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from the don't-blink-you'll-miss-it dept.
When the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car is unveiled this week, the public will be able to see the many innovative technologies used in its construction. Several surface panels will be removed so that people can look inside to get a sense of the engineering required to make a car move faster than 1,000mph.
Given the bespoke nature of Bloodhound, a significant number of its components have been fabricated using 3D printing techniques. This includes even the steering wheel.
With over 3,500 custom-made parts, it would have been prohibitively expensive, and wasteful, for the Bloodhound project to use traditional batch production approaches in many instances. The complex design of the car also demands shapes that are difficult - sometimes impossible - to make using traditional tooling. As a consequence, the car's designers were always going to make good use of "additive manufacturing".
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday September 25 2015, @03:05AM
Are you talking about the car or the printers themselves?
I was fairly recently introduced to 3-D printing and was horrified by what I actually saw. Over half the printing jobs failed because the printers get gunked-up all the goddamn time, even if you clean them on a regular basis. So you got a big 12-hour job that finishes halfway and then the job fails, and you're back to square one after 6 hours worth of wasted time and filament.
You'll have to resort to tricks like rubbing a glue-stick on your tray to make sure your job doesn't get stuck to the nozzle and slide around, and some printers just freeze up and require a hard-reset to work. Other printers encrypt their data streams so you have to use their buggy and bloated shit software.
Yes, there are people who depend on 3-D printing for prototyping side-jobs, and yes, those jobs frequently fail over and over again causing a loss of not only pay but future work.
None of the different models of 3-D printers have a feed procedure which squirts all the burnt hardened gunk out of the nozzle until it runs clear, so that your job doesn't get fucked up -- if you want to feed, you actually have to go through the whole feed procedure, which means opening the fucking thing up and hand-feeding the filament and even that fails half the time when the mechanism fails to grab the filament.
Yep -- 3-D printing has a looooooong way to go before it's useful in the real-world.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Friday September 25 2015, @07:45AM
You'll have to resort to tricks like rubbing a glue-stick on your tray to make sure your job doesn't get stuck to the nozzle and slide around
Words to live by.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk