Makerbot killer? Ultimaker: There’s a New 3D Printer in Town | Hacker News Reader

Makerbot killer? Ultimaker: There’s a New 3D Printer in Town

blog.makezine.com

63 pointsriboflavin20 comments

Does anyone make useful things with these? How come the article doesn't give the accuracy and resolution or are people just printing crude shower curtain rings really quickly?

My friend fabricates bottle openers, for starters, which go for as little as USD$4-5 on etsy.com.

How much time does it take? What are the materials cost? What are the operating costs? How much does the machine cost? Just trying to do a bit of break-even calculation and figure out what the profitability point is on a per-item basis... since I might do the same [grin]

back of the envelope, a thingomatic is $1300. If you get it working well, it'll happily print for days unattended. electricity and plastic i'd guess is less than a buck an hour. ABS plastic is dirt cheap. less than $20 per pound, stuff you print weighs a fraction of an ounce.

Not really. .25 mm resolution, accuracy is higher, .05 mm is likely. Depends on the threaded rod, belt tension etc. In general the accuracy is far higher than the uncertainty in the melted plastic coming out of the extruder.

I built a cupcake and, as a hobby, it is totally worth the money. I don't think i'll build another, but i'll keep mine running as long as i can.

abs sands well, it takes paint, there are very few things you can't rough out with this sort of tool. I think the design software just isn't there yet. blender is weird. art of illusion crashes. openscad is writing code in a broken language. sketchup doesn't support the correct formats out of the box. There's still a bunch of rough edges.

When is someone going to develop a quality desktop 3D printer? I know I would be willing to pay many times the price of a Makerbot for a proper printer.

RepRap is a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects: http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

The RepRap Project is an initiative aimed at creating a largely self-replicating machine which can be used for rapid prototyping and manufacturing: http://www.reddit.com/r/reprap

Both are different projects, but relate to 3D printing.

If you're willing to spend 10x the amount, you can score a professional printer. How much is "many times the amount"? (p.s. checkout Up! printer)

I think you can get a "real" desktop 3D printer for about $5K these days. But the consumer build-it-yourself designs are doing reasonably well, and actually give very, very good results - the catch is you have to be willing to put a lot of time in.

I guess I would also note that these guys are all kind of headed in the direction of competing with the "real" desktop 3D printers, but yeah, they won't be there for a while. I wrote some further thoughts here: http://justindunham.net/2011/08/where-is-open-source-3d-prin...

Higher resolution, but further from a finished product: Junior Veloso's experiments: http://3dhomemade.blogspot.com/2011/03/high-resolution-compa...

He's using light from a projector to harden liquid resin.

Whatever it is, it looks a clunky mess. This is not the leap in 3D printing I was hoping for.

Computers were pretty clunky, too, at the beginning. We are seeing the very earliest moments of the Star Trek replicator. When the market smells a demand, we'll get the pretty you are looking for.

To each his own, I suppose, as I rather like the build of exposed wires, bolts, rivets, and the likes -- I'm not alone.

I'm not sure what "clunky mess" means or how device asthetics correlate to "leap[s]" (in ability?) in 3D printing.

I was actually referring to the produced piece that came out of it. It seems to have rather poor resolution, and there are what appear to be stringy anomalies and uneven portions. The machine itself is not relevant to me. I don't care if that looks clunky. But if the produced piece is a clunky looking mess, that's a problem.

Ah, "clunky" tends to be used to refer to ungainly machines, which is one reason most people reading your original post will assume you're discussing the aesthetics of the printer and not its products.

The other is of course that the title of the submission is about the printer, so using "it" without further clarification will not be read as referring to something mentioned only in the article.

You might be surprised at how much of a clunky mess most plastic cases look during the manufacturing process before they move in the production line to the finishing step.

I would say, don't judge a book by its color. There are plenty of examples of ultra-refined models to be printed by these types of machines on http://thingiverse.com/ .. if you really want to evaluate the 'finished nature' of the models coming from this scene, you ought to look at a few more examples ..

Many 3D printed parts have a great deal of support material printed along with the "core" part. This provides stability and is removed during finishing.

Could anyone tell what it was making in the video?

On their blog they say it's a Mendel part: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768

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