So I gave that model another shot on my Rostock MAX Friday night.

<singsong>Nailed it!</singsong>





Took 11 hours to print. 25% infill, silver ABS plastic.

g.

Beautiful!

That's impressive performance, with that sort of overhang and no support!

I think it should be mandatory to own a 3D printer, what a nice toy!!

Great result Gene.

Mate that looks incredible..

Thank you so much..."sniff"

Impressive! What's the cost of one, if you were to take material and time into account, were you to observe the process?

[EDIT] ...and what would the price be for a P-38 reproduction? (the pretzel shaped one)

453Raafspitty, you're quite welcome. I know of a few people in your neck of the woods that have a machine capable of printing the model if you're interested. Standard "cartesian" machines don't have the Z height.

JAMF: How big is the yoke on the P-38? Got an STL model of one?

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Can it be printed in two halves or would it bend too much to be glued together?

There's no technical reason it couldn't be done.

g.

Well, if it were to be split in two so that the front and back could be joined together, maybe with added screw holes and alignment pins, it ought to be possible to fill the interior with a support lattice rather than have it solid, saving print time and filament. Also, it should be possible to trim part of the support lattice to fit the wiring in, and to add structural reinforcements.
Btw, are you going to try casting it in aluminium? Seen it takes twelve hours to print one I'd try to make a mold to obtain a bunch of wax casts though.

Where O where do you get these wonderful toys! No links necc. I can't afford it anyways......

But nice work!

Brandano: I printed the model at 25% infill. This means that 75% of the interior of the model is nothing but air. It's NOT solid. While the model could have pockets added to it, you couldn't do the mating posts without support material.
The model is destined to be nothing more than a desk accessory. I printed it simply to see if I could.

If someone has a KG13 grip model they want to see printed, I'll be happy to give it a shot.

HHF: Sorry, too late. http://www.seemecnc.com. You. Must. Buy. One. (I have the inside track with the guy that wrote the assembly manual! *laughs*)

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That's incredibly cheap for a full kit. Electronics and motors included? Also, do they have an European distributor?

I have a Kg13 in the works but the grip part is a bit above mt modelling skills at the moment..

@Gene what software is needed to pilot the 3D printer?

Brandano: That's a full kit. All the plastic components are injection molded right there in Indiana.

Bluedeath: There's three parts to the toolchain.

1. The Slicer. This software is what "slices" the model in to layers in the height you specify. It also dictates plastic flow rate, etc. The end result is a standard G-Code file. I use KisSlicer (http://www.kisslicer.com)

2. The Host. This has various configuration options about the printer and allows you to manual control it. It's also what sends the GCODE to the firmware. I use Repetier-Host, but you can use other packages like Octoprint or Pronterface.

3. The firmware. This is where the rubber meets the road - it translates all the GCODE commands in to movement. I'm using Repetier firmware on my Rostock MAX, others use Marlin. There may be others that have been modified to properly use the delta geometry of the Rostock style printers.

With the exception of KisSlicer, all the software is open source. For an open source slicer, see Slic3r, Cura and Skeinforge.

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Gene, how much does it cost to make something like that in terms of materials?

Just in raw material, there might be $6 in plastic. The cost comes in machine time.

g.

Hi Gene, can you explain what you mean by machine time? is the wear and tear on the machine such that you have to account for it on something like this? or is it just that the machine could have been doing something more profitable while it was engaged doing this?

Is the grip full-sized? $6 is only around 250 grams of plastic isn't it?

When dealing with a 3D printer like mine, the material cost is usually pretty low. I pay anywhere from $18-$40 for a 1kg spool of 1.75mm ABS or PLA filament. The low end of the scale is typically manufactured in China and it's "you takes yer chances" filament. Sometimes it's awesome, sometimes it's so bad you just toss the whole roll. (I've heard horror stories about foreign debris in the filament, etc..) The high end is often US produced filament - there's one company in the midwest that produces virtually all the 3D printer filament that's marked as being "Made in USA".

If I were to produce that grip for sale (I won't. It's not my model to sell, or to make and give out), I'd probably charge about $50. That makes the time investment worth it for me. I have to keep an eye on the printer until I'm confident I can leave it unattended and the print won't fail and need to be restarted. That point was hit about four hours into the grip print.

I checked to see how much Ponoko would charge to make the grip model. They use a SLS or STL printer instead of the filament style I use. Their material cost is a lot higher and their machines cost orders of magnitude more than mine (a good SLS printer will set you back about $30,000.00). The grip would run about $260 printed in "durable plastic" - they don't list the plastic formulations that I saw. Just for giggles, I picked "stainless steel" as the print media, and the price jumped to about $2200. Yes, they can print real stainless steel parts. The technique is called Selective Laser Sintering. Boeing has a fancy machine they developed that prints wing spars out of Titanium in a huge vacuum chamber. (It saves them gobs of money. Instead of milling away at a 5000lb billet of Ti to get the 3000lb spar they need, they print one out of Ti and mill off about 500lbs to get it to final tolerance)

I haven't weighed the grip, but it is full sized. At least it feels like it - 453Raafspitty would know for sure as he's the one that created the model.

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