Anybody used the 3D printer at the UPS store?

I haven't seen this, but surely they can tell you how much it will cost when you hand them your design file. No? Who would buy something with a no quote price?

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Rick C

I'm about ready to try the 3d printing area again after a few years. Last time I tried it, it was an incredible source of pain, at least for anyone not interested in immersing themselves in the technology, its embodiments, and their far too numerous quirks (and failings).

Friends tell me things have improved, both in hardware and software.

Monoprice showed a $150 version of one of their 3d printers at CES this year, and it's getting good talk from some people I respect.

But I'd go with the hacker/maker space approach. If/when I get back into it I know I'm going to set up time with (paid) with a friend who does this kind of thing a lot, and learn from him.

have fun and let us know how things work out--

Ya think? They were unmoved by that argument! Problem is that I don't have a design file yet. Chicken-egg. Why bother to learn the tool to design something if you're unwilling to pay what it costs to print?

1) Create a design that has roughly the right amount of material. For a box that means simply the dimensions and thickness. That's easy in OpenSCAD or the web-based equivalents; it will take 5 statements: - create cuboid with external dimensions - create cuboid with internal dimensions - translate second cuboid - take difference between two cuboids - render 2) take the .stl file and submit it to an online fab which can print in many materials; they give you an instant online quote. I've used shapeways (nylon, bronze) and dirtypcbs (SLA), but there are many others 3) ask at hackspace or makerspace

Just download something fancy from thingiverse.com and give them the .stl file. They should be able to make a quote based on that.

Pere

Otherwise get an online quote from a website turn up with the design you want printed and ask them if they can beat that price.

A digital sundial is an amusing thing that can really only be fabricated by a 3D printer and a reasonable test piece.

If the print drifts on the baseplate during printing then the light paths through the thing don't work. Some are better designed than others

- one has a two part design split in the wrong place.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

That's the easiest way to do it. Try to match the volume and mass within reason.

What printer is UPS using? This is something Kinkos (sorry Fedex Office) should be doing.. .

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany 
Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition:            http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8

Dated, but...

"Prices vary depending on the complexity of the object; an iPhone case would be about $60, while a replica femur bone would be around $325."

Cheers, James Arthur

My son's high school charges about $8 per cubic inch of plastic filament.

Not sure how much profit margin UPS is expecting...

Michael

Thanks, that kills my interest. Still would be nice to hear from someone who actually used the service.

3D printing looks very attractive for things with inside stuff that can't be created with a milling machine. So far, I don't need that.

Mostly they are used for prototypes is my understanding. It may not be cheap, but it's a lot cheaper than milling and *hugely* less expensive than making a mold. I wish we had a way to make cheap PCBs for protos. But proto PCBs are actually much more expensive because of the typical short lead time and the low quantity. Too bad there aren't more batch services so you could get 6 and 8 layer boards at a good price in small quantities.

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Rick C

3D printing is used for far more than that, for example...

A lot of jewellery is made that way: print in wax and then use traditional lost wax casting. Even mass-market Shapeways allows you to do that in precious and semi-precious metals.

Some aerospace components are 3D printed, using direct laser sintering of metal powder. There's an argument that the resulting materials have more predictable (not necessarily better) characteristics than traditional processes.

There are many one-off medical components fitted to specific individuals.

That's evolving rapidly. I haven't seen anything I would bother to use, as yet.

Yes, like I said, mostly prototypes.

In the old days there were a number of methods that were pricey for production, but a lot cheaper than a prototype batch of PCBs. Wirewrap was very popular, then there was stitch welding and one that was like wirewrap, but used insulation displacement pins instead of square posts (much shorter). Each had it's advantages, but none were very good when signal rates got faster. I recall a wirewrapped system which they felt they were pushing to run at 25 MHz. In reality, they just didn't understand signal integrity. Wirewrap isn't as easy to run at higher speeds as PCBs, but it can be done if you understand the concepts.

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Rick C

nting/

Those are limited number /production/ designs. Not prototypes.

Of course prototypes are an important use-case, but if you go and browse at a 3D manufacturing trade show, you will see that there are already significant production use-cases, and more will come.

I've seen and used wirewrapped production computers (a Modcomp 4, IIRC).

Wirewrapping was used in many production designs, particularly on backplanes.

There are other techniques including those you note.

Yes, and the key word there is "limited number". There are still a lot more prototypes than production done with 3D printing because of the economics.

Yep, I worked on a machine that was a state of the art machine only beaten in speed by the Cray. The ST100 had a wirewrapped backplane and actually only ran at 25 MHz. But the CPU had four pipelined ALUs for

100 MFLOPS performance. The wirewrapped backplane was not so much an issue, but they used twisted pair wires to distribute the clock and this required manually adjusting the length of the clock wires to "tune" the machine.

The follow on CMOS ST50 used a printed backplane and had serpentine traces on each board to allow adjustments to the clock delay on the boards so as to make them interchangeable. They were pushing the technology too hard to just provide more timing margin to allow for component variation.

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Rick C

We print parts for mechanical models and "snow and tells" for customer presentations. It wows the crowds when you show up with a model of what you're bidding on, that they can hold in their hands.

After that, the prototypes are either milled or cast. Milling is thermally similar to extrusions and the parts that are to be cast are cast using soft tools. This is much cheaper than milling and thermally equivalent (same materials).

It would be nice but I don't think it's realistic. Are you going to spend the time/money to populate untested multilayer boards?

All IBM mainframes before 1985ish.

Yep. It was used as overflow wiring on mainframe backplanes, mostly, after 1980, or so.

Stitch welding was used well after wire wrap, well after WW went away.

those are bespoke products, not prototypes.

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