3D Printer Engineering

Out of interest I just went to the Factory 3D website. Hovering over the "Buy now" icon shows an Ebay URL. Going there takes you to factory-3d selller listings, but all that is there is a few odds and ends, no sign of machine kits. Is this the right company I am looking at? The only other factory 3d I could find was a company in Bulgaria!

They seem to run out of kits as fast as they can print them. At least (unlike a company I tried to buy off recently) they don't list things as in stock and cancel your order without explanation.

Might be worth emailing them and asking when they are likely to have stock back in?

Neil

Thanks for the very prompt reply. I will send them an email, although with my current on-going projects I am not sure if I really need another diversion!!

However, SWMBO, who is keen on arts and craft, mainly painting, drawing, stained and fused glass, saw one on a television programme last night and was very interested. The problem will be that she will want to produce her own designs and I don't relish explaining the learning curve that a CAD package will involve.

She obviously needs the MEW tutorial series

Neil

You could point her at SketchUp which does the job without much of the functionality and attendant complexity of 3D CAD packages. As well as there being plenty of tutorial exercises online, the are converters both ways between .skp and .stl files, so it is easy to modify (remix) downloaded models.

Personally, even after 20 years of 2D CAD I cannot get to grips with 3D CAD, but find SketchUp intuitive as it is closer to modelling software like 3dsMax and Blender.

Brian

With a flat level surface to stand them on and with careful build and set up all these things work perfectly well and help to keep kit prices down.

If you wanted to use ball screws for Z you could use harmonic gearboxes with no micro-stepping to achieve good resolution and torque.

In an ideal world, where price was no object, many 3D printer parts would be precision made in better materials. To that end I'll be making a set of metal parts to replace the plastic bits on my Factory 3D printer, but I'm under no illusion that it's likely to be an economical enterprise, it's just on the list of things to do whilst commissioning and getting used to my new VMC.

- Nick