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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) by mhajicek on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:11PM
Depends on what you mean by "small". Also depends on the anticipated cutting forces, duty cycle, and lifetime of the assembly. That said, you could start with lead screws and later upgrade to ballscrews once the machine is making money.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:38PM
Whoa there... we aren't talking about minting coins on CNCes, are we?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 11 2015, @10:42PM
I have used my MaxNC to make coining dies. Not for counterfeiting mind you, just medieval style coins for reenactors.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek