3D Printing. Your experience?

[robincherbatsky]

Hi there, I want to ask you about 3d printers before buying.

Can anyone recommend a good model for someone who has never used a 3D printer before?
Can printers under 1000$ use with different materials? Such as plastic, wood, leather, acrylic etc. or does it use only one material?
Is it possible to scan and print a model car body???
Can you guide me, please?

Any suggestions and ideas will be pretty appreciated! thanks

[curious aardvark]

why have you posted this in the prosthetics forum ?

Is it becuase there are so many: what printer should I buy ? threads everywhere else, that you can't be arsed to read, that you thoight you'd stick it in the least appropriate section of the forum you could find ?

Go read some threads and then - with a little knowlege - ask relevant questions in the correct section of the forum :-)

You can't print with leather - not yet anyway.
Although technically you could use a biomedical machine to infuse a matrix with bovine skin cells and grow some 'leather'.
But not for under $1000 :-)

[Geoff]

I'll move this thread for him

[awerby]

Printers priced under $1000 are all variations on the same basic kind of machine, which melts a sort of plastic wire "filament" onto a platform using computer-controlled motion to build a part up in layers. So all the materials you can use on these machines are one type of thermoplastic or another. They can have some other materials added to them, like wood dust, but it's still basically plastic.

If you want to make things out of these other materials, you might look into other types of machinery. For leather, a laser works well. For wood and cast acrylic, look into a CNC router. These work similarly to 3D printers, but they are subtractive machines, while the printers are additive.

Yes, you can scan and print a model car body, but the amount of detail you'll get on it is a function of the size of the original model and the resolution of the scanning system you decide to use.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[JacobVR]

If you are mechanically inclined, built one yourself from a kit. Save money and get a better idea of how everything works and you can use xbox kinnect as the scanner with the right implementation.