Remember when 3d printing was the next big thing and we were all about to have those in our bedrooms...

The only people who argued 3D printing would become a household item were science journalists memeing up research to get clickbait add revenue. As a general heuristic for life, I would advise you to always believe the contrary of whatever science journalists say because they're always wrong.

People realised it was just a glue gun on a robot arm

Everyone realized 99% of the stuff on shapeways and sites like it are garbage with no purpose beyond existing.

They still see lots of use in hobbyist settings, where you need some specialized part and can't afford proper machining.

>They still see lots of use in hobbyist settings, where you need some specialized part and can't afford proper machining.

i make stuff all the time, my 3d printers are a godsend.
i can fire up my cad software, construct something, and print it in less time than i used to construct something in cad. having the ability, to create stuff just from cad data is quite amazing, i would not want to miss it anymore.

I fucking hate 3d printers. They never fucking work. It's always something, bed adhesion, under-extruding, shitty support, cad issues, over-extruding, warping, shitty finish, filament grinding.

FUCK IT ALL. I WANT TO BURN IT ALL TO THE FUCKING GROUND.

all your problems can be fixed with proper printer, and a calibrated extruder and the help of an entire pva glue stick dissolved in a liter bottle of isopropyl alcohol. wipe it onto the glass surface you print on, let it dry, you will get more bed adhesion than you have asked for.

£4000 Ultimaker 3 Extended.

Git gud

>ultimaker

its like buying massively overpriced apple products, and not assembling your own pc for way less money.

you could get a better printer for a 4rth and even less what you paid for.

mine was a diy project, ive not even bought a kit, i used a BOM of a ord bot hadron, and built my own, bought the controller from printrbot, and the extruder from some german guy who makes them on a little desktop lathe, little works of precision craftsmanship, learned how to calibrate extruder output and the kinematic of the machine, how to modify your firmware, which is arduino based. you learn a lot about proper calibration, how the whole thing is supposed to work, and what can be done about such problems. 3d printers are not something i would recommend to a person who is not willing to tinker and improve said machine.

im not saying ultimakers are garbo, they are just way to expensive for what they are. price is not an indication of how a machine is performing.
ive seen 300$ entry level printers outperforming the ultimaker. some just have a smaller printbed though

still need a consumer grade machine that can eat used plastic and spit out feed stock.

Stratasys would murder your family. They literally have microchips on the end of there spools that are responsible for saying when nothing is left in the spool. What the microchip say bears no relation to how much is left in the spool, so you can "run out" with plenty of plastic. They tout this as a feature.

Pretty much this. Old printers were amateur jobs that had flaws. They got better, but then all the little guys got bought up and replaced with shit service and shenanigans. Anyone remember that MakerBot Z80? I don't know how they thought it was acceptable to ship that trash.

A 3d printer would be great if they were more precise .

The biggest hurdle for these things in my mind is that academics who could be using these things for research purposes lack imagination.

I gave a speech to my department last semester on how 3D printers could revolutionize our field, and I could almost hear their minds exploding because it's so fucking obvious once it's pointed out. Two people in the department have already purchased one, feels good to have an idea that the department latches onto

ive suggested 3d printing 5 years ago to my company, today we print all our robotic end effector prototypes inexpensive in a couple of hours, instead of having to wait for the machine shop to make them from aluminium, just to ditch them when we have to implement changes in the design.

I don't even know what the fuck I would print.

It has useful applications already and is decently affordable, but fuck me if I had a reason to use one.

What the fuck happened to the Higgs boson discovery
What the fuck happened to the gravitational wave discovery

i had to find applications for it myself. its not a machine i use daily, its just a tool like my cordless drill. but its priceless if you have to make a motor mount, or brackets, enclosures, things i had to make back in the days from sheets of acrylic and hot glue. i had to learn to use my printer for stuff i would have cobbled together otherwise. tinkercad or 123d are your best friends. you cant unleash a 3d printers capabilities and potential if you rely only on stuff you download from the internet

you don't have one?

printing race quads with PETG and carbon fiber reinforced printing material. super cheap to replace parts on that

Custom holster for your splorch

the average tard out there doesn't have a need to print random stuff every day. that being said, 3D printers and plastics are now affordable for anyone who actually does find the want or need to print a ton of stuff every day.

Whats the cheapest printer that can do really prcise shit like the atom 2?

>atom 2
>precise

what do you mean with precise?
any cartesian kinematic printer is more precise than a delta like the atom2. deltas are inherently prone to end effector wobbling and more complicated to properly calibrate, since there kinematic is more abstract. cheap ass printers like the Monoprice Maker Select V2 , which is around 280$ or the Monoprice MP Select Mini which is 200$ can print 100 microns layer heights, and are even more precise than atom 2. i was able to mess around with a friends wanhao duplicator i3, which was like 300$ at aldi, and is identical to the monoprice maker select, and you could measure a coin, create a square in cad, cut a hole of said coin diameter in that square in cad, print that 3d model on that 300$ printer, and the coin would fit just precisely into that hole, it was a nice gentle fit. printers are as precise as they are calibrated.
you wont need it any more precise than that. pic related, wanhao duplicator i3 print, bought at a discounter super market.

Molten metal is where it's at.

I don't think the powers that be would let us own such, though.

power is not the problem, its the price and the required infra structure around the printer.
SLS metal printers are ungodly expensive. and you need next to the printer a couple more machines and extraction systems to make the printer work, like a metal powder reclamation and cleaning station, which almost costs half as much as the laser sinter machine itself, a baking oven to finish the sintered part, and make it an almost solid object, and an air extraction/filtration system for both the oven and the printer. some companies build entire building around their metal printers and the required machinery to keep those running.

you can "print" metal with a regular 3d printer aswell, i made some aluminum parts using my 3d printer. you print your piece with your regular PLA plastic, burry it in metal casting sand, use polystyrene or straws to keep casting and air escape channels open for your molten aluminum, compact the sand, and cast it into there, the plastic will boil away and leave a cavity as the metal displaces it. you can do more rigid pieces that way than with a sls printer.

pic related, its an aluminum sand cast part made from a regular 3d printed plastic piece.

We have one at work. The printing material costs NZ$0.50 per gram and the temporary structural stuff isn't much less than that. The utility is great but most people aren't going to need them for anything more than printing shitty sculptures, cases for their raspberry pi or dragon dildoes and in those cases it's generally cheaper or better to go out and buy one that was manufactured properly.

you can use a smaller furnace to melt your aluminum as well, i have a small electric one i use for my casting.
youtube.com/watch?v=2wtotwuM2yc

Then they figured out that you need to have tons of experience with 3d modelling + spending thousands of dollars to do this shit

If you do want to make custom plastics/metals for yourself then its wonderful.

they sell cases for dragon dildos?
how do you know?

but yeah, i hate these people buying printers just to print useless junk. they just waste resources and create waste material. they gave 3d printing that gimmick reputation when it is so much more in the right hands

check out tinkercad.com/, its a free web browser cad program, based on 123d design. its as easy as using legos, and its learning curve enables you to make more complex stuff later on. its quite educational, i used it, for example, to construct my retro box hand held emulation console

>the year of our lord 2017
>not having a case for your dragon dildo
Are you even trying?

In srsns, the gimmicky nature has done wonders for publicity, but the true value of 3D printing lies in fields like medicine and rapid prototyping for industry. If anything, the last couple of years of hype would have inspired a lot of people to go into engineering, and even if only 10% of them are actually decent engineers who do anything with 3D printing, that's a whole lot of innovation that wouldn't otherwise have happened

my home 3d printer kinda inspired me to get my polymer technician certification and my additive manufacturing engineers degree. im now working in 3d printer aided restoration and reconstruction

Id just like to point out that this entire post is built upon a misunderstanding of a figure of speech

there wasn't even a figure of speech, your post is not really comprehensible. please rephrase it, since it made no sense to me. at least, even though that anons response to it was quite interesting.

So when are we going to see large scale 3d printing of durable construction materials, for building houses in a day or two, or for "printing" whole buildings in a month.

right now youtube.com/watch?v=GUdnrtnjT5Q
its not really an issue to do this today
youtube.com/watch?v=k74rb7xl3aY
heck , china is printing 10 houses a day
youtube.com/watch?v=OYqBxEAtXZA
a chinese company also 3d printed a 6 story apartment tower, and a mansion (pic related)
3dprint.com/38144/3d-printed-apartment-building/

Nobody made affordable small business version.
Metal printing is still in inception therefore very expensive and useless.
>MUH WAX CASTINGS
If you knew the setup required to cast a part you would probably kill yourself.
More complicated parts even require preheat furnaces and vacuum conditions.

youtube.com/watch?v=28Ck27Z54qE

>Metal printing is still in inception

spacex flies 3d printed high-pressure rocket engine combustion chambers on their falcon 9, reducing the price of their engines

3D printing revolutionized whole industries. It was MASSIVELY MASSIVELY successful.

I watch Jay Leno's Garage and that guy cannot stop praising his 3D printer. It's a revolutionary tool to make very accurate one off parts for his classic cars.

I've seen a metal 3D printer in action and it's fucking amazing. Lots of industries are buying these million dollar machines now.

Oh you thought you were going to just have it next to your paper printer? Lol, that won't happen, probably.

One basic machine is 100K.
That is not affordable for any small to medium size business.
Space X is multi billion dollar investment from multiple investors.
Not to mention the training employees need to receive on top of it.
unless you are tuning million a year its is impossible to keep something like that viable.

jay leno even has a metal sls printer in his restoration workshop

>That is not affordable for any small to medium size business.

Sorry if reality doesn't quite fit your childish economic ideology.

metal 3d printing is an integrated Industry 4.0 and cyber physical systems environment technology, its made for small scale production, one offs , and highly specialized parts. you need a different business model if you invest into a 4.0 micro factory including metal printing. there are also things you just can't machine conventionally

You are literally falling for the pop sci meme.
There are companies manufacturing metal parts with decades of existence that havnet made the leap for 3D printing instead they keep buying cheapo HAAS CNCs that can do the work and bring home some profit.
Keep dreaming sci,I love to see some of you actually putting 100K is a machine,you are all big on words but when you idiots have to actually make something you go for the 300K starting math degree.

I never said otherwise,but the market is small and already saturated by much bigger players than you and i.

can they print 6 story high dragon dildo houses as well? i would like so much to build one of these in one of those ass backward christian communities, just to have the kids ask their parents on the way to church and sunday school about it.

It was always a meme. Anyone who took that shit seriously was and is retarded.

I don't know where you dumb niggers work, but in engineering and architecture we use these all the time to prototype/model shit.

Consider getting out and about some time.

The problem is most people are goddamn retards and when you try to teach them CAD and you end up with the garbage on Thingiverse. People don't want to put in the effort, they just want it to HAPPEN. They'll gladly print something made by someone else but would much rather go watch TV or party than learn, or slap a few cylinders and cubes together and call it "done".

The general population is, unfortunately, incredibly stupid and lazy.

we used 3d printers to make a bunch of combs for acrylamide gels for screening through CRISPR mutagenesis events

the combs kinda fell apart after a few months though

>putting your dragon dildo in a case
>when you could be putting it on your mantel

it is, go buy one and start printing shit you retard.

well, at least they weren't expensive, unlike other scientific equipment. you might use something tough like PETG to print, that stuff prints even nicer than pla

Yeah we saved like five or six hundred bucks off what it would have cost to order the same number of teflon combs from the only supplier, and by the time the combs crapped out we'd found better ways to do our screening.

If we did it again we'd change up the materials. We settled on the acrylic plastic at the time, our biggest design constraint was smooth sides to the comb's teeth so it wouldn't grip the gel and break the wells. I'm sure there's better stuff out there now.

Google Powers That Be, faggot.

what? are you fucking yoda or something? make fucking sense please