My son's got a 3D printer but I haven't had anything to do with it, yet. Is it possible to print over or onto an armature or some sort of solid support?
My son's got a 3D printer but I haven't had anything to do with it, yet. Is it possible to print over or onto an armature or some sort of solid support?
Most entry level printers are filiment type, but irrespective of the technology one would have to have clear access to the layer being printed. The heads would get in the way for an sda, the extruder on a fdm, etc
So, no, printing around something that is not also printed at the same time is totally problematic as you add layers in the vertical plane.
Producing sections that can be glued together and fitted later however could work. Getting accurate 3D model of the part to cover would be the hardest part, especially with something irregular.
Be easier to cast over it.
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
I was just going to say (Dave got there first and probably knows a lot more about it than I do) that the internal support is usually built into the Cura (or whatever) slicer program you use and is normally in the form of a lattice just to keep everything supported in place - It often can be removed afterwards from the finished product - Support type can be changed, or turned off when desired by ticking a box in the program.
However I doubt it could be used in the way you suggest - in 3D printing, everything is built in thin layers from the ground up and can't work alongside stuff that has already been made - but, I dunno about expensive commercial printers, at the rate things are changing today who knows what's possible or what isn't!!!
Strokers Galore!
3D scanner and potentially hours and hours spent processing the scan data. It might be usable for a 3D printer without a great deal of work if you get a very clean scan, but turning things into accurate surfaces to pull into CAD can be a serious chore.
I got my NextEngine scanner and software at a steep discount after a friend decided for his projects it was faster to sit down with the part and calipers and model from scratch than to try and fit surfaces to the scan data. That was with some high-end software designed for turning scans into CAD. Mostly, the times I've tried doing that I've found the learning curve too steep for me.
It is probably like everything else, if you spend 40 hours a week using the tools you'll get reasonably handy with them.
I scanned some port molds made with Vinamold and it appears that light/matte surface is pretty much ideal for the scanner. But you also want a part that doesn't have awkward lumps/hollows that disrupt the line-of-sight of the scanner, doesn't move in/out of the ideal focus range as a turntable moves, etc etc. If your part has rough surfaces those will probably be duplicated in the scan data, which is annoying when you'd really like a smooth surface. Patching small holes, deleting excess data, fixing flipped surfaces/tangled vertices and other stuff, even with the software that automates that to a degree, can be very time consuming.
The wizzo handheld scanners that you see being waved at a part while a replica magically appears on the computer screen seem to run about $20-30K for the less expensive ones and can easily be twice that.
Did I mention how much I hate our 70k printer?
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
True but the gaps can be filled if you desire with filler or sanded back.
I was suggesting the the simplest way to create form was to 3d scan it.
It also doesn't require any draft like a casting would.
Even if he sucessfully made a casting he still needs the point cloud and the mesh of what he intends printing over.
Here's a screen capture showing the nice clean scan of a Vinamold port mold with my NE scanner. It would be helpful if all scans started like this, but if you start off with a part that looks like someone attacked it with a maul and axe your mileage may vary.
I've printed over things like nuts by stopping the printer, placing the part and restarting. The piece can't stick up, though. You can manually edit the g code for the stop by adding the pause at the right layer. The part below had a splined metal piece that fit in the recess. I printed the part up to the top of the wide area, inserted the part, and printed the rest of the handle.
Lohring Miller
That is a good way of getting round it! - I guess the best way for solving all the problems we may encounter in life is not to be stuck in the groove of trying to make everything fit the capability of whatever tool or machine we may be focused on at the time and have a look sideways for a better way of doing it! - perhaps in a case like this, even normal plastic welding or just plain metal casting. As they say, "more ways than one of skinning a cat" !
Then maybe I could be talking rubbish!
Strokers Galore!
Old technology but at least we are moving forward slowly.
Hoist works well, a fire up soon, I hope.
Ahh. So I stand partially corrected, that's still useful. I hadn't thought of that, but was thinking of non parallel sided items.
Thanks for that.
Don't think it could work for SLA as you'd have support material in the void if there was ro be a roof.
But no doubt someone has thought of a clever way to fool the machine to run two programs one over the other.
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
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