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This is seriously interesting and way more technical than I originally imagined. You see them and think, it would be cool to have one. A lot work, time and money go into using them, it would appear.
It seems there are as many upgrades to the printer as Harley has for their bikes.
The printers can be quite simple and cheap. I'm doing some things a bit outside the usual for hobby-grade printers. It depends on what you want to accomplish.
A Creality Ender 3 printer and normal filaments can do most typical jobs at very good quality for under $300 all in.
I'm trying to make a hobby grade printer do the job of a $15k+ printer. Mostly down to the materials I want to print.
Our rapid prototype group at work recently got a Mark Forged printer. I didn't know a lot about this process prior to this but we are all learning about its capabilities and finding ways to put it to use. My group is currently using the machine to make check fixture components that we typically make from aluminum & steel. Pretty cool what the machine can do and as a designer, pretty interesting to see what you can design without the restrictions of standard manufacturing procedures. One thing that has stood out to me so far is how long it takes to print some of the pieces we have made so far. If we were paying by the hour for machine time it wouldn't be worth it. For example I doubt you would have printed that 80/20 extrusion if you didn't own the machine, my guess is you would have just bought it. Anyway, cool technology and I am enjoying following this thread.
Yes, the process is quite slow. If I still worked at my old job this probably wouldn't have happened as I had access to all the fabrication equipment a person could ask for.
That's not a printed extrusion, tho. It's real 20x40 V-Slot.
Mark Forged has that cool continuous fiber inlay process, right? Nice machine!
Yes, the machine can inlay fiberglass or carbon fiber continuously. It does some other interesting things as well. For example, their software will "honeycomb" the internal body of a model that was drawn as a true solid. You can toy with this as well making some areas 100% solid and other areas honeycombed depending on how much rigidity or strength is required. They have their own proprietary material called Onyx that is 30% carbon fiber chop and 70% plastic. That base material can be mixed with any percentage of inlay material so there are a lot of options. Our company has always made SLA and SLS parts for rapid prototype but this machine is pretty new to everybody including the guys who run it everyday. There is a lot to figure out.
The honeycomb is called infill. Standard practice for FDM. There are at least a dozen different patterns.
The Onyx material sounds a lot like what I got from 3DxTech. Base resin could be almost anything, tho. They make pretty much every technical material you can use with FDM. PEEK, PEKK, ULTEM, etc. My machine won't ever be able to do those, but I can handle reinforced polycarbonate easy enough.
The patent keeping us from having affordable heated print chambers expires soon so maybe next year I'll see what I can do about printing Ultem.
First polycarbonate print. Testing extrusion temperatures. .40mm dia nozzle with .15mm layer thickness. Temps from 250c to 280c at 40c ambient.
Found my current machine ambient temp limit...at about 42c the motors start to get flaky.
At this point the printer is completely stock. No real complaints with the quality but the upgrades I'm working on should improve consistency significantly.
Enclosure version 1. Easily maintains 40c even with doors cracked. Version 2 is ready for assembly and should be able to do 60c once I get the coolers on the motors.
The coolers are waiting on the rest of the upgrades at this point. New frame is ready. Printing polycarb parts for it right now.
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