Printer Accuracy

[OBR]

Hi,

I'm new here and hoping somebody can advise me.

Since looking into 3D printing I've been quite surprised at the range of machines on the market, but am a bit baffled by which one to go for.

I work at a college in England, we currently have a z corp 450 which we are looking to trade in, and putting about £9k towars whatever we can get.

We've been offered a uPrint SE, which is probably very accurate in comparison to the Robo 3D level machines, however the number of materials/ colours etc seems really poor.

Can anyone advise me if I'm just missing the point, and in fact to get a good level of accuracy you have to sacrifice the range of materials/colours etc? Or is the supplier trying to pull a fast one and sell me a rubbish bit of kit??!!!

Thanks

Olly

[richardphat]

It's just typical horsecrap advertising. Sure the nozzle can be spot on, but then all you want to know if at the end of the job it has the precision you were looking for.

Remember you are dealing with melted plastics from amorph state to solid, the parts will shrink and dimension will be off from what you had in mind. At least, where I work, tolerancing is crucial and sometime I just literally refuse printing stuff because I know people will come complaining later.

Materials is probably the major thing playing with the shrinking, so choosing materials should be careful with what you had in mind.

[iDig3Dprinting]

uPrint SE seems to be a nice printer but running costs may be quite expensive. I believe that they recommend using a new print pad for each run (these are deemed to be disposable) and of course they take a Stratsys own cartridge. If there is away to load this with your own filament then thay may decrease running costs and increase your range of materials but bear in mind that the machine is not put together to do this and so may not work well.

As richardphat points out, the quality of materials is very important. This, one would think, is the advantage of brand own filament cartridges, that they are made to a high standard that give a high degree of extrusion consistency. With the emphasis on materials then it is also important to be able to tweak the settings and so optimise your extrusion process. So the up-shot is you need to print with good quality filament and use a printer that allows for the settings to be tweaked (generally depends on the sofware interface to some extent). The level of resolution then will be determined by what you are trying to print.

[curious aardvark]

precision is effected by how well the machine is engineered.

So you've got about £10K

What are you making ?
And if at a college - which departments have access to the printer.

The industrial owder based machines are all going to be limited in material (well unless you've got a further 190 thousand to add to the pot for a full colour multimaterial objet) and restricted in the material source - read: expensive to run.

fff machines on the other hand really have blossomed in the last 2 years.

For engineering you've got the markforge printing with carbon fibre, kevlar, fibre glass etc.
The hyrel, prints with just about anything that can be extruded as well as standard filament.
There are no end of 'consumer' grade machines that will print every bit as well as a 'commercial' machine.

My personal opinion for a college would be to not put all your eggs into one basket, but start with one really decent machine - the two above are my current favourites. For many reasons. And then throw in a few ultimakers.
Additive manufacturing is the coming thing, pretty much all art and design and engineering courses will need them. So building up a manufacturing/prototyping centre - rather than just one machine - makes a lot more sense.

Material wise pretty much all fff machines can use: pla & abs variants, nylon, pet, wood, metal and bamboo fibre filaments, conductive filament. Rubber and flexible filaments.

In short where you're probably limited to powdered nylon for a chaep sintering machine - there are fewer limits by the week with an ff based system.
The ultimakers are about as precise as you can get and probably every bit as good as machines costing a lot more.
The main difference between a 'commercial' fff machine and a 'consumer' fff machine is simply one of appearance and enclosure. And it's pretty easy to enclose most printers.
Print volume seems pretty even across the board - regardless of price.

So it really depends on usage and common sense.
You can buy 5 or 6 ultimakers - each one will perform better than the printer you currently have.
Or - what I'd do and spilt the difference, maybe a couple of ultimakers and a markforge or a hyrel.

I just don't see the point of just one machine in the current developmental climate.

[OBR]

Thank you all for your responses, it's given me a lot to think about.

I'll check out the Markforge and Hyrel machines as it would be great to have a comparison.