/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Oh your lazy.

Heres some steps:

1. go on craigslist personals
2. post up that your a male whore
3. ?!?!?!????
4. profit
5. pay someone five times as much because your lazy.

You can either build it yourself for less than $400 or pay $1500+

Besides if your to lazy to built it how are you gonna create models?

>>292012

Download them

>>292013
>Download them
Kill yourself. Or at the very least never post on DIY again.

>>292012
>>292014
>not knowing about http://www.thingiverse.com/

Also, check this shit out,

>Complete Downloadable Kilowatt Wind Turbine — just add magnets & wire!
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:28773

So you can power your 3D printer for free.

>>292014
You need to get out. Stop ruining the board with your bullshit.

You could have pointed him towards some kits or some assembly tutorial for the repraps or something useful. Instead, you decided to shitpost.

OP, check out
http://www.reprap.org/wiki/RepRap_Buyers'_Guide#Full_Reprapped_Kits

>>292010
>I wan't to get a 3d printer, but the problem is few exist for the common consumer.

WAT
the market is exploding with these things recently.

ok, you made me reply, and now that I am at it, how about telling us what the printer has to be capable of.
> Total build size
> build speed
> portability
> modifiability (does this word even exist?!?)
and so on.
Also: Price range. Else I am going to recommend a Zprinter 650, lel

>>292034

OP Here

I want the best I could get the best I can for around 500 or less. I've been looking at reprap and the wiki they have is detailed enough that I may be able to build one without needing a kit.

A small size is fine for now.

One thing though, is there any out there that will allow creation of translucent plastic things, I would be willing to pay more for something like that. But if it doesn't exist for less that 1k, I'll just settle for opaque.

>>292038
500 or less is hard to combine with high print speeds.
If you are ok with printing slowly, the printrbot/wallace flavor seems to be in your price range. The inherent problem in that design is that the X-Axis (gantry) is not exactly stable, so under high accelerations, it tends to wobble.
This is confirmed with the Prusa Mendel design and just looking at the construction of the printrbot/wallace, I can say that this issue will become problematic at much lower speeds than for the Prusa Mendel.
Speaking about printing slowly: I am quite spoiled by being able to print on a sturdy Mendel90 (costs around 600+ if you buy printed kit parts) that I have tested up to 500mm/sec with PLA plastic. Normal print speeds are in the sub-100mm/sec range with 60mm/sec being sort of a nice speed (also suitable for the printrbot/wallace I guess). Keep in mind that professional printers will also print quite slowly. In fact, the RepRap ones exceed professional printer speeds without compromising too much in quality.

How translucent does your plastic parts have to be? PLA (Polylactic Acid) is transparent if left uncolored, much like Polycarbonate. When you print it, the added layers will diffuse the light so that it becomes quasi-translucent like crushed glass. Pic related: Print in PLA with 100% infill on the outside and 25% in the central cylinder.

>>292038
Also, you might be able to achieve higher speeds with a bowden extruder design because that would remove mass from the X carriage, thus there is less to make the Z rods (which hold the X assembly) wobble. However, there might be some other problems that come with a bowden design like feed stock hysteresis. One of the best printers out there uses a bowden, though and just look at this print!
OF course, a lot of tweaking (and 14 hours of print time) is required to get to this quality.

Maybe add in some extra cost for a heated bed. It will save you a lot of headache and filament.

>>292038
The way the DIY 3D printers work is that you can customize them to use anything at all that can be squeezed through their applicator's aperture and onto the work surface.

This includes, but is not limited to,

food
plastics
metals
epoxies
living cells

So, yes, while I've not personally seen it, I would imagine that you will be able to use translucent plastic.

>>292082
well, uncolored ABS technically is translucent, but when printed into a solid object, it just absorbs too much light.
Translucency is also achieved by surface roughness. A transparent plastic can be made translucent by giving the object a rough surface, but that's more a job for a mold than for an extruder.
Another issue in this case is that you print filaments anyway so your object will never be perfectly solid. Light will scatter on internal surfaces like discussed and demonstrated here: >292068

I'm not the OP, but if ever I was to build a 3D printer that used plastics, I would really like to recycle my own plastics for my own machine to use. I see that plastic printing 3D printers seem to all use extruded plastic wire. So, to make my own plastic medium I'd need to melt down the source plastic and extrude it into the correct diameter the 3D printer needs. I'd also need to adjust the heat levels for different plastics I assume both for melting and printing. I would think that making such a device to recycle plastic into extruded 3D printer medium would be fairly straight forward.

If this a viable idea? After all, making the 3D printer would be more difficult than this I would think. I'm actually surprised there isn't a market for this already.

>>292086
Derp. I cannot into linking. >>292068

>>292087
> After all, making the 3D printer would be more difficult than this I would think

Unfortunately, no.
Although a good idea, recycling the plastic is harder than it initially seems.
To be able to print in good quality, you need plastic wire that is homogenous, so no air bubbles and irregular diameters. In order to achieve that, one either has to compress plastic scrap into a tiny hole while melting it, not dissimilar to a screw extruder or melt and extrude it in a vacuum chamber.
This was the second part of the problem.
The first part would be how to feed the plastic into the extruder. You obviously cannot just jam large parts into the contraption, so it has to be broken down into smaller bits.
One idea I know of was to take an industrial coffee grinder and another would be to use acetone to dissolve ABS plastic. When processed correctly, dissolving and drying it yields extremely fine plastic powder (which could theoretically be used for laser sintering, too).

However, there is one project that attempts to use plastic pellets as feed stock instead of plastic wire. So far, it looks decently promising, so maybe in the future, we will be able to recycle, too.
Here is the link: http://makibox.com/

>>292107
I've worked with melting plastics before and it seems very straight forward almost comical actually. The easiest way I thought of was actually placing an old fashioned meat grinder into an oven and feeding it plastic while it slowly runs the plastic through and out specific diameter holes into an air cooled section.

A solar powered heating unit would be better. So, instead of an oven you can use a heating coil to keep a constant temperature inside the meat grinder.

The biggest problem would be clean up if you wanted to use different types of plastic. Because cleanup just isn't going to happen unless you can dissolve that crap off.

>>292143
The meat grinder is quite similar to plastic extruders used in infusion molding. Actually, there are some contraptions based on this design, so far with no really satisfying results except maybe for the makibox device. However, the heating they do is only locally directly at the extruder, leading to clogging when the distance between feed mechanism and extruder is too short.
Maybe your idea may help as there are only few thermoplastics being used currently. Then, even heating a big chunk of plastic might not be that much of a problem if that did not deteriorate material quality (ABS turns a little bit brownish when heated for a long time).

Here is another link I found this evening: http://filabot.com/
Also looks promising and takes care of every step.

>>292143
using recycled nichrome wire to heat the grinding section/extruder tip would probably be better than heating the whole grinder in an oven. A thermostat would keep the grinder in theright temp range.

>>292163
>ABS turns a little bit brownish when heated for a long time

I think that is because they are heating it just a tad too high. It should be heated at a slightly lower temperature even though that means it will be more viscous.

Nice link.

Go home Bob.

Soliddoodle is the cheapest premade printer I've found. 6x6x6 work area, ~$550 for the version with the heated plate.