Does this seem at all practical for making pickup covers?

[Chris Turner]

MakerBot Industries - Robots That Make Things.

An affordable 3D printer that you make yourself (from a kit). I can imagine this being pretty useful for making covers, bobbins, etc.

Just saw this in the latest edition of Make magazine (coolest magazine on the planet ;-) ).

[Spence]

I don't think it will work out.

[rdrr]

The cupcake isn't very fast. It's pretty cool for making one off prototypes and testing things out. It's printing resolution would leave a lot to be desired as well, the parts would need a fair amount of cleanup. It would probably be ok for flatwork type stuff where you wind directly around the magnets but not an entire enclosed bobbin. Another thing it would be good for is making masters for molds. You can print up the master and clean it up and then make your molds from that.

There are industrial 3d printers that can give you much better results but they do not $650. I cant remember how much the material is so I'm not sure how cost effective printing items like that would be compared to an injection molder.

The RepRap is pretty comparable to the cupcake but you would need to source the parts yourself, but it would be ~$200 cheaper.

[ken]

My buddy has a RepRap, and is trying to get me to make one too. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the resolution to make a good looking cover - too grainy. In fact it reminded me of '16 bit video game' grainy.

I gotta say that that a 3D printer would be beyond cool for bobbins and covers in ten years or so, but not quite yet in a 'home printer' format. Just think... you would never run out of bobbins again.

On the other hand, some industrial 3D printers can now do rudimentary COLOR printing...

ken

[Steve Conner]

Hey, I remember when the old clunky stuff was 8-bit, and 16 bits was state of the art!

There are places that will do this stuff for you. At work, we recently brought out a product with a moulded plastic case, and the case prototypes were made by a 3d printer, so we could evaluate them before shelling out $15k to get the moulds made. It's called stereolithography. The quality was very impressive, much better than you could manage with anything you could afford to run at home.

The two prototypes were still going strong until last week, when somebody dropped one onto concrete and it shattered. The final case is moulded from polypropylene, and passes the drop tests no bother.

To drive a 3d printer, you need 3d design software, and that's not necessarily cheap or easy to use. The guys who designed our case used SolidWorks.

[David Schwab]

I've had parts made on a 3D printer. Depending on the machine, you might have very good surface quality, or something that needs work. Then it's mainly god for making a rubber mold.

You can see here that there is a pattern on the surface. That required filling and sanding and then priming. But I've seen better examples.

[ecenur]

Hey, I remember when the old clunky stuff was 8-bit, and 16 bits was state of the art!

There are places that will do this stuff for you. At work, we recently brought out a product with a moulded plastic case, and the case prototypes were made by a 3d printer, so we could evaluate them before shelling out $15k to get the moulds made. It's called stereolithography. The quality was very impressive, much better than you could manage with anything you could afford to run at home.

The two prototypes were still going strong until last week, when somebody dropped one onto concrete and it shattered. The final case is moulded from polypropylene, and passes the drop tests no bother.

To drive a 3d printer, you need 3d design software, and that's not necessarily cheap or easy to use. The guys who designed our case used SolidWorks.

Hello, What I want to do is start making my own mouth peices of my own for my clarinet and saxophone or making replicas of the ones I already have, I want to do this by using Stereolithography you seem to have an idea about Stereolithography. Do you think this would or or would be a good idea?

[David Schwab]

Hello, What I want to do is start making my own mouth peices of my own for my clarinet and saxophone or making replicas of the ones I already have, I want to do this by using Stereolithography you seem to have an idea about Stereolithography. Do you think this would or or would be a good idea?

In some cases the material is porous because of the way it's created. So it wont work for a mouth piece.