Rapid Liquid Print: Patented Gravity Free Manufacturing | Hacker News Reader

Rapid Liquid Print: Patented Gravity Free Manufacturing

rapidliquidprint.com

28 pointsyincrash8 comments

Interesting but the videos show a lot of vibration of the parts during the print, which seems to be created by disturbance of the gel by the tool. As a result I assume that the accuracy/repeatability are quite poor. This assumption seems further confirmed by the absence of any numbers about the resolution and accuracy achieved.

I'm sure there's plenty of parts that can be made this way and that can tolerate whatever the limitations are.

I’d love a support material that disolves in water. I’ve ruined a lot of prints with the supports not coming off easily.

Some existing 3D printing techniques already support this with dual-materials (where the support material is dissolvable easily). I guess the advantage of the OP approach is that the printing can be much faster (albeit with the tradeoff of precision due to the gel (see other HN comments here) and speed) due to (a) The extruder not needing to extrude extra support material (b) The support structure of gel may be allowing for much faster extrusion.

the trick of using a gel to act as support is clever!

you can tell it's not a consumer product when they call it "solutions"... shame, the 3d printing options for flexible materials are very limited right now

This is actually a pretty easy system to DIY for small scale prints, I've done it with photocurable hydrogels. The gel is available off the shelf (Pluronic F-127), and it's no problem to rig up a pressurized syringe to any moddable 3-axis printer.

Interesting concept. Likely useful for a limited set of applications. Speed is a problem. That's OK, not everything requires high speed or high volume manufacturing.

Exactly, for small runs of injection moulding, often the tooling is prohibitively expensive. Each part could cost you say $10k.

I'm curious about materials safety, some platinum/tin 2 part hardners are pretty nasty...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com