Please recommend a commercial grade 3D printer.

[Ed209]

Hi all,

I represent an Engineering department in a college in South London. We are in the market for a commercial 3D printer; which would you recommend please?

Could you also recommend which CAD software is best to use with a 3D printer? AutoCAD or Solidworks or something else?

Thanks in advance.

Ed

[Mjolinor]

You need to post more info like (but not limited to) budget and use. The more info you give the more meaningful the replies will be.

[Ed209]

Thanks Mjolinor. I'm pretty ignorant of 3D printers at the moment to be honest, so I bow to your superior knowledge.

I'll try my best to explain our position. I am the head of an engineering department, who have a considerable budget with which to build a new workshop containing CNC machines, and a 3D printer. This 3D printer will also be used by the art and design department, and shoud be capable of handling a volume of 30cm cubed.

It will be used by college students daily for one off items, but would not be manufacturing a huge run of products.

The staff we have currently are not au fait with any type of 3D Cad, so the more intuitive the software associated with the printer the better.

Budget is probably £10k.

[curious aardvark]

10k is interesting that puts you into several categories.
You can buy something like the hyrel, which has multi use heads.
You could get a second hand laser sinter machine for powdered nylon.
You could but 4 ultimaker 2's
You could throw in some change and buy a 3dp ulimited giant printer - 1mx1mx50cm volume.

You could buy 2 ultimaker 2's and a hyrel.

Whatever you do get more than one printer.
maybe a fancy commercial one and a couple of cheaper FFF ones for playing with. (flashforge dual extruder machines run at £429 each - get 25 )

Lot of options.

Maybe a big delta, a hyrel and an ultimaker. Cover your options.

The art department would love the hyrel. Gives you the ablity to print with clay, silicone - pretty much any extrudable substance you can cram into a giant syringe.
http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...yrel-3D-Videos

Don't think you have to buy an expensive big commercial machine, because you'll not get much for £10,000
Whereas you can get a variety of semi-commercial machines that might suit you a lot better.

It would also be worth looking at a formlabs form1+ resin printer.

I reckon you could get 3 really nice machines with different capabilities that would allow a lot more scope to the projects the students could undertake.

I'd start with a list that contained a form1+, An ultimaker 2, a Hyrel, a shitload of pla and resin and then a couple of flashforges with the change :-)

If you're worried about longevitiy geoff's been running his flashforge (sub £500 dual extruder 9x6x6 inch volume)) for a couple of years non-stop, and hasn't killed it yet lol

OR you might want to geta scanner as well. Though personally I'd wait a while for the price to drop and the quality to rise.

And learn openscad - and maybe tinkercad as well. Both free, both very good.
I prefer openscad, but I'm not artistic so it suits the way I think much better.

[Ed209]

That's great advice. Thanks very much.

[curious aardvark]

the other one that's worth looking at is the markforge
Prints with dual materials and produces pretty good carbon fibre composites. Also kevlar composites and some others. One head adds the fancy stuff and the other uses standard plastics.

For near-spec engineering prototypes it's well worth a look. While you can't get a cheap metal printer, the carbon fibre composites are still 10x stiffer than aluminium. (around that, might be more or less I'm working off memory here :-)

It's also well within your budget, around £5000 for the top spec machine that will do kevlar and carbon fibre composites.

The top of range hyrel kicks in at around £4000.
So you could still afford a flashforge to play with in the office and a crate load of filament to go with it all.

Personally, given the sheer variety of filaments for fff machines. I'd go down that route rather than a commercial powder sintering machine.
Gives you more production capability, greater versatility and you won't have a huge queue for just one machine.

And trust me once the 'kids' have some idea what a 3d printer can do - you will be inundated. Do not underestimate how much these things are going to change the way you make things :-)

The biggest drawback is both those machines are us based. So import tax is going to be a right bastard. That said education institutes get a lot of discounts on a lot of things. Might be worth looking into tax breaks.
If you wanted a slightly different route then a form 1+ resin printer (I'm going with them over some of the others as they've been around a bit longer and have ironed out a few more bugs than some of the newer entries into the laser/resin market), a hyrel (given the sheer scope of that machine and the after sales support I'd definitely have one.)
An ultimaker and a couple flashforges.

If you want a chat about this stuff - drop me a pm and I'll give you a call :-)
If you pay petrol I'm also happy to pop geraldine into the car and pop down for a hands on demo. I'm based near burton-on-trent. Don't like driving round london - but my tomtom always knows where I'm going.
Once you've cadded a model from scratch and seen it made real before your eyes, it's amazing how different people see the technology.

I'm looking to get more into the consultancy side of things - so this could be a good dry run for us both :-)

[BillDempsey]

You might check out the Type A Machines Series 1 Pro, as well. It's one of only a few desktop printers that meet your 30cm cubed request.

[kudo3D]

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[Davo]

This was a six month old post.

[exlondoner]

So let's get some updates based on current time.