, metal is just inherently a more difficult material to work with (requires a LOT more energy to reconfigure) and metal 3D printing is likely to stay much more expensive than plastic 3D printing for the foreseeable future.

I’ve made quite a few things with my 3D printer. I made a rack that holds 6 Raspberry Pi 4s. And some others things like fasteners and radiused sanding blocks and small cases. However I don’t think I’ll ever make the 3D printer pay for itself. It’s much like my mini lathe, so far I’ve made one door hinge out of steel when the plastic one on the microwave stand broke.

If you want to learn to design for 3D you should head on over to Paul McWhorter’s Fusion 360 tutorials on YouTube.

Fusion360 is the most powerful tool available for free, until they continue to strangle features to extort people into getting subscriptions.

It's really satisfying to design something in free space and see it materialize on your table. Even if the design sucks and you have to re-do it several times...

quote:

Originally posted by DoctorSolo:
Fusion360 is the most powerful tool available for free, until they continue to strangle features to extort people into getting subscriptions.

It's really satisfying to design something in free space and see it materialize on your table. Even if the design sucks and you have to re-do it several times...

I built an entire Battlebot w/ teaching myself solidworks.












220 lbs heavyweight (because solidworks will also model the weight of everything we could put in the “density” of each material and calculate how much the entire project weighed…

We were 40 pounds overweight in the initial design and ended up reducing the chain drivetrain from 5/8” down to 3/8” and we brought the weight in under the limit.

One very nice option of CAD.

Battle specs:
——————————————
4 wheel drive w/ 500 foot pounds of drive torque.
100,000 pounds per square inch of impact at the hammer
900 Amps available in a hurry.