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MakerBot's 3-D printers will soon be able to produce items that look like bronze, limestone, and wood, thanks to a new line of plastic-based composite materials shipping later this year. But the launch may be too little, too late: Entrepreneurs and artists interested in working with metal and wood are already embracing desktop milling machines that can handle the real deal.
The calculation is simple: Buy a MakerBot Replicator, the leading desktop 3-D printer, for $2,889, and you can produce plastic prototypes or the kind of trinkets that you might find in a Happy Meal. Buy a small-scale milling machine like the Othermill, which retails for $2,199, and you can make jewelry and mechanical parts out of everything from aluminum to walnut.
"Once you can cut metal, you can make things that last," says Danielle Applestone, chief executive of Other Machine Co. "For the first couple of months that I was working here, I was scared of cutting with metal. It was louder, I was worried I was going to break the tool. But as soon as I jumped in, it quickly became like wax to me."
"Metal is power, it really is," she says. "You don't go back."
It should be noted that MakerBot's base model also went from $400 to almost $3K when Stratasys acquired them.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 11 2015, @09:01AM
Point taken...
The printers, scanners, and disk drives have many interesting parts in them. Printers and scanners have motor drivers, optical position detectors, and interesting mechanical assemblies, shafts, and gears. Floppy disk drives have steppers, and HDD's have neodymium magnets in the head positioner, as well as interesting bearing assemblies.
I was just talking to some of my colleagues today over how impressed I am over what some would call the lowly Arduino.
I can build damned near anything with it. Very inexpensively. I was lamenting on whether or not to keep a drawer full of old 6502 parts and associated IC's. I could not justify keeping them, as I had nothing to support by keeping them, and there is no way I would ever design another 6502 based system when I have all these neat ATMEL 328's.
For me, those ATMEL 328's are an ideal example of the "magic" you referred to. Along with all the I2C support chips now available. Unbelievable precision. For a song.
I still can't get over just how inexpensive it is to build these things, and if I have a lot of really persnickety stuff ( like stepper motors or DMX lighting protocols ) to run, I can offload that to yet another simple eight-core Propeller chip (Parallax 8X32). For a fraction of the price I paid for just the memory board for my IMSAI 8080.
Cost is definitely no longer the limiting factor it once was. Now the problem is mostly bootstrapping one's knowledge up high enough to catch on and use these things.
However, let me say too that there will be some startup costs that cost every bit as much as my IMSAI cost me... like getting a good microscope and soldering tools to assemble tiny SMT circuit boards, getting books of SMT part assortments from China, as well as learning how to use EAGLE so you can get PCB's made. There is a lot more front-end training these days required before you can actually produce a unique thing of your own design. Its no longer an evening with a soldering iron, a breadboard, and a box of leaded parts.
The tools are more powerful than anything I have ever had before - and mostly free. Arduino compiler - free. EAGLE - free ( at least the training version that restricts you to small circuit boards - good enough for this kind of stuff ). Propeller compiler - free. Linear Technology even provides a free SPICE simulator. My main development computer is an off-the-shelf WalMart laptop that was less expensive than an Iphone.
Its things like this which make me believe a mentor that can bootstrap a kid is more important than ever, yet I see little effort being made to help the next generation get through that initial barrier of learning the tools.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]