3D Printed Minatures

Yea it's all about batch size. All the media attention about 3D printing is nice but they all forget to add that it's never going to replace all conventional production methods.

By the way: injection molding gets you about 800 000 products per die (at a cost of several hundred K per die, depending on difficulty).

That's another thing that is on my list.

Ha.

Yeah sure.

Not in your lifetime, maybe.

You still have to assemble the component that you produced with other manufacturing methods. That's the advantage of 3D printing - it also assembles.

Mass manufacturing is becoming a reality.


You should pay attention to GE Aviation, instead of using subtractive manufacturing, they are now using additive manufacturing to produce fuel nozzles at 25% the weight of previous, without having to assemble 18 different parts.

Whether you like it or not, mass manufacturing using additive manufacturing will replace subtractive manufacturing. Not this year, not next year, but down the track, absolutely yes.






And on topic, clearly not for PA miniatures, the technology simply sin't there yet.

Miniatures? I want a full sized commander!

3d printing can not do wonder, it's not a matured technology. The quality is just not so nice even for professional one, for example, the one in my college's lab. Not to mention the cost.

Devak says "it will never replace conventional manufacturing methods".

Cost will come down.
Quality will go up.
Quantity will go up.
Speed will go up.

My response is in response to the future (never say never), not the here and now. The here and now is yes, it's not affordable, it's not viable, current manufacturing techniques are doing it better.

By the time my generation's kids are my age, the same comments won't be true.

This!

And I want that wooden moon (from that fall trailer). Would look awesome hanging on the ceiling with a red light in it.

I run a product design company and I'm familiar with allot of these techniques, I just couldn't resist chiming in...

For small items like this your tooling cost won't be as high as that. You can tool up for a part for £2 - £3k (so not hundreds of thousands) and a proper mild steel mould tool is capable or producing a few million components. 10's of millions with a bit of careful maintenance and design consideration.

Now what is more interesting- where you want small volume runs (in injection moulding terms) so less than 500,000 pieces, you can use SLS 3-D printing technology to produce a metal injection mould tool in a matter of days. Cost is similar to a machined tool, the argument for it being the much faster time to market of your part (at the cost of tool life span).

Also with respect to quality of plastic 3-D printed components, it entirely depends on the technology used. There are a lot of cheap 3-D printers available for home use now that use the 'FDM' process, however these machines are basically glorified glue guns mounted to an X-Y cradle with a height adjustable bed. They're good for quick tests but they lack the quality needed to make anything 'finished'. Thankfully there are better 3-D printers about that offer an order of magnitude better quality and don't necessarily cost that much:

The best available right now is the 'Form 1' STL 3-D Printer which uses a laser curable resin instead of molten plastic and can achieve pretty spectacular results. This also happens to be another successful Kickstarter project, I've got one on order for use on a project with one of my customers (should be due any day now!)...

"all", you forgot the "all".

Is it gonna replace subtractive production methods? well, that's quite likely, yes. It's not gonna be some magical Star Trek Replicator though. (which was my point all along and the part you missed)

Marginally. the slowness comes from accuracy and the accuracy comes from the need to print it line by line. You can't use too big a thread or it becomes too imprecise. You can't use 100 different wire sizes because the head is only so big and you only want so many heads.

Subtractive methods like milling and lathing experience quite similar problems with batch size, but that's why it's usually better to just cast or forge large amounts of products (or pressform or whatever).

We have dozens of production technologies because of different demands on different things. 3D printing isn't a solve-it all. It's a useful extra asset.

Mechanical engineer here .

Yea that's just budgetary restrictions. Ready-to-ship, engineering-grade 3D printing is a possibility right now.

Because it wasn't relevant?

You said production, not manufacturing. That's the difference. Manufacturing implies assembly. And well, while casting and all that is nice, you would still have to assemble the components. My mistake, sorry I misinterpreted.

Interestingly, the British military (and undoubted the US and many others) have drastically reduced their inventory of spare parts for vehicles and replaced them with SLS 3-D printers. The majority of components that fail can simply be printed out as required. Large naval vessels also carry this equipment.

The cost of entry to this type of kit, as well as computer controlled subtractive technologies has plummeted recently and I work with a number of small firms utilising fairly high tech equipment that simply wouldn't have been available to them even 5 years ago due to the price barrier.

I do think that additive manufacturing techniques are going to become the norm for anything low volume in the near future, which is a pretty exciting prospect given the number of design restrictions that are lifted when you are not having to worry about production tooling costs, draft angles and so on.

Edit: There are also quite a few forms that are physically impossible to produce as a single item in any other way. Common examples are things such as a model 'Rook' chess piece with a spiral stair cause running inside it. The engineering / design potabilities are endless.

I'm personally only coming from the perspective of miniature wargaming. In the majority of cases, you assemble your own models from kits. This allows significant customisation options that you can personalise your models with, thus many find it far more enjoyable than just getting a model out of the box.

Ya was replying to Devak's post

But wouldn't you rather download the assembly file, alter that, and then 3D print it on your own personal 3D printer? That would allow even greater customisation options, if the software was easy to use?

Great idea. I think I might devote some time to modelling and making these.

Hold on there! I have to graduate from the mechatronics program before I can make you one of those! And I have dibs on the first one, got it?