3-D Printers! - What are they, how do they work?

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3-D Printers! - What are they, how do they work?

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Well, I over the winter I splurged for a nice 3-D printer. I'm always coming up with ideas and often fabricate them from either wood or bent aluminum, etc... Some ideas are not easily building, requiring injection molds, custom CNC cutting, etc... Well, low and behold, 3-D Printers have become affordable the last few years, I had to have one.

Image

http://www.flashforge-usa.com/creator-pro/

How does a 3-D printer work?... My easiest analogy is taking a old dot matrix printer (that spits ink droplets)... add one more dimension to it such as a bed that goes up and down, allowing you to layer the ink droplets on top of each other... Well, now exchange the ink with molten plastic.... now you have a 3-D printer! The printer basically extrudes molten plastic in thin molten filament, and the movable platform/bed moves up and down allowing the printer to layer more molten plastic upon previously deposited plastic... it sort of builds objects in tiny fine layers (I normally print in .1mm layers but you can go finer, down to .01 if you want... but it's real slow!).

Cool device to say the least. You can download objects other people made (using a CAD software program) or you can design your own (My main use). I looks into various CAD drawing programs and one of the easiest to use (and it's free!) is made by Google and it's called "Goggle Sketch-Up". It takes a bit to learn it's intricacies but it's really neat for what it does.
http://www.sketchup.com

Sketchup allows you to 3-D draw you object and them save it in a format that can then be used by the 3-D printer. One intermediate step you need to do is "slice up" the CAD drawing. This "slicing" software is also free from various sources... the one I use (recommended by most 3-D printers) is called "ReplicatorG"
http://replicat.org/

Once sliced up and saved in a format the printer can use (called an ".SVG" file)... you send it to your 3-D printer (much like sending it to an ordinary computer printer" and the 3-D printer does it job by building the object layer by layer (from bottom to top). You can a couple type of thermoplastic on the printer, two are ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) and PLA (Polylactic Acid). ABS is great for high temp application and is somewhat flexible while PLA is a bit easier to use/print but has a lower melting point and can become brittle. ABS is petroleum based while PLA is corn based and biodegradeable to boot!

So... I:ve been having all kind of fun designing stuff and printing stuff... as if I needed another hobby! ;)

So, below are a few things I made and printed... one being a cool Spektrum receiver tray (looks like a Powerbox but it's basically a receiver holder/tray.... another is a cool servo lead clip for keeping those Hitec/Futaba leads attached when inflight... One vid below shows the printer (lapse) printing a neat charger/discharger box with 4 legs... and lastly, I attached a cool vide that shows how the servo lead clip was designed and how it works... the ideas are endless... can't wait to retire! :)

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Bob Pacheco
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