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Major Advance in 3D Metal Printing
I just got emails about this earlier today. I have no idea on the cost (I’m waiting for my rep to quote it) and it won’t be released for sale until 2018, but if this tech works out then we’re looking at a truly massive breakthrough in affordable (for businesses anyway, not yet consumers) 3D metal printing. Probably still out of the price range for my business, but this is a significant move towards affordable 3D printing of high-quality metal parts.
First up we have a desktop (really benchtop) metal printing system. Nothing like this has been out before.
Next up we have a high-volume version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUOCiRktuCo
The second video demonstrates the mass printing of an impeller, with an estimated cost of under $5.00 a part. If they are correct, that is a very affordable price.
Amazing.
Published in Technology
PLA is hard but brittle and has a low tolerance for heat. That’s why it’s used in the low-buck printers. ABS is tougher in that it maintains flexibility and has a better tolerance for hot and cold. PLA can be directly printed in a room temperature environment, but ABS requires a heated chamber that controls for shrink and peel.
The Mojo printers I linked above print in ABS and those parts are very strong, which they ought to be for a $6000 printer. The printer has a locked and heated chamber, and uses PLA in a 2nd print head as a support material, which is then removed using a wash process. Your consumer grade printers primarily use PLA, the commercial and industrial ones done.
The exciting stuff, though, is nylon, along with some more rubbery elastomers available, but those printers start at $20k and only go up from there.
The tech is actually there, it’s just that the equipment is pricey due to its size. Gerber Scientific makes equipment for designing and routing out fabric, plastic sheeting, and so forth, but the fabric routers are all very large.
There are aftermarket hot heads for a lot of printers that can handle nylon now, and a few printers for under $2000 than can do it out of the box.
The Robo C2 can use nylon and other “advanced” materials, and it’s $1499.
It’s on the way. 3D mapping of your (naked) body. There are places in China that then laser cut the fabric, liners etc.
Do you have a link to that one? Nylon has even more difficult cure and shrink issues than ABS, so I’m curious how they handle that.
Okay, I am going to link the apology post in the original one.
When I’ve used nylon it was much, much, much easier than ABS. That said, it could be a quirk of my printer (my heated bed kind of sucks).
Seems like it shouldn’t be hard to make a nylon staple carbon fiber blend. If you did it with the right length of fibers than they should align themselves during extrusion. I’ve always wanted to try it, but I have no idea where you’d get staple style carbon fiber (staple fibers are the shore hairy ones used for cotton thread etc).
The future is almost here, just have a little patience
Patience? The sign said 2073. I’ll be 125 by then and will have lost interest.
Sorry, I said “Robo C2”, but meant Robo R2. That’s the $1499 one with the heated bed.
https://robo3d.com/robor2/
From one of their fact sheets:
“More than 15 specialty materials can be used with all Robo printers, from PLA and ABS plastic to Carbon Fiber PLA, Wood Infused PLA, Stainless Steel PLA, Nylon, and PET”
True but there are a lot of low volume ideas out there were this will greatly reduce the cost curve on the front end for low production runs. That is 3d printing is making the economics of scale cost curves start out much lower. Products you might sell in low volumes even up to a few hundred units a year are ideal depending on the tooling cost for mass run. Even better you can see what the demand is first before you spend the capital cost to reduce your manufacturing cost. As the software becomes easier to use and more automated you don’t need your pricey senior engineers programming the 3d printing. You can get lower level techs/machinist to due it. Remember labor can still be a decent size cost of your product. So if you can reduce some combination of shipping, labor and capital cost in exchange for more expensive Raw material it can be cheaper to print in 3D.
Or even better manufacturing firms still have huge issues with inventory accuracy. If you have a special part you need a couple of in a day or two and have the CAD file, it could now be cheaper to make them than air freight them to your customer or yourself.
There are a lot of uses for 3d printing that can reduce cost. Your right 3d printing is still far away from being economical for large volume production runs. However most entrepreneurs don’t have ideas that have that volumes that make sense to make them under traditional cheaper manufacturing process. There are a lot of few hundred to few thousand unit ideas out there that cheaper 3d printing machines now make possible. So 3d printing is making commercialization of new ideas a lot easy and cheaper. 3d printing is not for consumer goods that are similar or are basically the same as the mass produce stuff most of us buy every day. Its more for lower volume commercial products and specialized consumer products.
There are products PLA/Metal hybrid materials that are up to 85% metal for Copper and brass and work on the under $2000 plastic printers. If you go on maker forms people are upgrading their nosels to all metal for a few hundred dollars at most and are having some success with printing pure metal on these cheaper printers. Room temperature matters a lot still in this case but they are experimenting.
There as been a project going on were for under $2500 make your own picker (for circuit boards that pick and solder automatically). Pickers normal cost at lest $50k. If they can work out calibration routines so the machine is precise enough to work, that will be a huge leap forward. The reason being most circuit board runs need 400 or 500 units to be economical because of the set-up cost. That way small business can due under 100 production runs on custom electronic products and have a lot smaller investment cost and reduce the risk of unsold products.
I’ve got an SMT line. The setup costs are actually more complex. The component data is all in the CAD files, so programming the machine isn’t terribly time consuming at this point unless you have to teach the machine a bunch of new or weird parts. Just convert your pick file coordinates and orientations and go. What drives up the cost is job setup – how many different components do you have to load on X feeders? How about your stencil? What about your oven profile?
A really simple board can be economical at under 100 pcs. A complex board can still be uneconomical at well over 1000 pcs.
So basically you are saying, unless your labor is a lot cheaper than a Circuit board printing house, their set-up cost is almost totally labor related. So internally doing this is usually not cheaper because external firms mark-ups are low as it stands? I only have professional manufacturing experience in Metal Fab (conveyor), Food Processing, and some Electrical shop (MCP’s, VFD’s) stuff. I thought I was well read enough to understand very similar industries in manufacturing that I understood the basic drives. I guess it proves that you always need to be careful about extrapolating and connecting the dots even in fairly similar process/industries.
Sorry for my first response, in re-reading it I think I left some things out. Was typing on my phone while attending to some other business. Until we put in our own line I was dealing with contract houses to run my products so got to understand their model pretty well. Certainly when dealing with them the setup costs are key, but it’s the setup labor of loading up feeders. They’re usually not happy to run just 50 pcs of something because the setup will take a lot longer than the actual board run. But you’d have that same setup time internally for doing it yourself, and then your benchtop system is going to run considerably slower, plus you still need to do your solder paste screening, then reflow the board. You will likely need more labor hours to do all this than they will, so that’s the balance you have to look at.
First up, I’ll link back to a piece I wrote on electronics manufacturing, then expand from there.
http://ricochet.com/archives/i-circuit-board/
Inexpensive Pick-n-Place machines do definitely have a market, but they have limitations. You won’t save on setup labor with them either, in fact you’ll likely have a higher labor cost to use them than you would with a larger line, simply because you’ll have to manually feed and load, then swap out and load again, and again…. The key to setup cost savings on an SMT machine is Capacity – how many different parts can you load on at one time? How often are you changing your parts feeders? Is your parts mix optimized on the machine for most rapid placement? Small machines are really limited here. Further, they’ve been out for a long time. Mann Corporation, for instance, has been making benchtop PNP machines for (I think) about 20 years.
Here’s a practical example – you’ve got a benchtop placer that maybe has a 20-feeder capacity (which would be high). Well, that’s at best 20 feeders of 8mm width, if you are placing wider parts then your real feeder capacity goes down. If your board only has 20 unique components then this isn’t an issue. But if you have 25, or more, well you will have to keep swapping feeders out. Even in very large plants today, it is not uncommon to have more invested in parts feeders than in the original PNP robot.
What these little machines do have going for them, though, is their low capital cost. They let you get “in the game” on the cheap so you can run your own quick-turn or short-run boards without needing to wait on a contractor or solder them yourself. They also don’t need the power the larger machines do. I need 3-phase, but these smaller PNP machines and low-buck convection (or vapor-phase, if you want to go exotic) ovens can get by on 220 1phase, at the sacrifice of speed. Lets you set up shop in a rented office condo, or your garage, or your basement, and that is a massive boon to startups or engineering labs.
So due any of the big firms have automated warehouse lines that pick the components from bins in the warehouse and are able to automatically load the feeders? Or is the process of loading the feeders still need to be done manually?
I suspect it’s still mostly manual. The parts come mostly in pocket-tape reels, and to start them is almost always a manual process. That being said, a reel of 5000 parts is going to last you a while unless you’ve got a very high-speed turret line, and then you’re loading massive magazines full of feeders for those, with a crew setting up replacement magazines on the side. Those machines can place up to 80k an hour, but it’s rarely 80k of any one single part, it is a mix of resistors, caps, small diodes, LEDs, etc. Odd form-factor parts come in trays, or are fed to the PNP machines by vibratory bowl feeders, but those take up major real-estate on the PNP, but their reloading tends to be very automated.
It’s all about the trade-offs. A reel can take you up to a minute to load on a feeder, but once there you’ll not need to change it for a while. A tray won’t last anywhere nearly as long, but you can have large magazines of trays that you can swap in and out as needed, but a tray feeder can take up an entire side of your machine (1/2 your feeder capacity). Bowl feeders are easy, you just feed the hopper, but again they take up a lot of room.
But look at it this way – my line has 2 placers, and I can load it up with about 200 feeders at full capacity (I rarely need to do this as our “worst” board only has 55 unique parts). But just 1 employee can keep up with an entire run once it’s going, swapping feeders as needed. Keep a couple of extra feeders for some parts on hand and you can make a quick trade out, and then have plenty of time to reload the one you pulled off while the next one is running. Thus that 1 employee can do in 1 day what it would have taken a team of 6 working an entire week back in the 90s.
Even the gigantic job shops in Mexico and China still mostly use the same machines as me, with the 80k turrets for the popcorn parts.