18 Aug
2011
18 Aug
'11
8:21 p.m.
jim s wrote:
I inquired as to printing with plastic, and a friend
who does it
regularly here producting parts like mouse housings, and housings for
our movie viewer product said that the juice that is used in the
printers costs around $1000 / litre.
If it's "juice", he's
probably talking about stereolithograpy, which is
definitely insanely expensive, and not at all what I was talking about.
Commercial printers that use deposition of ABS plastic have the same
problem as inkjet printers, where they try really hard to keep you from
being able to buy the ABS from anyone else. It comes in cartridges with
protection chips, and the printer won't print if it thinks the cartridge
should be empty. The ABS for these typically costs $4.50 per cubic
inch, which is $275/liter, or about $265 per kg.
Of course, if you pay a service bureau to print something, you'll have
some markup on top of that.
What I was talking about is do-it-yourself 3D printing. When you do
that, you don't have the cartridge conspiracy, and can buy ABS filament
for under $50/kg.
The quality of prints from the do-it-yourself printers isn't yet
comparable to what you get with the $25K professional printer and
$265/kg cartridges, but it's close enough for most things. Even with the
professional printer you have to do some surfacing operations on the
output if you want it to look like an injection molded part.