Accurate 3D printer without support material - Any for home use?

[swatti]

When production time is not and issue but i want as accurate as possible sharp round surfaces and without using support-material, the only thing that comes to mind is SLS. Are there other types that use the powder as it works as a support on itself? Apologies for my lack of knowledge and poor english.

Are there any home-usable / affordable ones in the market? What is the starting-prices ?

My skills as a modeller are somewhat lacking and my models would need lots of supports, also speed is no issue but the price of the machine is.

[Geoff]

Starting for an SLS machine is about $880, which is the CTC riverside, but you don't buy that apparently, more bad reviews than good (just youtube 'CTC riverside')

Powder machine at home, still very very expensive!

[swatti]

I take it powder-based machines are all the same? I got an old sand-blast box i could use to clean up powder but working with liquids... I'd prefer not.

[awerby]

There are also powder-bed printers that use inkjet heads to deposit a liquid binder that consolidates the powder. Z-corp used to make them; now 3D systems does. There's also a Chinese knock-off version called the 3D Pandoras. The advantage of these systems is that they can print in full color. Twindom has a comparison of full-color printers on their site: http://web.twindom.com/printing-3d-p...d-3d-pandoras/

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[curious aardvark]

the best cheap minimum-support option is a right side up sla printer.

Most sla printers pull the model from the vat of resin, and need supports.
But a few build the model from the bottom up like a fdm machine and they can print complex shapes without supports.
The peachy is the only one that srpings to mind at the moment.
Because the resin is less dense than the saline solutiuon, you can print some unsupported structures.

The cheapest powder based machine I know of is around the £10,000 mark.

You can always get your models printed via shapeways. Expensive - but a lot cheaper than buying your own powder machine :-)

Another option is the mcor paper based system. full colour, no supports needed. And half the price of a powder machine. http://mcortechnologies.com/3d-print...olour-printer/

Still not cheap, but the models are surprisingly robust considering they're essentially paper mache.
Okay just looked at the mcor consumables - a 4 pack of ink is £480 ! Over $1000.
So, um not exactly cheap things to run.
But hey, full colour, no support machines aren't going to be cheap for a few years yet.

You're best bet is buy a flashforge creator pro - or equivalent. And prit with pla and pva support.
that way you just throw it in a sink of warm water to dissolve the supports :-)
And then paint it afterward.

[swatti]

Paper sounds like not very water-friendly. Even the prototypes will be taken outside and sometimes get wet.

Im starting to warm up to this liquid-resin-thing. How expensive is it to run in comparison to any other? Also, what is the cheapest to run?

Z-corp and this Pandoras seem nice ideas, however, one is 50 grand and the other is kickstarter... Also their magic-powder sounds quite expensive.

The peachy seems a neat idea, sure aint too expensive atleast. I havent decided how much im willing to spend yet. The peachy seems like its aimed at being cheap, if only there were a model using its method coupled up with high accuracy.
For the price The Peachy looks awasome but the object all have small faults, VERY easy to notice layers and odd mess-ups in small parts or tight corners/tips

I have lots of round shapes and things moving inside the round shapes. Those kinda need the accuracy or movement is sluggish or objects are hard to insert into their places.

[curious aardvark]

what's you budget ?
That's the first place to start, And yes resin printers are currently quite expensive to run.

[swatti]

As i mentioned, i havent decided on a budjet. If i have to throw out something. "few grand" but for that it has to be VERY good and cheap to run. Certainly dont mind if it were sub 1000 but im being told the lower you go the more problems arise and im not sure if i can handle those.

[awerby]

For the money you're willing to spend, you can get a pretty good FFF printer; that might be your best bet. These do require supports, but so do the SLA and DLP resin printers. You haven't really said what you're trying to do - what size prints you want to make, how much resolution of detail you need, how strong the parts have to be. These things determine which printers you should look at.

As far as I know, the Peachy is still a pipe-dream: http://3dprintingcenter.net/2016/02/...-on-the-maket/

Resin printers in general are expensive to run, as was pointed out, because of the cost of the photo-sensitive resins used. But they do make more detailed parts than the FFF machines, although they're not exactly problem-free.

I keep waiting for an inexpensive FFF machine with a demonstrated, reliable and easy-to-dissolve support material option, but although some companies claim to have that, there seem to be issues when they are put to the test, like the support material not adhering to the models, or problems managing the dual heads. Failing that, you end up having to carve away the supports by hand, which is tedious at best, dangerous at worst.

[dunginhawk]

Muve3d resin based printer. Hands down... Top notch quality build. cheap to run (you can buy a liter of resin for 60$ and it lasts a LONG time).
Check out a couple of my videos on quality of the prints.
You can go all in for well under 2500$

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3tBv314q-s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19-m_SUNRqs