3D Printer Engineering

[Brian GParticipant @briang]

Posted by J BENNETT 1 on 21/11/2018 15:03:20:

…The problem will be that she will want to produce her own designs and I don't relish explaining the learning curve that a CAD package will involve.

You could point her at SketchUp which does the job without much of the functionality and attendant complexity of 3D CAD packages. As well as there being plenty of tutorial exercises online, the are converters both ways between .skp and .stl files, so it is easy to modify (remix) downloaded models.

Personally, even after 20 years of 2D CAD I cannot get to grips with 3D CAD, but find SketchUp intuitive as it is closer to modelling software like 3dsMax and Blender.

Brian

[Nick HulmeParticipant @nickhulme30114]

Posted by John Shepherd on 16/11/2018 09:44:45: a thread about cheap printers, I complained about what I consider to be poor practice such as bearings held in place with cable ties, poor rigidity, 'all threaded' rod used for construction and for lead screws etc.

With a flat level surface to stand them on and with careful build and set up all these things work perfectly well and help to keep kit prices down.

If you wanted to use ball screws for Z you could use harmonic gearboxes with no micro-stepping to achieve good resolution and torque.

In an ideal world, where price was no object, many 3D printer parts would be precision made in better materials. To that end I'll be making a set of metal parts to replace the plastic bits on my Factory 3D printer, but I'm under no illusion that it's likely to be an economical enterprise, it's just on the list of things to do whilst commissioning and getting used to my new VMC.

– Nick

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