Westlake Publishing Forums

I came across this thread:

http://www.modelcarsmag.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=69078&page=1

Some interesting uses of scanning included.

I thought this was a lovely piece of 3D printing by Shapeways for a 1/35 project by Marcel du Long (computer model also by MdL):






Some more pics at the bottom of this page on his blog:
http://www.marceldulong.com/c11.html

Outstanding. (Except for what might be a broken or incomplete rib at the upper left of the printed model. Deliberate?)

Why didn't they print a turkey for Thanksgiving?

Why do I think of these idiotic things?

Russ

Bexley, Very interesting. Much like when running renders, or exporting 2D images from some 3D programs/models.

I've been playing around a bit with a deck girder bridge. One of the bits I had printed was a splice-plate and a stiffener. In the pic the rivet head that is 1.4 in. dia. run down the stiffener while the .75 in. dia. rivets are on the splice plate. This is about as extreme a close-up as I have been able to get so far. This was printed in FUD (Frosted Ultra Detail) from Shapeways. The layering from the build is pretty evident .. not THAT bad but evident. To put in perspective .. this is O scale so the 1.4 in. dia. heads are actually about 0.029 in. dia. The .75 in. dia. rivets are really 0.015 in. dia.

Note: Why two different sizes? Well ... rivets on a bridge ran between 3/4 and 7/8 in. That is the rivet SHANK dia not the dia of the head. Well duh! Turns out that a rivet head of this type is 1.5 to 1.6 x the shank dia .. so that the 1.4 in. dia is perfect for a 7/8 in. rivet. I ummm .. got mixed up between inches and mm when putting the rivets on the stiffeners ..  and hit the head dia by accident I confess.

That last photo is a bit unfair to Shapeways .. drawing back just a bit with the camera .. and IMO .. still way closer then you would ever be seeing the thing with the naked eye and it looks much better. That jogged angle by the way is about 0.012" thick at the flange.

There are finer prints available .. Fineline Prototyping for example has a MicroFine Green Resin that is mind blowing .. on their Knowledge-Base page they show a chess-board measuring 1cm square .. with an ant. This is their MicroGreen. The only problem is the cost WAY exceeds what a hobbyist can afford - but an example of what we may see available to us in the future at a reasonable cost. Who know .. I can dream can't I?

Just for fun I uploaded the splice-plate mesh to both Shapeways and Fineline Prototyping. This is the two plates connected by short sprues.

Shapeways - you have a $5 handling fee per mesh and a flat-rate $6.50 shipping. It would be silly to place an order just for the two plates .. if I do drop an order I will put this in with other meshes but for showing the differences in price this matters little.

Shapeways .. my cost would be ..
1 for $6. This includes the $5 handling fee so the cost for the FUD is $1. You can figure that..
10 for $15 .. and ..
100 for $105 .. and of course the $6.60 shipping. If you were quite mad .. and since each deck girder bridge would require four and therefore 2 prints per bridge then 100 would give 50 bridges so .. suppose 50 mad modelers .. the cost would be $111.50/50 or $2.23 per 4ea to each of the mad modelers + shipping. Not THAT bad .

Now .. to print these in the MicroFine Green at FineLine Prototyping ..

1 for $315
10 for $573
100 for $3,153

Even with 50 quite mad modelers .. that would be $63 each!!

So for now .. the MicroFine I leave to someone using it for a master .. and I will stick with the FUD which doesn't seem quite so expensive now!

The printer arrived last week and the tech will be here tomorrow and Friday to help set it up, show us how to run it, and how the software works. It looks like we'll be printing some calibration models (instead of actual work models, which I can't show) first, so I may actually have something to show here.

Christmas!

Congrats! Look forward to the pics and your thoughts.

Please report regularly on your findings and opinions. -- Russ

Will do. The current plan is that I will be the primary operator. However, my experience will only be minimally applicable to modeling at large, as most of us use Shapeways, which is a different style of printer than what we purchased. But I'm sure there will be some useful stuff.

It's lunch time, so here's the interesting bits I've learned today:

1. The printer uses an RFID material card system. Basically, when resin is shipped to you, it comes with an RFID card that must be inserted into the machine in order to run it. Of course, you could use any resin from any company and just insert a card in to make it run, but the card contains all the resin parameter data, and so if the resin you're using has different cure times, expansion rates, flow rates, etc. from the card's data set, you will get typically get print failures.

2. The .STL editing suite it comes with is pretty nice. Certainly, it blows Netfabb out of the water. And we didn't even get the full version, just a limited version to setup prints.

I think resin cost is the elephant in the room when "low cost" 3D systems are mentioned.  I have heard that the costs are kept artificially high.