Political power grows out of the nozzle of a 3-D Printer home injection molder.
Posted on 06/07/2013 8:08:09 AM PDT by null and void
designnews.com cannot be posted to FR per copyright complaint.
But if it could, I'd post the article at http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=264158
It would point you to LNS Technologie's website for details.
Political power grows out of the nozzle of a 3-D Printer home injection molder.
You STILL need to make the molds. . . either additive metal fabrication tech (which is NOT at the home/hobbyist level yet) or CNC (which IS available at the home/hobbyist level. . .)
/johnny
I did toy design for a firm in 1985 that had a unit just like this one. So what’s new?
A little bit offtopic, but what is the very tinyest heatcam on the market?
Yes. The company has some stock molds, and a link to their mold machine shop.
I bet you could use your own 3-D printer to make lost wax patterns and make your own aluminum injection molding molds.
All you’d need is the ability to melt and pour your own aluminium...
Crowd sourced funding?
to create a piece you need plans and the ability to interpret them or, in some cases a 3D scanner. next is the creation time in the program followed by printing. that is for 1 piece. as a modeler if you need 50 of them you will probably use that for a mold and resin cast the rest. it may or may not take less time to scratch build the initial piece. certainly it will cost less
there are some positive aspects to 3D printing. if i create a part, say a start-up generator for an airfield diorama in 1/35 scale, and a friend needs one in 1/32 or 1/48 or 1/72 all i have to do is scale the 1/35 part and print. 3D also works well with repetition. i don't have to make 9 cylinders on a rotary engine. i can spend twice the time making one and array copy it 8 times. big time saving. it is easy to make adjustments per customers' requests before printing. you can even create a scene a see how it looks.
i am revisiting my 3D program and this may become a small income source, who knows. all i am really trying to save is this: "the folks that think they can buy a 3D printer and print out a competition level 1/32 spitfire the next day are going to be disappointed."
I keep forgetting to ask you to add me to your ping list - can you please?
Done!
Yes. There are quite a few people who look at this as a better hammer, and therefore the whole world is their nail!
Lost wax would still need touchup, and if you get voids. . .remelt and start again. Although for THAT level of injection molding. . . you could probably use a wood mold, provided you didn’t want to do production. And a setup like that, with no cooling and limited injection capability, isn’t really a production system anyway...
Or you can make them old-school. With chisels, riffler files and stones.
It’s not rocket surgery.
What you say is true now but 20 years or so down this road, the “kit” you buy maybe nothing more that a file containing all the instructions needed to print the kit using a standardized 3d CAD/CAM program driving the appropriate 3D printer. As with 2d paper printers (and other digital devices like printers, digital cameras, flat panel televisions, etc.) today, high quality/fidelity in kit parts may come down to the resolution capabilities of the software and hardware you are using to execute the file instructions.
IF such a shift occurs (and there is no certainty that it will occur due to the expense of establishing the home 3D printing setup), it would profoundly effect the physical structure of the industry. Think of how the Internet is killing off traditional format (printed) general circulation newspapers and magazines. However, there is no lack of high quality specialty/niche magazines on the news stands. Similarily, the lower price general mass distribution modeling market is suffering just as 3D CAD/CAM is bringing unprecedented quality to higher priced injection molded kits.
The 3-D printing gives you the ability to define a complex shape without a machine shop or home CNC machine.
Making an aluminum mold from the wax master gives you the ability to make dozens to hundreds of injection molded plastic parts much more quickly than printing them one at a time on a 3-D printer.
Don't know where the price breaks would be for having Protolabs or one of their competitors make a mold from scratch, but there probably is a low volume niche somewhere in the design space, especially where one wishes to totally control the IP.
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