Hands On With MakerBot's 3D-Printed Wood 72
angry tapir writes: 3D printing has lost a bit of its novelty value, but new printing materials that MakerBot plans to release will soon make it a lot more interesting again. MakerBot is one of the best-known makers of desktop 3D printers, and at CES this week it announced that late this year its products will be able to print objects using composite materials that combine plastic with wood, metal or stone.
Laywood (Score:4, Informative)
3D printing with wood? Oh, a bit like Laywood [hackaday.com] then.
The other composites are something I'm less familiar with, but I know that shapeways already has alumide as a printable medium.
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well, yeah, makerbot announcing printing in materials that people have been printing with already for a while.
woodfill is pretty common as is bronzefill etc. "conductive" carbon filled filament is fairly common too as is carbon fibre filled filaments, there's also glass filled nylon on the market. basically all these filaments are certain % of whatever filler and the rest is plastic.
HOWEVER! if they were going to announce that they have a new extruder for their 5th gen products that doesn't have stated life
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Yea, but using wood in this context is stupid. They should use fiberglass, carbon fiber, or something else artificial.
Re:Laywood (Score:4, Interesting)
Not very glamorous; and if Makerbot is selling this sort of filament as a 'premium' option compared to ordinary dyed stuff they are probably playing you for a sucker; but a perfectly sensible adoption of an established practice.
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Why? Wood fibers are pretty darn strong in tension, and cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than fiberglass or carbon fiber.
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Though not particularly helpful with wood or non-ferrous metals, a future generation 3D printer may well align bits of injected ferrous metals by creating a simple magnetic field.
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There are "magnetic" filaments, such as https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com] and the iron and stainless steel from http://www.proto-pasta.com/ [proto-pasta.com] . They have iron or stainless steel particles mixed into PLA, so magnets stick to the printed parts, you can magnetize them, etc.
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Not necessarily. Certainly cross-linking is essential to *maximizing* the strength of the material - but assuming cross-linking remains roughly unchanged, increasing the linear strength of the deposited filament would still be of benefit. Especially if the object design / printing pattern took into account the asymmetric strength differences.
In fact after being extruded the hydrocarbon chains in a single line of plastic are probably reasonably well aligned and interlinked so that, even with good adhesion
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I can't comment on glass or carbon fiber filled filaments, but for Laywood and Laybrick (more like sandstone than brick) it's more about texture and appearance than physical strength properties.
I was at a 3D printing show last year and saw several architectural prints that used Laybrick and they looked amazing. And several Laywood organic designs looked equally impressive. Upon examination you could tell that they weren't actually wood (at least solid wood) but the weight, shading variations, and texture
Re:Laywood (Score:4, Informative)
I've uses laywood, bronzefill, etc., and in general the structural element is the PLA, and the material mixed into it really just affect the appearance or other properties (magnetism, surface texture, etc.). But since it's the PLA that is what bonds it all together, you aren't really "printing with metal" the way you are with an SLS printer - you are "printing with PLA, with metal powder mixed in".
For example, with laywood, the resulting print really does feel and look like wood. And bronzefill is very heavy and soft/flexible, which is a lot like bronze. There's also a material with iron in it, so it sticks to magnets, etc.
So if you're interested in structural strength, not appearance or feel, these materials won't help you. Instead, look at Taulman's filament (for example) which have really amazing structural properties.
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I have a jammed extruder on my Makerbot Replicator as a result of printing in laywoo-d3. For whatever reason it stopped extruding while I wasn't watching, and when I came back I found it permanently jammed. No amount of unloading or loading will fix it. At this point I will have to resort to some of the more difficult measures such as running acetone through the extruder, or drilling it out, or something like that. The trouble is that I don't know what resin is in the laywoo-d3 so I'm not sure if aceton
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This device http://tunell.us/ [tunell.us] detects filament tangles, jams, and end-of-filament, and pauses the print. The price is pretty reasonable, given the stress reduction.
Note that it cannot detect cases where the print fails but filament continues to feed. So you still need to keep an eye out on your print. But it certainly reduces the stress involved in hitting the end of a spool of filament.
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Thanks, I'll look into that.
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laywood has a bad rep for jamming extruders...
what you can try is quitar string(small) and push it to the nozzle when the nozzle is hot.
another thing, if you remove the nozzle you can torch it(high temp torch).
5th gen has a jam detection system built in, but it's so buggy and badly done it's worthless. for earlier rep1/and rep2 there's an aftermarket filament jam/no-feeding detector and support in the sailfish firmware for that.
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Thank you for all that information! I meant to post in the Makerbot operators Google group and get their opinions, so it was nice to get a free head-start on that.
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the carbon/glass fibers are chopped up to be smaller in length than the printer orifice. they do however help the structure in layer bonding(small parts of the fibers end up crossing the layer lines(the layer that the next layer is getting laid on does melt slightly when the next layer is extruded on it, making the whole fdm process feasible) and some other properties.
so it's short chopped fibers, not one length of it (that would make moving from place to place harder, clog up the nozzle etc).
the wood fills
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I just put in a new extruder today and it didn't even work out of the box. Keeps jamming. I wish I had never bought one based on previous model qualities I thought it would be good.
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The real questiion (Score:4, Interesting)
Will it have properties of the material. If I printed a 3d pan. Will it melt? Will it have magnetic qualities? Will it be strong enough to do the tasks. Or will it just look like wood, stone and metal but suffer from the same drawbacks that plastic has.
Re:The real questiion (Score:5, Informative)
The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic; the aluminum particles are not interconnected into a mesh or anything. When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with. Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic. Which means that its resistivity is still in the plastic range, certainly higher than less effective but still insulating materials like glass.
Think "sandy-looking plastic", and you'll understand alumide. Sorry, I know you want something that's like metal, but this is not it. If you want metal, you need to print out of metal - say, laser sintering, or printing a mould for lost wax casting. Not printing a plastic that has some dust mixed in. *Maybe* you could get more metallic properties if the metal in the plastic was in the form of whiskers rather than dust. Maybe.
Oh, hey, here's a better analogy for you for what alumide is like: paint. Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts. Among the types of dust in paints can include metals, especially if they're trying to make the paint have a more textured or sparkly look to it. Aluminum dust is for example a common additive to car paint.
So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.
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The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong
I can't speak for any particular consumer composite, but the abrasion resistance can vary quite a bit depending on exactly what particles are suspended in it and how much. This can vary from making abrasion resistance worse because the particles don't bind well and make it easier for bits to be scratched off, to making it "quite a bit better" even without initial contact between particles, because they can pile up when abrasion starts.
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When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with.
Well, no. This depends on the particulate size. If it's very small, that's true. If it's larger than the typical deformation of the plastic, then it's not true. The metal will tend to work as an ablative. Semi-metallic brake pads otherwise wouldn't work, they're made out of metal and resin.
Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic.
And this depends on both the shape and the quantity of the metal particles. Surely you've heard of conductive epoxy. They even have that worked out so well that you can buy epoxy that only conducts where it's been squishe
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You're speaking in theoreticals. I'm speaking in facts. Alumide is *not* a conductor, and it is *not* unusually abrasion resistant vs. other hard plastics. Yes, it's possible to make plastic composites that have improved properties. For an extreme example, look to CFRP. This is nothing of the sort. The average grain size for Shapeways' alumide, for example, is 60 microns, so we're talking extremely tiny particles. Alumide's tensile strength is 48 MPA (typical of a hard plastic; metals are usually in the hun
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So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it. [...] You're speaking in theoreticals. I'm speaking in facts.
Oh, I see. That's how it is.
Alumide is *not* a conductor, and it is *not* unusually abrasion resistant vs. other hard plastics. Yes, it's possible to make plastic composites that have improved properties.
Yes, very good, that was my point. But you are still not getting a cookie.
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Just because one *can* make plastic composites with significantly improved properties (for example, carbon fiber panels) doesn't mean it has relevance to 3d printers in general, and it certainly doesn't have any connection to what Makerbot is demoing here. Alumide is all about appearance, plain and simple. And it's not even a metalic appearance, it's more of a sandy appearance.
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Just because one *can* make plastic composites with significantly improved properties (for example, carbon fiber panels) doesn't mean it has relevance to 3d printers in general
As sibling comment points out, these materials exist already. So yes, they are relevant to 3d printers in general.
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"Somewhat improved properties over plain plastic" is nothing on the order of hand-laid composites, or having properties like a metal, or anything of the sort. That you can print a very mildly-conductive plastic (which this stuff in the article is not) or mildly reinforcing fibers (which the stuff in this article is not) in some extrusion printers is making a mockery of what people *actually* want to print (actual metal, actual strong fibers, etc). And it's what people who didn't know any better were thinkin
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I think you're mistaking "what you want" for "what everyone wants". So while I agree that these press release tend to hand-wave over the difference between "printing in wood" and "printing in PLA with wood powder mixed in", I disagree with the idea that these composite materials aren't valid or interesting.
These sort of composite printing materials aren't very interesting from a structural perspective, because the mixed in particles aren't structural.
But they can have other interesting properties. For examp
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Look up "alumide", it's been around in the 3d printing world for a very long time. Primarily you need to think "plastic" in terms of its properties. But that said it does generally have mildly better heat tolerance and higher stiffness than most plastics you'll work with. It generally looks dull and sandy (yet smooth), but iMaterialize now has a sparkly version [3dprint.com]. Alumide is not like metal, but on the upside its not every expensive either.
You can get real 3d printed metal out there from a variety of services
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A number of material fabrication techniques involve starting with a shape made of some material that is pretty lousy; but easy to work with, and then either heat treating it to change its properties or using it, like a sponge, to guide the absorption of a more suitable material.
Ceramics are one example: during initial shaping, the material is a slurry or semisolid of mixed mineral particl
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If you have a 3D printers for Plastic, Metal, Ceramics, Wood
A 2d auto weaver for fabric. You can make most non-electronic devices.
But that is hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery, and the cost of raw material.
The Makerbot, even with postprocessing work is still only good for mostly toys, and the occasional replacement part (Replace a keyboard key, a clip on your printer, a replacement gear) however the rest of the stuff is mostly toys and nic-naks. Great if you are kid, where you can expand your
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It's true that a printer that extrudes plastic can only make plastic things. But I think that there are many use cases beyond "expand your action figure universe, or fully equipt your doll house".
Yes, you could limit your 3D printing to toys (and toys can be fun), but it can be a lot more.
For example, 3D printed prosthetics (http://enablingthefuture.org) really change people's lives. And I've saved a fortune printing replacement parts that manufacturers wanted many, many hundreds of dollars for. And, of cou
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Here's another way to put it. Alumide has a thermal conductivity of around 0,5W/(m*K). Regular nylon is about 0,25W/(m*K) and high density polyethylene is about 0,4-0,5W/(m*K). But aluminum is 237W/(m*K). So nowhere even close ;) 0,5W/(m*k) is about half the thermal conductivity of glass (0,8-1.4) and about 1/6th that of granite (1,75-4). You'd literally get better thermal conductivity out of a brick than alumide.
Think plastic, not metal ;)
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What would be really slick is a 3D printer that can start with a metal skeleton and extrude plastic in/onto/around it. This would require a six-axis extruder, and much more complicated control software than the current layer-by-layer XY extruders. But it would enable production of many very useful things.
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Everyone is stuck on the concept of extruders. What I want to see is a 3d printer based on thermal spraying [etsa-thermal-spray.org], a technique mainly used today for applying coatings.
1. First off, you don't have to be only the tiniest height above your workpiece like you do with an extruder - you have some degree of distance range (your precision decreases with distance, but there's a tradeoff and it depends on the situation). Your precision vs. flow rate can be chosen by your choice of nozzle size.
2. By varying the fuel and air
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I work in a machine shop. I have seen an ad for a machine that uses a combination of milling and thermal spray to produce parts.
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I work in a machine shop. I have seen an ad for a machine that uses a combination of milling and thermal spray to produce parts.
I would be very interested in this. Can you provide a link or reference?
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Here you go
http://www.mmsonline.com/blog/... [mmsonline.com]
http://en.dmgmori.com/blob/176... [dmgmori.com]
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Very cool :) CNC to get you the rough shape of the large object, then spray to get complex details and advanced materials and coatings. They use a laser jet rather than combustion jet, but the principle is the same. And look at that deposition rate: 3.5 kilograms an hour! Even without the CNC you could print a 1-ton *car* in two weeks at those rate ;) Wide range of powders usable. Wall thickness down to 0,1mm - I didn't even think that it'd be able to be that precise. And the results are just beautiful.
I'
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For structural purposes, these materials all give you a PLA print. The fact that it's got particles of something else mixed in just makes it a bit weaker because the print is full of "holes". So if you care about the structural properties, these filaments won't help you - look at Taulman filaments, etc., that have different base materials with different material properties.
In terms of appearance, or other properties, the particles matter. For example, if you print with BronzeFill, then sand it down a bit to
Homemade particle board (Score:1)
Yay!
Does it work? (Score:2)
Can you hammer a nail with it, or is it just for show?
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Using one piece of wood to hammer in a nail in another is perfectly possible.
True but one will damage the wooden hammer in the process. The wooden hammer will become useless very quickly.
If the head of the nail is ten times larger than the pointy end the object you hit the nail with can be as soft as the object you want it to get stuck in.
Sorry but penetration resistance is only one aspect of the effort needed to hammer in a nail. As the nail is inserted the wood presses against the sides of the nail causing significant friction. The more nail in the wood the higher the friction. That is the reason that nails actually hold things together.
Here are some more detailed questions about the hammer.
Does hammering a nail into hard close gra
Composite materials are not new. (Score:3)
This 3D printing allows us to precisely place and orient the components of the composites. At this point it can't be called composite materials but should be called composite structures , may be with some adjectives like micro or precision to distinguish them from plain old structures made with fiberglass. Even this is not really new. Circuit boards and IC Chips are theoretically custom made precision structures using a process similar to 3D printing.
To take full advantage of these precision built composite structures, we need similar breakthroughs in analysis methods. We would like to take some expensive material, place very small quantities of it strategically in a matrix of inexpensive materials and get very good thermal, strength or vibration characteristics.
Companies like Ansys, Ansoft, Nastran, SDRC (does it still exist?) should do well in the coming years, you need their design/analysis tools to design structures that could take advantage of this emerging technology.
Oh noes Makerbot! (Score:2)
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Nope, they filed patents on their original work, citing community created inventions as "prior art". People are reading the patents incorrectly and are interpreting the prior art section as if it's the claim - easy to do, as patents are pretty hard to read - but it doesn't help anything to repeat their incorrect analysis.
I agree that the new extruders suck, though. I like the idea that the extruder is an easy swap, but it's absurd that you can't open one up to clear a jam, so you have to swap the extruder f
Still ripping shit off, eh? (Score:1)
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I bought a flashforge, who are ripping them off......
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To be clear, FlashForge is based on the open source Replicator 1 designs, so while it's certainly "cloning", it's entirely legal for them to do so, so IMO it's not "ripping off" MakerBot.
Printing with mixed in particles has been going on a while - Laywood, BronzeFill, etc., have been happening over the last year or two, from a number of companies. So now MBI is doing it, too. And it's entirely possible that MBI is OEM-ing filament from those companies to sell under their label, as companies do that sort of
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Actually nobody wonders why, in fact nobody cares about you at all. /facts of life>
That's how we knew (Score:2)
That's how we knew that 3d printing is finally growing up...
back when it got it's first wood.
Printing exotic wood (Score:2)
Imagine being able to print reproductions of exotic or extinct wood e.g. tiger or fiddleback maple.
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Amazon Prime is _fantastic_ for filament. There are many suppliers, the review system lets you weed out the bad products, and you get free 2-day shipping. The free shipping is the "deal maker" for me - buying through other channels it often it costs as much as the filament to get it shipped quickly!
Keep in mind that you're not really buying "Amazon Filament" you're getting DeltaMaker, or MakerBot, or Taulman3D or eSUN, or Octave, etc. - Amazon is just a sales channel, and doing "pick, pack and ship" of the