Quote Originally Posted by awerby View Post
There are 3D printers that can output aluminum, but they're out of range for most of us. However, Shapeways offers aluminum printing from your files, which may or may not be worth doing, depending on how important that part is to you. If you need see-through inserts printed, they can do them in a clear resin using a SLA printer; FDM (the printing system used by the common cheap printers that deposit melted plastic) isn't going to work too well for that. But it will be able to produce the parts shown in black plastic.

If making parts like these was my main use for a scanner, I'd save the money and invest it in a good CAD program. You can replicate those parts by measuring and modeling a lot more efficiently than by scanning and trying to clean up the scans to meet your tolerances. If your parts were a lot more complicated, though, scanning and reverse-engineering would be worth considering.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com
I'm fully agree about this