i will let u know once i've got the costs and such figured out hopefully they won't be to expensive

Nothing that can't be 3D-Printed for a song on these days...

What kind of material are you going to make them out of? Will it be archival quality material; something that will last a long time without chipping or outgassing? Cynde Moya On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 08:56:12PM -0500, Adrian Stoness wrote: If they don't end up being too expensive I'd be interested.

thanks for the laugh On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

On Mon, 23 Apr 2012, Rich Alderson wrote: Well that means you need to use asbestos impregnated Teak. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Buying desktop hardware and installing a server OS doesn't make a server-class system any more than sitting in a puddle makes you a duck. [Cipher in a.s.r]

Cynde Moya wrote: Definitely don't use PVC (or any form of vinyl) for archival storage. It outgasses plasticizers and other chemicals that cause degradation of paper and other materials. http://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/photo.html

Or a 3D printer with PLA :) --- Enviado do meu Motorola PT550 Meu site: http://www.tabalabs.com.br ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gene Buckle" <geneb at deltasoft.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Cc: "'General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only'" <cctech at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 9:27 AM Subject: RE: paper tape trays

This is another problem. Can we solve one problem at a time, please? :o)

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: Indeed. We have a 2'x3' sign-making vacuformer at our hackerspace. I think the stock on hand is colored polystyrene - rather thin, but it conforms well. I was thinking about making a form out of 6mm hardboard. The thing that will take the longest is drilling lots of tiny holes in the base to get a good pull. One thought is to make a form that has no base and looks a little like this... TTTTTT Where the backstop is one piece as wide as necessary (probably around 8") and each "leaf" is long enough to hold a stack of fanfold tape with some protective gap (around 10" IIRC). That would take a few minutes to cobble up. There's room on the table for at least 4 of these in one pull (you have to do a full sheet at a time or the vacuum doesn't work - it's a simple machine with no way to block or divert the air for a partial sheet, or to clamp a partial sheet in the carriage) -ethan

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Adrian Stoness <tdk.knight at gmail.com> wrote: The Columbus Idea Foundry - http://www.columbusideafoundry.com/ As to Gene's comment, we do have a 4'x8' Shopbot, but the smallest bit we tend to run on it is 3/16" (4mm) to avoid snapping smaller bits. I'm setting up a smaller (12"x12") CNC, but it's a ways out from being up and running. -ethan

On Wed, 25 Apr 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote: Ethan if your hackerspace has a cnc router, it'll make short work of drilling those holes. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Buying desktop hardware and installing a server OS doesn't make a server-class system any more than sitting in a puddle makes you a duck. [Cipher in a.s.r]

take forever and would be pretty expensive and the quality is not the best On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Alexandre Souza - Listas < pu1bzz.listas at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: I have built several printers and organize activities and lecture on the topic. I am not a doomsayer - I think 3D printing is really cool and I am especially excited about under-$2K-USD models to get the technology into the hands of people like the members of this list. That said, it's not a magic bullet, it's not cheap as chips, but for the situations where it's a good fit, it's cheaper than many traditional manufacturing techniques including bypassing the mold-making costs of injection molding, the labor costs of traditional machining, and since shapes are freely shared on sites like Thingiverse, even sometimes bypassing the expense of skilled labor to design the parts in the first place. It fits a niche between one-off hand-made prototypes and true mass production. If you need exactly 1 or if you need thousands/millions, there are other ways to accomplish your task. If you want dozens or if you want minor customizations that don't map well to economies of scale, it can be a less expensive choice than endless engineering revisions. As for straight dollar cost per item, it depends entirely on the size of the object and the printing technology. Hobby-grade FDM (filament deposition modelling) printers are coarse but inexpensive. The filament is typically plastic welding rod in 3mm or 1.75mm diameters and can be purchased for as little as $12USD/lb. A toggle switch is indeed cheap, but because the output nozzle is about 0.3mm-0.5mm, it will have a coarse texture. Sintered powder printers produce smoother results for a higher cost (don't have exact numbers, but not $12/lb). Stereolithography produces very nice high-res results, but the resin costs $200 per *liter*. I just did some calculations for someone, and a solid badge 50mm x 50mm x 6mm (2"x2"x1/4") is about $3.50 USD just in resin. Hobby grade printers are also smaller than professional printers. I have some DEC papertape trays - they are about 8"x10" and hold several sets of papertape in partitioned bays. Mine are cast acrylic, though I think I may have seen some once made of vacuformed ABS with an acrylic lid. A hollow box with sidewalls at least 1mm thick and a floor at least 3mm thick (so that you have several layers of filaments to bond together for strength) that's 8"x10"x1" is going to weigh several ounces and won't fit on most hobby-grade printers. The MakerBot CupCake (somewhat common with several thousand made) has a 100mm^2 (4"x4") bed... too small. Various RepRap models can print up to about 200mm^2 (8"x8") - a bit smaller than the trays I've seen, but you might be able to make something work. I don't have a shape to run through my calculation tools, but based on the badge price, printing a tray with Stereolithography would run at least $30 in resin alone, and probably closer to $50. These are open-topped designs, BTW, a base, sides, and partition walls - it skips the problem of support material, etc., to allow printing a lid. Vacuforming a tray should cost no more than a few dollars each, once you have a tool large enough to pull a form around 8"x10". Oh... and I forgot slow... a medium-sized item, something that fits in the palm of your hand, can take 2 hrs to print on a hobby-grade FDM printer. Stereolithography often is rated as to how many millimeters per hour the part can "grow" (one entire layer is done as one action, so it matters little for printing time how extensive each layer is and matters greatly for how many total layers there are). I would budget several hours to print something 8"x10" on a RepRap. Each. It would be faster (but probably not cheaper) to CNC mill a tray out of a single block of plastic - HDPE (high density polyethylene) for example. Unfortunately, unless you are buying scrap, it's going to be many dollars for a slab of plastic that thick. Time-Cost-Quality - pick two. -ethan

Adrian Stoness wrote: Kits vary considerably in capabilities and quality, and of course the quality is also affected by the skill of the person assembly the kit. There are sub-$2500 kits that can produce fairly decent output, though generally not comparable to the commercial printers. No, there are commercial ones in the $25K range that produce high-quality ABS parts. The problem isn't the cost of the printer, but rather, the cost of the materials. They do the same things that some inkjet printer vendors do (or used to do) to keep you from refilling the printer cartridges. For example, each cartridge has a chip with a unique ID and a record of how much material is believed to be in the cartridge. The printer updates that record, and will not use the cartridge if it thinks it should be empty. That wouldn't be too difficult to circumvent, except that the printer also maintains an internal database of all of the cartridges it has used, and how much material it thinks should be present in them.

On Wed, 25 Apr 2012, Sander Reiche wrote: Here's a site that goes into it a bit: http://www.studiocreations.com/howto/vacuumforming/index.html Essentially, you heat up a sheet of plastic until it becomes "droopy", then press it over a positive mold that has a shopvac pulling air through it. When the plastic seals over the perimeter of the mold, it goes "thunk" and you've got a bit of plastic sucked into the shape of the mold. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Buying desktop hardware and installing a server OS doesn't make a server-class system any more than sitting in a puddle makes you a duck. [Cipher in a.s.r]