3D Printer Kickstarter

[LillFilly]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ref=nav_search

I've backed this. Prints a 12X10X10 inch area. Decent price and looks like a solid product. Tell your friends, because I WANTS IT! Need to make suits of armor for my dog, rabbit and rat...

[Ophbalance]

I'm seriously considering getting one of these down the road. I've got some fairly old RC gear that will need replacement parts that are going to just be harder and harder to find. Looks like the Dremel printer has an app that let's you use a cell phone's camera to turn create a 3D object to import (which one hopes you can then export to a normal CAD type file). I just wish that it didn't take $530 pledged to get a kit. Oh well.

[wolfie]

Not familiar with all the TLA materials they mentioned, but a couple things that would make such a printer VERY useful would be:

- Able to use some sort of wax as the printing medium
- Software that incorporated a "shrink rule" scaling, where you could pick any of several metals by name (most likely aluminum, zinc, brass, steel, nickel-silver) or pick "other" and enter your own shrink ratio

The combination of these would let you make metal parts via the "lost wax casting" method - automatically scale things up by the amount the metal would shrink as it solidifies, and print the part using a material which could "disappear" after being coated in investment medium (a type of clay).

Example uses of this:

- Model railroaders could make detailed parts (esp. drivers and side rods) for rolling stock
- Heavy-duty dental repair parts (e.g. crowns)

Unfortunately, it could also lead to a crackdown on 3D printing, by making it easier to make certain parts (files for this type of part have a tendency to "go missing" from online repositories) out of metal (as the hard- or impossible-to obtain originals are) instead of plastic which can't stand up to the stresses that such parts need to withstand.