My life events and lack of change in my shop led to a long period where I had nothing to blog about, so I just neglected this blog rather than trying to make up nonsense I didn't actually feel inspired to write about. I figured I would write something when I felt like I had something - well, something positive, that is - to write about, that was in some way shop-related.
So now, after a long period of nothing-but-bad and not-shop-related period of time and events, about which the less said the better, I have this, entirely new and for me, unexplored territory to talk about:
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| (Creality Ender-3 V2) |
Additive manufacturing has entered my life and my shop lexicon due to the incredible generosity of a long-time friend and co-conspirator.
Some folks are using the term additive machining since 3D printing does indeed use machines to do the work, just as subtractive machining does, and I like the expression too, because it has fewer syllables and therefore trippeth more lightly from the tongue.
So yeah, this thing works, and I have some overall and kinda random impressions, and I figured one more review - especially one that isn't YouTube based, will definitely get lost instantly in the background noise of the internet, so I'd better get busy and write one right away.
Consider my background: I am an experienced (possibly retired, it remains to be seen) engineer and amateur machinist with no experience whatsoever with 3D printers. When I took this one out of the box was the first time I had ever touched one, anywhere.
First impressions upon opening the box and seeing the packaging:
"holy shit, how much did my friend pay for this? I've seen lab
instruments which cost literally a hundred times what this
printer does, that weren't packed this well."
and also
"hey, I recognize this motion control scheme - we used this
same scheme extensively at Famous Former Employer - this
method has intrinsically high precision, I like this."
and things like
"oh it has a heated glass bed; I think I read somewhere that's
a desirable feature... when I last read something about these...
ten years ago...
Then I read the manual. I was amused at its confident minimalism, at first. I was less amused that it did not come with a magnifying glass to enable reading the text or appreciating the micro-printed diagrams.
I say 'amused', because Creality™ had plastered a QR code on everything, so I figured - that is, I ASSUMED, HA-HA, that whatever was missing from the paper manual would be amply covered in the PDF or electronic version.
That youthful feeling of naïveté did not last.
The QR code printed on the box, on the manual and on a sticker prominently displayed on one of the stepper motors all lead to a web page equipped with nothing but dead links. As in links that lead nowhere. Links which, when inspected with an actual browser on a real computer were definitely dead links which lead to non-existent documents or pages.
As in, the documentation - on the English side at least - is not being maintained.
No documentation, no manual, no community forum. Those things may exist somewhere, and I even downloaded a Creality app for my phone looking for more basic operational and tech info, but I haven't explored that yet, and when I needed, when I was getting started, assembling it, and seeing that QR code everywhere - that helped me not at all.
The diagrams in the manual, and the instructions were even more minimalist than something from Ikea, and they assumed more about the technical competence of the assembler than anything I've ever seen shipped as a consumer item. There are a lot of ways you could screw up putting this together, or for that matter, even taking it out of the packaging carelessly. But if you treat it like the precision instrument it is, it turns out to be surprisingly easy to assemble.
Note also that your mileage my vary. Not to toot my own horn,
but I am a smart guy with excellent manual dexterity (when my
arthritis isn't acting up that is) and decades of experience with
fiddly technology.
So I wouldn't buy this for your ten year old to play with by
themselves. Your sixteen year old, maybe. Especially if your
sixteen year old has already built a gaming computer or
similar, at which point they are smarter than I am.
If you're thinking it's like buying a bread-maker, it's probably
not for you. I mean, using it is just as fiddly and wasteful as
learning how to use a bread-maker... but imagine if you also
had to assemble the bread-maker first. It's like that.
Including a few false starts - mostly due to me getting ahead of where I was supposed to be in the instruction - and also some domestic interruptions, I think it took me about two hours from cutting the tape on the box to plugging it in and turning it on.
The very first item I printed worked correctly and I got a successful print. From what I had read and was prepared for, this astonished me.
The second item I attempted to print - another small and simple example/test file included with the printer - has proven EXACTLY what I expected 3D printing to be like; frustrating, fiddly, and difficult.
So, now it's living up to my expectations, which means I am learning. ;)
One positive surprise has been how little filament is consumed, even though I have long known that most printed objects don't need to be solid, and that's actually one aspect of the technology which excites me the most: 3D printing breaks a lot of rules of classic materials science and engineering, because it enables complex internal geometries which allow tremendous lightening (material savings), or conversely, strengthening of lightweight geometries or designs.
Shapes which might in the past have needed to be made from exotic materials or using complex layup and compositing methods or compromised shapes in able to achieve their strength-to-weight requirements may now be achieved with 3D printing.
(albeit not quickly, as most additive manufacturing is slow, although increasingly cheap to parallellize since the cost of machines is plummeting)
And this sophisticated capability is now available to almost anyone. Various machines are being sold in department stores and most are well under a kilobuck.
Certainly the materials are limited to thermoplastics or things which can be polymerized from a liquid resin. Some experimentation with powdered thermoset resins and laser sintering/curing has been done, I don't know where the state of the art is on that, but as, if, and when it arrives it would enable printing with things like phenolics (Bakelite™), which would be cool for high-temperature applications.
Note also that there are a few popular engineering resins (such as acetal AKA Delrin™) which simply are not yet 3D printable by any known means.
Laser-sintering of metal powders is also a thing (some folks are making rocket engines that way), but don't expect that capability to be sold at Wal-Mart any time soon.
Nevertheless, perfectly acceptable resins like ABS and some Nylons are extrudible thermoplastics which can be run in most modern consumer-grade printers.
Metal inserts can be pressed into printed plastic parts for high wear features such as axle, bearings, shafts, pivot points, etc.
This is an exciting and useful addition to my shop's manufacturing capabilities, and I look forward to remaining completely inept and incompetent at this technology for years to come. >_>
Sure is cool to watch though:
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1 comment:
Neat! I was lucky enough to be gifted a Prusa i3 Mk3 earlier this year and have put a couple kg of filament through it now. Right now, I have it churning out Duplo train track pieces for the kid. I haven't done anything incredibly useful with it yet but expect to, I made a lot of useful things with my old printer even though it was a POS.
I have a couple of friends who use Ender printers, both of them have the Max for the huge build volume. One friend has a pair that he uses for making cosplay stuff, the other I think is exclusively using it for printing R2-D2 parts. The only real complaints that I've heard about them is that support is tough, the machines themselves have been more or less rock-solid.
In my experience once you find whatever "tricks" work best for your printer it makes them much easier to deal with. My old printer had a glass bed and only supported PLA, and the only way I could get bed adhesion to work was to coat the bed with blue painter's tape. This new printer I have bed adhesion problems unless I wipe down the bed plate with isopropyl before starting each print. Once I found those tricks though, I've hardly had isssues.
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