On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 5:06 PM, Edward Bernard <yankeelena2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Sounds very interesting, Jon. I've looked at extrusion based RPS and have > not > been impressed with the results. > Edward, Care to share any of your thoughts on this? I'm curious to see what aspects of it you've found lacking. I felt the same way until I recently saw a RepRap and some parts it had made. The parts were strong and the machine seems to be getting a lot more reliable. The part quality and finish are not what you get off a mill, and it is not super fast, but the CAM is much simpler and you can make very complex geometries without multiple setups or fixtures. As an example, there are guys selling RepRap parts kits on eBay for ~$100 like this: http://cgi.ebay.com/SAE-Prusa-Reprap-Mendel-w-PLA-Bushings-3d-printer-/190543881396?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c5d4ce4b4 My understanding is that represents 20-30 hours of machine run time, most of it unattended. The existence of a decent number of vendors of these says something to me about multiple people getting these machines working well. I doubt I could come anywhere close to that with my mill, and a lot of the parts would need to be redesigned. The gears alone add a ton of complexity. The finish is definitely imperfect and has a striated/layered look and feel, and there are little blobs that sometimes stick out that can be knocked off with a file/sandpaper. Powder-bed systems definitely give a much prettier finish but the parts have very little strength. Electron-beam systems give strength and beauty but we're talking price-of-a-German-sportscar stuff now. And all of the commercial systems follow the printer ink model in terms of feedstock. The big thing stopping me from jumping in was the sense that you were lucky if you got a part one out of three runs on one of these things. It seems like the past year or two, things have improved a lot in terms of the extruder designs becoming somewhat reliable. I think their biggest problem these days is the motion control side. A few people have used EMC to run their RepRaps and seem to have gotten better results. This is just my .02c. Curious what others think. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
