Member Introductions

[Eddie]

Welcome to 3D Print Board. Please introduce yourself here. Let us know what types of printer you have (if any), and what you interest is in 3D printing.

My name is Eddie. I am an avid 3D printing nerd! I truly believe that 3D printing is the future. It is an industry that is about to explode. I am 31 years old and live in Southwest Florida.

Ed

[McNabb5]

Name: Jake
Age: 24
3D printing experience: I've only seen it down by a few friends, but I have not yet purchased a printer myself.

I really am looking to get into 3D design because I see this whole 3D printing thing really taking off soon!

Jake

[old man emu]

Name: Mark
Age: Baby Boomer

I like messing around with new technologies for making things. I built a CNC router, and now have a Maker Farm 8" Prussa i3 printer.

I'm also a bit of a tech writer.

My screen name is Old Man Emu, (OME for short), which clearly tells you that I'm an Australian.

OME

[jimc]

hi, name is jim, 39 years. just started with 3d modeling and 3d printing a few months ago. i am running a makergear m2 and do most of my designs in rhino3d.

[MysteryAlabaster]

Name: Daniel S.
Age: 17

I've been working around a Replicator 2 for over a year and a half now, and starting this year a Replicator 2X. Most of my designs come out of either Sculptris or Tinkercad.

[mechadense]

Hi,
My name is Lukas.
I've sketched and drawn physical gadgets since I can think of.
Somewhere along my way in English education (I'am an Austrian) I guess I was around 17, I got to read an article about
absolutely beautiful nano-machines of this kind:
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/visuals.html
http://www.imm.org/research/parts/
If you ask what that has to do with 3D printing then please be patient.
I didn't even know of the existence of 3D Printing at that time.

I guess I first learned of the existence of 3D printing around the time shapeways popped up.
I immediately knew I had to try it out and started 3D printing with this dutch 3D printing service.
After I've tried all the major materials which where available back then
I found it to be rather expensive and thus only usable for jewelery and only a vew other things.
This brought me to the decision that I finally want to buy my own personal 3D printer kit.
At that time I was fortunate to be late enough that the the Ultimaker was already in pre-order state.
Since I own it I put it to good use as you can see here.
http://www.thingiverse.com/mechadense/designs

But thats not the end of the story.
Remember those "Diamondoid Molecular Machine Elements" I've mentioned before.
Completely unrecognized by the general public (at least in my part of the world)
atomically precise nanotechnology is slowly but certainly progressing to a state
where atomically precise printers (for non metallic elements) become possible.
A recent example of the progress can be found here: http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/101/
Further stages will quickly switch to crystalline carbon and silicon as building materials.
Don't be mistaken - atomically 3D printing devices will not evolve from current day 3D printers but come from labs that combine
bottom up and top down nanotechnology.
Even though they'll emerge from rater secretive parts of the technological development (if sensibly designed) atomically precise 3D printers (in the second or third generation) will share the open spirit in that they will be copyable with just a bit of welding gas as the only necessary resource. Later just sun and CO2 may suffice. Those printers will come in all sizes (think key-chain pendant) and spread over the whole world in no time.
Every one of those key-chain-pendants will be a seed - capable of rebuilding the whole word even after a 3rd WW (not judging it's probability here)
Just to remind you that those won't be almighty wonder-machines: Food will not be printable this way as you will find if you decide to look further into the details.

By the time this technology will arrive we'll already will have a quite vast library of all sorts of stuff.
But beside Macro-products the nano-machine-elements must be designed too.
Here I've written a tutorial about how to convert designs for future nano-machines to
something that can be printed for presentation as a model with current day 3D printers.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13786/#instructions

In our future the whole world around us will be programmed and often packaged with it's code.
Today I do mainly use OpenSCAD since for me its the most easy to use and practical software there is at the moment.
But for diverse reasons I'd rather like to see some cross of those two:
https://github.com/colah/ImplicitCAD (plus quick preview)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mole.../NanoEngineer/

I plan to publish some thoughts of mine about atomically precise 3D printing here:
http://scriptogr.am/mechadense

Some literature about atomically precise manufacturing - If you're interested:
http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Abunda.../dp/1610391136
http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html

So in summary what establishes my interest for 3D printing are my need to get those gadgets out of my head and my motivation to showcase detailed concepts for components of future atomically precise (AP) systems. If you've not already known about AP printers it I hope I could spawn your interest.

[Vanguard]

I like "old man emu's' reply baby boomer, HA ! Myself, I'm so old, I can remember when the dead sea was just getting sick. HA ! Bradley C. Fudge, little tiny hole in New Mexico, nobody, nothing around, might as well print something.

I was a tool and die maker for what seemed like forever, I have worked in most every aspect of manufacturing, including manufacturing guns, model making, props for movies, lost wax casting, etc., etc.,.......then I became disabled. Now I get so bored I have to find something to do, so I tinker, I like to tinker where nobody else has gone, or at least not much is known. That becomes expensive. I have always had expensive tastes. So even though my company looks like a for profit company, it seldom actually makes any. I'm not complaining, I wouldn't know what to do if I wasn't messing with this stuff.

There is a LOT of room for advancement, I can see so many things that can be done, with very little expense. It would be very easy to print directly from pellets, a person could make a machine with quick change tool heads, so you could have multi color/material, switch to engraver, switch to wax cutting mill, switch to PCB drill, etc. It is not practical to use a printer to cut metal though, the rigidity needed is too high.

So as Eddie says, 3D printing is the future.

[blissiictrl]

My name is Matt, I'm currently 24 (nearly 25, within 2 months haha). I'm in my fourth year of a dual major in Mechanical/Heavy Industrial Engineering, and Human Resource Management. I do both modelling and printing, my modelling skills at the moment are fairly limited to what programs like Inventor are capable of, but I am trying to teach myself how to use programs like Milkshape, Maya, 3DS etc, in order to further bolster my training and abilities/usefulness.

As for a printer, I'm only reasonably new to 3D printing - I've wanted one for years and years, ever since I did an on-site experience with an engineering course in high school, when the tech was moderately rudimentary at best! I only just bought myself a Replicator 2 recently, and have been teaching myself Blender in order to clean up models for 3d printing and export them to print ready formats!

I'm a long time Eve Online player as well, which is where my decision to buy the printer actually came from - I wanted to develop my own tabletop version of the game to play with friends, and to make a one-off Eve version of Monopoly for home!

I see a big future in 3D printing, and getting the knowledge these past few months I have has definitely greatly benefited me, I've learnt an immense amount as it is!

I'm based in Australia too, in South-East Queensland. I would definitely be open to any group meetups and such!

[dave21740]

Hello, I'm Dave, and I've been around since mini-computers were as big as refrigerators and had to be booted up (I am not kidding) by setting address/data switches on the front panel so that the computer would know where to start executing. It was old technology at the time, but they were still in use where I was going to school. I'm still in the same industry, but now it's Java realtime and quad core processors, instead of wire-wrapped backplanes and magnetic core memory.

I have a Makergear M2 printer for practical reasons and for play. On the software front, I've been using Simplify3D Creator and Repetier-Host/Slic3r for model prep, slicing and g-code creation, and a number of modeling tools and utilities depending on what i'm doing (FreeCAD, Blender, OpenSCAD, MeshMixer).

I remember (geezer alert) when the music industry came down hard on some private citizens who were trading music online. Not making money with it but, according to the industry, taking money away from them through lost sales. I wonder when manufacturing companies will do the same with 3D printer file trading. I do think at some point examples will be made of people based on copyright infringement and/or theft of intellectual property. For example, one of the more practical items I've made is a LiPo battery tray for an electric helicopter. The manufacturer charges $20 for two of them. My knock-off, using measurements directly from the stock part, cost me 92 cents in plastic. About 25 grams. I thought about publishing the STL on Thingiverse then decided not to because I didn't know what the legal issues were, given that I made my part from measurements of a commercial product. Really unlikely that the company would decide to make me a legal test case, but it's going to happen at some point, to someone. So I decided I'd publish things of my own design, but not anything I reverse engineered or outright copied for my own use.

[navkram]

Mark
43
Northern Indiana
been around 3d printers for a few years, started with A Seemecnc H-1, then Rostock MAX and the latest is the ORION also from seemecnc.com.
Seemecnc guys are part of our makers group and they are located about 5 minutes from my house so its nice to have Steve and John at my finger tips. My Brother owns Tricklaser.com that makes aftermarket parts for the Rostock Max and Orion printers, along with other printer accesories.

Our maker Group along with seemecnc.com will be hosting the second annual http://midwestreprapfest.org/ March 14 15 16 - 2014 excited to have Josef Prusa (Prusa Mendel/i3 and more) and MaxBots (Mendel MAX dev), , Logxen (Smoothieboard Dev) and many more again this year along with build events from seemecnc and others.

I am currently working on a rotational machine that can reproduce hollow plastic parts from molds, either printed molds or silicon molds taken from a printed part.