Local 3D Printer Hero

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the-first-100-3d-printer-and-sc

Go Saskatoon!

Cool stuff. Not bad for some young dudes from Yorkton.. I hope they come through big time.. considering they are up to 450K already they are well on there way.

I don't want a 3d printer.. but Id invest in their company for sure.

Think of what that could do for building terrain!

This is the only reason you should invest in the project...


"Gage was raised on the barren wheat fields of Saskatchewan by an alternating family of Prairie Dogs and a Sasquatch. He was born into it, moulded by it, he did not even see flax until he was already a man."

hahaha.

i looked it up, good on them.

I'm not sure everyone is up for building their own printer in their basement. i imagine a lot of folks will get their pieces and never be able to get it running properly. that said, it might push down the cost of commercial printers even more.

We all think GW is crazy for charging so much for codecies and rulebooks, but the future is coming and fairly soon the heydey of charging $80 for a plastic dragon may be coming to an end as people can make thier own for $10 worth of resin. eventually all GW will be able to sell is thier IP.

Rhaevyn wrote:hahaha.

i looked it up, good on them.

I'm not sure everyone is up for building their own printer in their basement. i imagine a lot of folks will get their pieces and never be able to get it running properly.  that said, it might push down the cost of commercial printers even more.

We all think GW is crazy for charging so much for codecies and rulebooks, but the future is coming and fairly soon the heydey of charging $80 for a plastic dragon may be coming to an end as people can make thier own for $10 worth of resin.  eventually all GW will be able to sell is thier IP.

Well and this will get worse as people buddy up and pool together to buy the printer. If each 4-6 of us got together and bought one that wouldn't be to bad at all. Can make a lot of dudes for the cost of resin.

You could even make more robust ankles for your Tau!

Yeah.. i wouldnt be interested in buying one at all. I knock shit over all the time and it.looks really fragile.. plus i really have no idea what the hell id ever print.
But.. i think the idea is fascinating and super cool.

As someone who owns a 3D printer I feel like chiming in. I got one that was setup for a newbie I barely had to do anything other then take out some packing screws and set up the software. It was still a bitch to get going but hardly impossible. That being said I agree that if you had to build it yourself most people would not get it up and running without lots of help. Some places have "hackerspaces" where you could go for such help. Dude mentions one in stoon in the video. Mine was 600$ + some tools and filament.

A few things I've learned: Prints take a ridiculously long time and the higher the resolution the longer it takes as well  your design and print settings effect print time quite a bit. This
was printed in several parts.

1 - door faces x 2 (5.5"x4")
2 - Middle part "frame" of the door i glued the faces too. (half inch wide)
3 - Door Frame x 2 The outer side parts that will eventually be glued down leaving the door to be dropped in or pulled out (3.5" tall)
4 - The middle symbols (x4)  with the gears are a seperate part that snaps into the middle of the door. 2.5 inches wide about 1/8 thick

The outer parts were printed in a lower resolution then the actual door. Overall the Print time is about 12 hours for two Doors

12 hours of a 200 degree printhead moving quite quickly over hot plastic. Kind of means you need to be around it as (and i almost had this happen) if your print unsticks from the bed it will follow the printhead around as ir gorges out more hot plastic creating a big molten blob of ugliness that builds up around the 200 degree print head.... see where im going with this?

To build something actually durable you need high rez high density and if i were to build these parts like that it would push print time 30+ hours.

the level of detail on figs is just unatainable but the printer has its uses. Currently I'm working on a "Forge Ship" 6x4 board. Lots of corridors and equipment/ship systems to build. Much can be done conventionally (admittedly these doors fall in that catagory) but custom "manifold" type parts could be invaluable. Things to fasten other things together in a neat and tidy fashion. Im JUST getting the hang of design and printer tweaking and already seeing improvements. Also stupid easy floor tiles! Width and length matter much less then height for print time to a degree. I can print 5.5x5.5 .2mm thick squares if i wanted. thin enough to be translucent thick enough to give your terrain an easy decent looking floor tho at .2mm all your going to get a slight crosshath pattern.

None of that justifies the 600$ price tag. I got it to be a hobby not to be productive! lol.

SOOO when i look at this guys printer I'm a little blown away by the alternative design and how crazy effective it could be. As well as much safer. At 100$ breaking it would be a little painful but not the end of the world and a suuuper high Z rez makes me wonder how finely tuned you could get it. The normal style of 3d filament printers can do outcropped/overhangs but pretty quick the printer needs to print support material to hold it up while the plastic cools. More cutting/trimming and the slope is usually a little ragged. handles curved surfaces that dont hang over open space pretty nicely though.

Still the problem of design persists. He needs a SUPER user friendly interface coupled with 3d design software that any newbie can pick up and go. you know who wants to print their paper bird in plastic? Pretty much nobody. Even with the 3d scanner capability chances are your still going to want/need to tweak the output.

All I really wanted from this post was to say that for 100$ if the printer works its fantastic and you guys should at least consider it but not without warning of some of the blatant drawbacks the current technology has. We'll have see how well his new design really works but the ability to ignore gravity already has me salivating. It all depends how truely accurate the Z rez is and the X/Y rez but from the video It looks good. One thing I can say already is you better put this in your basement as vibrations would comprimise your print but hey at least you wont light your house on fireif you leave it alone!

Oh heres a shot of my printer (solidoodle 2) in action

I didn't realize that we had anyone on the forums currently running one of those beasts. What's the general cost on material for it?

45$ for 1 kg of 1.75 mm filament. I haven't used up a roll. Yet but close to half roughly. Those doors r bout 50 cm cubed each but that's a lot of plastic and I'd guess together they used up 1/5 th a roll but don't know exactly how. Much is left on the roll. Like I was sayin how far a roll gets u depends on design and resolution those doors were printed as fine as possible so lots of plastic.

Could be great for bases and skeleton work for scratch builds.

Yeah bases are super easy and the skeletal work it excels at. I have the big box of buildings from GW and im going to use the printer to make the wall
struts/top/bottom and use the building walls as corridor walls or at least the the preliminary plan lol. These doors were more of a lets learn how to use this thing and see what we can do with it. Over the next few weeks going to try more complex objects that would be tedious or difficult to scratch build.

Sounds great, I hope to see more of your projects on the forums here. So it's $45 for one of those spools of material? That means the doors only cost you around $9 in material, plus time. I'd call that pretty decently priced terrain!

yeah Id say so. Though its painful to see a half done larger print decide to mess up in some way and need to be scrapped. However.... its possible to recycle all ur plastic! A "fillabot" was kickstarted a while back and they are avail for pre-order. 750$ tho so its pretty much terrible. someone smart come up with a cheaper method of doing this! moral of that story was the plastic is reusable if you ffnd a way to recycle it back to filament. If the printer + recycler were <500$ that wouldn't be a crazy entry point and fingers crossed we reach that within a few years.

All this aside 3d printing is kinda fun and its cool to support something (at least the tangent of it) that one day leads to star trek like replicators. sure it might be 100's of years from now but everything starts somewhere right?

It may well be closer to us than 100's of years, as our tech has a tendency to double in power/speed every two years. Already NASA is starting to use 3D printers to make Pizza in space, because shipping up "material packets" is more efficient than shipping the pre-assembled food. There is also a guy over in Europe who's in the middle of 3D printing out an Aston Martin, for crying out loud.