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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 LoRdTAW on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:31PM
No worries.
In my opinion, going for more discreet steps has no real benefit unless you are looking for crazy high resolution per rev using microstepping. That or more steps when not using microstepping (e.g. when using a dumb step driver without current control.)
And crazy high resolutions are not necessary when you are driving lead screws as they have imperfections in them such as backlash and winding. Winding? Hold a straw on one end and twist the other. The straw winds up. Happens on screw stages when the loads are high and the commanded move very small. The motor moves, the encoder sees the move but the table has not moved as the shaft and/or coupler twists slightly. Even with a stepper without feedback the same thing happens.
Crazy high precision usually means linear or piezo stages with laser interferometer feedback. Then you can enjoy submicron precision.