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About LinkBacksRead more.Aiming at auto, industrial, and medical industries. Claims 50x productivity boost and lower costs.
Read more.Aiming at auto, industrial, and medical industries. Claims 50x productivity boost and lower costs.
$399,000? Dang, thought I'd be able to afford one this lifetime
Bah, I was hoping to find somebody to print replacement exhaust tips for my car, but they're too big. Price tag might not make custom work much cheaper to have done!
I wouldn't worry about the price tag for now, as long as you can find somewhere to get things printed.
If I could print a new alloy head for my V6 car engine, that would be damned useful tech for future spare parts.
It would save manufacturers so much money. Currently most parts manufacturers have to keep spares for up to 10 years depending on contract which is so costly. Now you don't have to, you just spin up a print and send out!Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix
Does it have ray-tracing?
If so, I am pre-ordering this thing.
The more you live, less you die. More you play, more you die. Isn't it great.
I'm impressed.
how much are the <removed> cartridges going to be?
<Whatever the machine or consumable, cost now it'll be a lot less in a few years.
My first CD recorder was £4000, and blank disks £15 each. Now look at them.
Ink certainly hasn't got cheaper on normal printers, so not everything gets cheaper with age.<Whatever the machine or consumable, cost now it'll be a lot less in a few years.
My first CD recorder was £4000, and blank disks £15 each. Now look at them.
In many cases it has, but it's a complex picture.
It certainly isn't cheap on low-end domestic machines, but then if you can buy a printer at £20, £30 £40, you can expect to pay for ink when they're more or less giving you the printer. So it's a blend of capital cost for the machine, and the cartridge capacity and cost/ml of the ink. Also, neither the inks nor the cartridges are exactly simple to design and develop and that cost has to be recouped somewhere.
I also remember getting one of HP's first colour inkjets, the Deskjet 500C. For what by today's standards was a crude print quality, it was still sime £700 to buy and cartridges £30+.
Similarly, their first colour laserjet. I had one of those on my desk for several weeks when there were (according to HP's Press Manager) just two in the country.
Anyway, without getting into the specifics of printers the same always happens. I could give examples of many such cases, like scanners, for instance. Or digital cameras. Initial models are expensive, mass-market consumer models much less so .... if this metal printer ever becomes a consumer device. If it doesn't, it'll likely stay well beyond what most people would pay for a home machine.
We still need to see the resolution come down so its precise enough to make me obsolete, yes precision engineer, and watching the video, they talk about using it for prototyping, then scale up the production, they have slowly started to use it for aerospace, for making thin wall stuff, but you still need to machine it where precision is a must.
Its a great thing for making prototypes though
My concern is the durability of the part. It's like a powdered / sintered metal like output from what I can determine. I don't think we'll be printing any cylinder heads for cars using this stuff. Indeed, I suspect with the forces in play, this kind of stuff will be very limited in scope for the automotive industry for now. I would honestly say that even a lot of bolts (types required to cope with sheering loads as opposed to just mostly clamping loads) would be out of the question with this kind of material and if you did use it to make something odd (say a bolt with a funny imperial-age design that you just can't find) then you'd have to make some calculations about how much torque you can apply given the material and design. I'm sure the precision engineer above will correct me if I'm wrong....
For spares I wonder if the kinds of companies which provide specialist power tools (like drills for building sites) and service them rather than binning them would use them? I can well imagine the gears inside these things being changed regularly and right now they probably just swap out the whole gearbox whereas with this they could just print and replace the appropriate parts without having to keep masses of stock. I know they have a 3D printer on the ISS to reduce spares stock and increase speed of repairs but I think that uses a plastic compound. I would fully expect one of these kinds of things to be making its way up there shortly.
I'd love to see some data on the properties of the end material. I wonder how long until someone 3D prints a metal firearm?
Oh that was done years ago, one of the printer companies is in Texas so it was pretty obvious they would print a working gun. Obviously people at the time over-reacted as you can already by cheap lathes etc off ebay good enough to make a firearm vs the cost in significant fractions of a million to buy a metal printer.
Should be fine for cylinder heads though, NASA are already 3D printing rocket nozzles.
These things seem to work on a 2 step process, having printed the part you stick in in a kiln to melt the meta grains together. That makes it much faster than the laser scanning sintered metal methods often used. I would have thought that would be at least as good as a good quality casting.
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/08/t...gun/index.html
These people say they can print tool steel and titanium parts: http://3d.markforged.com
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 13-09-2018 at 01:10 PM.
No one is 3D printing my rocket nozzle.
So there is a silver lining to every cloud, then.
DanceswithUnix (14-09-2018),philehidiot (13-09-2018)
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