Re:3D Printing of a Steel Bridge in Amsterdam
by ChuckMcM on Saturday June 13, 2015 @12:42AM
(#9709894)
I understand your scepticism, I shared it. What changed it for me was prototyping electronics.[1] If you're prototyping something there are things you use to hold them together, but when you look at something like the LMB catalog [2] there are a bunch of boxes of certain shapes with certain properties, and mixes of those properties to try and maximize the chance they will have a box that is useful to you. Often you can get close, but it is to expensive for any distributor to stock their whole line so when you found your enclosure you had to order it and it had to come from the factory. Change the project so it doesn't fit any more and order the next bigger box, wait, and move forward.
ABS though is reasonably strong (and it is used in a lot of plastic cases) so if you can "print" the enclosure you just do. After postage its about the same cost, and from a time basis it is a lot cheaper. My daughter built a yardage counter out of an arduino, a hall effect sensor, an LCD display, and a printed "wheel" which carries the yarn and rotates carrying inside a small magnet that passes the hall effect sensor. All of the case work is custom and can be printed.
I wanted a 'universal' mount to hold various small eval/demo boards. The base is defined and the board holders are custom printed (basically a flat sheet with posts that can be drilled and tapped in various places) so every board just drops into the holder. Easy sauce.
Prior to printing things I have a Sherline Mill and Lathe. Great for a lot of materials and you can make things the old fashioned way by grinding off the stuff you don't need, but aluminum is expensive (even at scrap prices) when you need a bigger block that mostly is going to become chips. So while I love the VESA 200 -> 100 mount adapter I machined out of a 1/2" thick piece of aluminium, you can do it in structured ABS for less money and less time. And a lot less waste. (That said I'd love an affordable laser sintering system).
So kind of like programming, its neat and all but what ever and then suddenly it clicks into your brain where solutions to problems come from and you start seeing all sorts of things you can do now that you didn't think was possible.
[1] A short digression, I had the same scepticism for Evernote, but once it reached a critical mass of information it became HUGELY valuable to me, much more than the sum of the information contained.
ABS though is reasonably strong (and it is used in a lot of plastic cases) so if you can "print" the enclosure you just do. After postage its about the same cost, and from a time basis it is a lot cheaper. My daughter built a yardage counter out of an arduino, a hall effect sensor, an LCD display, and a printed "wheel" which carries the yarn and rotates carrying inside a small magnet that passes the hall effect sensor. All of the case work is custom and can be printed.
I wanted a 'universal' mount to hold various small eval/demo boards. The base is defined and the board holders are custom printed (basically a flat sheet with posts that can be drilled and tapped in various places) so every board just drops into the holder. Easy sauce.
Prior to printing things I have a Sherline Mill and Lathe. Great for a lot of materials and you can make things the old fashioned way by grinding off the stuff you don't need, but aluminum is expensive (even at scrap prices) when you need a bigger block that mostly is going to become chips. So while I love the VESA 200 -> 100 mount adapter I machined out of a 1/2" thick piece of aluminium, you can do it in structured ABS for less money and less time. And a lot less waste. (That said I'd love an affordable laser sintering system).
So kind of like programming, its neat and all but what ever and then suddenly it clicks into your brain where solutions to problems come from and you start seeing all sorts of things you can do now that you didn't think was possible.
[1] A short digression, I had the same scepticism for Evernote, but once it reached a critical mass of information it became HUGELY valuable to me, much more than the sum of the information contained.
[2] http://lmbheeger.com/chassis.aspx