A wise man once told me: When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

...Doesn't mean the hammer is the right tool for every problem

-Ryan

 

But if you have a hammer, it's fun to bang it!

If I had a 3D printer at my disposal, I'd have all kinds of fun with it.

 

I fully support just banging for the hell of it.

-Ryan

 

x2 Then need to hurry up and get "affordable"

 

A motto I could get along with. The wife might not agree.

 

You can get a decent one for under $500 these days. What's affordable to you?

 

I didn't realize that... I was still seeing 1k+ numbers. What model do you have, out of curiosity?

 

I'm using a makerfarm prusa i3 8"

Prusa 8" i3v Kit (V-Slot Extrusion)

The flashforge ones look like to be a good bang for the buck printer tho.

Prices should still continue to drop for the next year as I've been seeing a lot of china companies developing and selling printers direct from manufacturer rather then via a US reseller who would mark it up.

 

I'm going to give it a year, and buy the second generation of the first <400$ printer I can find. First generation always blows.

 

Many companies are already on their 3rd plus generation machines. Most of the major kinks are worked out. The g-code generating software is constantly being improved so it's always neat seeing what new features they have.

At work we use a stratsys which runs about $30k. I'm sad that it set the bar way to high for my 3D printing expectation and no hobby entry level machine can match it. It just works. period. No tinkering with and adjusting a bunch of settings. Perfect prints every time. But still for the price, it's pretty impressive what the budget ones can do and how far the tech has come since then.

What I'd love is a budget system with a temperature controlled chamber rather than just the heat bed. I always have print warping issues on larger prints due to the temperature difference between the lower and upper layers causing contraction stresses. The Stratasys machines control the temperature of the entire chamber so there is no stresses in the part while printing creating very reliable large prints.

 

We also have a stratysis at work. Also an UP! The up has the heated cabinet. Also my friend just got a printer with a heated cabinet but I can't find the name of it, it was just barely sub 500 but he prepaid and waited 5 months to get it.

 

It looks like the Up printer is just a heatbed type printer with a shielding enclosure to reduce air draft but not a true temper controlled heated chamber. The Stratasys ones use no heat bed and instead have the entire print in an oven. The shielding should help some with that issue but I doubt it would solve my issue of large print curling on ABS.

if you friend bought one with a temp controlled chamber rather than heat bed please let me know the details of it if you ever find out.

 

Solid doodle press. Heat controlled bed. Stratysis has a patent on the temp controlled chamber.

 

ahh, that makes sense... Damn maybe ill rig up a heat gun or air dryer to blow hot air at my prints.

 

12v fan, heating element, microcontroller, temp sensor.

 

Damnit, now you got me looking at DIY heat chamber projects. Looks like another project to add to my list of **** to do.

PS: sorry for the thread de-rail. 3D printing some GV brake ducts is on my to do list so it's only slightly off topic I guess.

 

Our stratysis is pretty awesome, we have done a bunch of hacks to it, so we have refillable cartridges (saves us $100's), we added a raft of support material to the bottom of the print so that we can reuse the beds, about quadrupled the print resolution and were able to change some of the settings for multicolored printing.

 

I used my lip duct for a CAI, because streetcar. when heat soaked, AITs drop like a brick at speeds even under 10mph.

 

Has anyone thought to take a page out of Porsche's GT3 playbook? Their brake ducts are moulded plastic pieces that attach to the control arms and very effectively direct air to the rotor:




Here is the setup from the current GT3:

 

Thats neat. Usually you want air being forced into the center of the top hat rather than the surface of the rotor but that would help too.

making a tool specificly for the miata for plastic injection or vacuum molded parts like that is more of an OEM undertaking where you have exact CAD dimensions of everything and can spread the tooling cost over a number of cars. Someone with really good fiberglass and layup experience can probably come up with something tho.