What you need to know about buying a 3D printer | Hacker News Reader

What you need to know about buying a 3D printer

blog.cubehero.com

93 pointsiamwil14 comments

One thing that should be noted is the burning smell of ABS plastic. I got a 3D printer in my office that is currently serving as a paperweight on my desk. That is until I get access to a lab with an exhaust hood.

All my previous experiences with 3D printers had been in outdoor/well ventilated environments so this issue hasn't come up. I'm surprised how little people have talked about this.

It does get talked about, but mostly in the depths of 3D printing forums, rather than on blogs. ABS fumes seem to affect different people differently. Some people are rather unaffected, and others get slight headaches. PLA fumes smell more pleasant (some say like popcorn) by comparison, but that doesn't mean it's good for you.

http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,40296,40355,quote=1

On the forums, there are links to toxicology datasheets if you like to look into it.

I always print in a well-ventilated space. Do you think it'd help if I added a section on this?

I think this is an important issue. I didn't think about fumes when I got the printer. Someone who sat next to me started getting headaches. Also, another colleague was concerned about the effect of burning ABS on reproductive health (she pointed me at a study which I don't have a pointer to now). To run these devices in a corporate environment, it isn't enough that I be satisfied with a scientific paper (rightly so .. I'm a computer scientist and this is not my expertise).

Edit: Thank you for the link. It helps to educate myself on the topic!

Activated carbon filters are reputed to take care of this. Suck the air from your printer into an activated carbon filter and you can let it back into the room. Trivial if your printer is already in a box, still easier than cutting a hole through your wall and running a duct through the "important guy with a window"'s office.

3D printers are shop tools, not office tools. It's just that because they don't produce swarf people think that placing them in an office is ok, but I'd rather have a benchtop CNC mill running in an office than a 3D printer.

For me, the biggest hurdle to 3D printing is the cost of the filament. It's plastic for goodness sake. Are companies just using the traditional economics of printing (cheap printer, expensive ink), or is this stuff actually expensive to make?

The cost of the filament is about $30 to $50 per kg. In practice, I've found that a spool lasts me for about 2 or 3 months with vigorous printing. Otherwise, it lasts me about 6 months with less frequent printing.

There are people making machines that recycle the plastic to make your own filament. This means that you can buy ABS pellets for much cheaper and roll your own. Search for the Filabot or the Lyman Extruder.

I'm not as familiar with the filament industry as I should be, but I do know that the quality of your filament makes a big difference in the quality of your prints. Because 3D printers are open systems, there's no feedback as to how much plastic is actually extruded. 3D printers depend on the filament to have a consistent diameter in order to make good prints. Because the layer heights are so small, and a change in diameter is a squared change in area cross-section of the filament, any slight changes to the diameter will affect the amount extruded, and hence the quality of your prints. So quality control probably adds to the cost of the plastics, but with good reason.

So far, the 3D printing community hasn't succumbed to lock-in of printing material like the inkjet printers. All the material is interchangeable between printers

Yep, everybody agrees that filament should be cheaper, so much so that they ran a contest with a $40k prize: http://desktopfactory2012.istart.org/. That was won by the Lyman extruder. See also filastruder (derived from Lyman's design), currently on kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/833191773/filastruder-a-...

I believe it's the Cube 3D printers which use their own 'cartridge' spool which happens to cost significantly more than the spools used by most hobyists. So I've heard.

The Make Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing is a pretty good resource for "what you need to know", if you want more information on this subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Ultimate-Guide-3D-Printing/dp/144...

OP here, yes. I thought this was a pretty good in-depth guide, and I link to it at the end of my post.

Ah, so you did. Sorry, I missed that at the end.

As a non-fan of 3D printing, I did need to use one for a project once or twice and it was better just to use one at a coworking space or friendly company. There are also services online, which may be the only affordable option if you need something like multiple colors considering how expensive that is to own. So anyway, keep in mind you may not need to buy one at all.

I wonder how long it'll take before desktop DMLS machines become viable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMLS

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