Anyone else having an awsome weekend?Follow

For the most part, yes. There are some limitations to consider when designing a part for printing. Whatever you are printing has to be attached to the base all the way up. So for example, if I wanted to print this statue of Bruce lee [img]http://www.bruceleefansite.com/images/statue.jpg[/img] I would run into problems when it got to the elbow and lower outstretched arm. The printer prints in layers from the bottom up. When it got to that hand, there would be nothing for the plastic to attach to, and it would just fall to the bed. You can get around that by using removable support material. Typically you have to have at least a 45 degree angle to print overhangs like that. Things with an extremely narrow base can also be hard to print, but you can get around that by attaching a removable "raft" to the piece that you cut off afterwards. I find that most things can be designed to be printable, and if nothing else you can glue the plastic to itself easily. I like to think I'm pretty decent at the modeling programs and drawing things up in 3D. I also have a makeshift 3d scanner using a web camera, a laser line level and this almost free software: http://www.david-3d.com/ Though usually I find it is faster to just redraw whatever I want to print than try to clean up the scans. I use autodesk inventor for most of my modeling, though I can work with pretty much any file format or any program that can generate a .stl file. I also have printed commissions on occasion.

You can indeed print most of a printer. There are elements like the heater cores and heated beds that cannot be reproduced at this time, and a printer typically uses some metal parts for structure, also not to mention the control electronics. But you can print probably 95% of a printer that will work kind of crappily, or about 80% of a printer that will work awesome.




Oh no, I'm sorry to hear your daughter has skin cancer, and kidney stones can't be fun. Hopefully she has one of the more treatable varieties. Wish her well in the healing process from all of us!

You can indeed print parts for casting. Wax printing requires a specialized low temperature nozzle, but many people have found success using PLA plastic as a substitute. PLA is a sugar based organic plastic with a lower melting temperature of around 173 degrees c, as opposed to ABS plastic which is oil based and melts at 230 degrees c. PLA takes a bit more heat to remove than wax, but not much more when we are talking about people with access to metal melting furnaces and the need to pre heat the mold to prevent thermal shock anyways. It seems to work well so far, but I haven't personally tried it yet. My next purchase is actually going to be a small electric furnace capable of melting aluminum for that very purpose, mainly to make helicopter parts in my case. One thing that 3d printed parts do require is a bit of surface preparation for something like fine jewelry. The individual layers, even printed with a very fine nozzle will be slightly visible unless the surface of the part is prepared ahead of time via wet sanding and filler. You can also dip a PLA part in the same wax used for the lost wax process to get a smooth surface that way. You can see some cast printed parts here actually if you want to see what they will look like approximately: http://forum.lulzbot.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=590

Here is the lost PLA process from start to finish. It's quite long, but it does show all the stages of the process.

Beauty trombone Kao. Congrats on the new machine.

Dont' forget printer protection; 3-D printed condoms.

Spoiler

Here's your first project.