Costs of 3D printing?

[DBT85]

The ender 3 Pro is here. I already want an adapter to go from my mitre saw to my vac. Why do these sprouts insist on making up random sizes!

 

[DBT85]

First print right off the bed. It was one of the models included in the printer so nothing fancy, no settings changed or anything. Not bad for a £196 printer.

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20200514_190258

This will easily do the bits I want it to do.

 

[DBT85]

Last post from me until anyone else actually wants to discuss it :lol:

Printed this for my brother, its an adapter for his hot tub or something. 2 hours, 13g of PLA and 0.25kw of electricity.

That's 29p worth of plastic and by my calcs about 4p in electricity.

 

[marcros]

Is that 2 hours to print or is there design time on top of that?

When it is printing, can you just leave it to it?

 

[DBT85]

Is that 2 hours to print or is there design time on top of that?

When it is printing, can you just leave it to it?

It was 2 hours to print and yeah, you just leave it to it. If it had an issue you might come back to a spaghetti mess, but if you keep the occasional eye on it you can cancel it if its looking bad.

There would have been design time for someone, I just downloaded the file he sent me to on thingiverse. Have a look. There's a LOT of stuff out there.

For the adapters I want to make I'll make one that has variable parameters in Fusion and then I can just adjust those parameters for each one I want in about a minute, export that file to a slicer like Cura, then export that file to the printer and then print it.

 

[SkinnyB]

Here is my latest design 3D printed. 2 hours to print. I run a 1mm nozzle over the standard 0.4mm nozzle, so essentially I lay down plastic over twice as fast as a standard nozzle. This works great for the print I do as they tend to be big parts so really speeds up the time.

I wanted to put 150mm sanding discs (Mirka silver Ace only available in 150mm) on my Makita 125mm sander. So designed and 3d printed a larger plate for it. Added some foam and velcro and all under £5. The slotted design allows for suction holes outside of the 'body'
of the sander so it still pulls in dust from the very outer holes.

I also designed one to take 9 hole and 8 hole discs as I accidentally bought 9 hole instead of 8 hole once.

IMG_9718 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

IMG_4546 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

IMG_8394 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

IMG_8395 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

 

[Deadeye]

First print right off the bed. It was one of the models included in the printer so nothing fancy, no settings changed or anything. Not bad for a £196 printer.

20200514_190302

20200514_190258

This will easily do the bits I want it to do.

I'm sorely tempted by the banggood product. Have you hit any issues?

 

[DBT85]

Here is my latest design 3D printed. 2 hours to print. I run a 1mm nozzle over the standard 0.4mm nozzle, so essentially I lay down plastic over twice as fast as a standard nozzle. This works great for the print I do as they tend to be big parts so really speeds up the time.

I wanted to put 150mm sanding discs (Mirka silver Ace only available in 150mm) on my Makita 125mm sander. So designed and 3d printed a larger plate for it. Added some foam and velcro and all under £5. The slotted design allows for suction holes outside of the 'body'
of the sander so it still pulls in dust from the very outer holes.

I also designed one to take 9 hole and 8 hole discs as I accidentally bought 9 hole instead of 8 hole once.

Ahh a great actual practical use!

I'm sorely tempted by the banggood product. Have you hit any issues?

None at all, bu bear in mind its only been a couple of days. It has been printing things for about 24 hours so far in total, today just parts for itself like cable clips and stuff.

If you don;t fancy it on Banggood it is available on Amazon and lots of other places. When I ordered mine they had stock in the UK, right now you can only order it to be dispatched from China, USA or from the EU. Its still free priority delivery from the EU. I paid the £3 insurance just in case but with the voucher for a new customer It still came in under £200. It does come with some PLA filament but I've not opened it as I had some here from Amazon already.

Obviously you also have to bear in mind the creation of designs if you are doing your own custom designs like SkinnyB did above.

 

[TheTiddles]

First print right off the bed. It was one of the models included in the printer so nothing fancy, no settings changed or anything. Not bad for a £196 printer.

20200514_190302

20200514_190258

This will easily do the bits I want it to do.

I have to admit, that is very good.

Aidan

 

[DBT85]

My first adapter is about to print the 3rd prototype. The first I messed up a dimension, the second is perfect, except that the printer is printing circles 0.3mm too small, so it doesn't quite match the drawing or fit.

So a fractionally a larger one is on the way.

Oddly a 20mm calibration cube was at most out by 0.1mm on any side. Maybe its the action of moving on 2 axis at once that compounded the irregularity.

 

[CHJ]

A calibration adjustment for the stepper motors in the firmware by any chance?

 

[DBT85]

A calibration adjustment for the stepper motors in the firmware by any chance?

I can make a steps per mm adjustment, but if a 20mm cube is nigh perfect I don't quite know what I'd need to adjust. I'll ask on reddit maybe.

 

[SkinnyB]

You will want to look at your extrusion multiplier. Essentially how much plastic is pushed out the nozzle.

To do this print a single wall (presumably 0.4mm) 20x20mm cube with no top, bottom or infill.
Once printed use a digital caliper and measure wall thickness in multiple places multiple times.

(Don't measure at the bottom of the cube that attaches to the bed. The plastic may have squished to the bed giving a wider wall and a false reading)

If the wall is thicker than 0.4mm reduce extrusion multiplier. Increase extrusion multiplier if walls are too thin.

Edit: I would go down 0.01 at a time. eg. 0.99 - 0.98 extrusion multiplier. Repeat and measure. You may have to do this for each material as they flow differently.

 

[DBT85]

That's great info thanks so much!

 

[marcros]

This thread alone has been enough to confirm that I don't want a 3d printer. It is very interesting stuff, fascinating in fact, but I hadn't realised there was quite so much to it.

 

[SkinnyB]

When I got my first printer I didn't think much of it and almost sent it back. Slow, the things I could find online to print were just like toys etc... It wasn't until I started designing my own parts that I really saw its worth. There is a steep learning curve just designing prints that are printable. Not everything is possible to do.

Mainly you can't print in mid air easily. There are ways around it like support material to hold bits up but its knowing and trying to design around these limitations you need a mind for.

Then there is actually printing the thing... I have generic print settings that will work with most parts and its as easy and hitting print. When you have something more complicated to print you really need to start adjusting settings for particular areas.

I would consider myself quite a capable 3d printer user but sometimes you get parts off like this and need to look at them to determine what you need to change.

For example I pushed the settings for this print and I knew in the back of my mind it wasn't going to work. I printed at a layer height of 0.3mm instead of the usual 0.2mm. It started of fine with the vertical walls but when it hit the angled slopes the layer height was to high, the print temperature maybe was to high and the part cooling fan too low. I would then go in and adjust these settings.

I am now printing one a 0.2 with a higher part cooling fan speed. That I'm 99% will sort the issues. Ill report back to show you.

IMG_8688 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

 

[DBT85]

This thread alone has been enough to confirm that I don't want a 3d printer. It is very interesting stuff, fascinating in fact, but I hadn't realised there was quite so much to it.

Yeah unless you have the desire to design your own stuff it is largely a bit of a toy.

My first adapter and its iterations took me maybe 40 minutes to do, but I'd never used the shell, hole or loft functions in fusion. I can now make one in under 10 minutes.

 

[SkinnyB]

And just by reducing the layer height back to 0.2mm we have a much better part.


IMG_8694 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

 

[DBT85]

And just by reducing the layer height back to 0.2mm we have a much better part.


IMG_8694 by jamie skinner, on Flickr

Can I ask why you changed it to 0.3 in the first place? I assume just for print speed. My nozzle is only 0.4 so I guess 0.2 is basically where I'll stay unless I get a larger tor smaller nozzle.

 

[TheTiddles]

This thread alone has been enough to confirm that I don't want a 3d printer. It is very interesting stuff, fascinating in fact, but I hadn't realised there was quite so much to it.

There is soooo much more than this! This is “which PAR from Wickes” level discussion. When you see a product that’s been optimised from the start to be made this way, it’s a little like looking at something alien, so many of the paradigms that usually apply don’t, because, why would they?

In some ways the “make a replacement moulded part on a 3D printer” reminds me of The Iron Bridge, a new material being held together with dovetails and M&Ts because that’s the way they thought back then, not realising it was time to move on.

If I had space and budget, I’d buy a CNC laser, nothing complicated to them, but you can make some super things with them so easily

Aidan