"New high res home 3D printer" Topic

This link kickstarter from MIT offers SL 3D home printer with 25 micron resolution for 3000 dollars (international, cheaper in US). Resin costs 0.13 dollars per cm3.

Is this a game changer?

Eventually.

Not yet, for many reasons:

TMP link

If it works as advertised then it is time for traditional miniature makers to start getting worried.

AB- that discussion focused quite a bit on what is available, this kickstarter seems to take industry quality and put it into reach of home printers. Is it enough?

Dynaman – it is from MIT so it stands a better than average chance of working as advertised.

However, see comment 78 for positive and negative comments from Maker Faire

(laughs) MIT is not always a brand name of quality- quite often their work does not scale properly in the real world.

That being said, I see more of a use for making scenery right now.

Jqawne – nothing guaranteed but MIT perhaps more likely than some university ranked 400th in world (hence "better than average" rather than "it will work").

25 microns is a lesser quality than I and many others that use CAD masters will accept.

$3,000 USD buys you a lot of high end quality metal figures.

$3,000 USD does not buy a high end 3D printer or the files needed to make the CAD models.
Nor does it make figures as robust as metal.

For low quality figures yes, for figures as good as we get right now from conventional means, no.

AB – what resolution do you accept?

i have recently got my first 3d printed object from shapeways, who use a machine far more than a few thousand dollers.
if it was a supposed smooth sided object then their quality would be no good at all, luckily for me what i needed was supposed to be rough.
you would not want your 20mm vehicles made this way!

As I understand it (very limited knowledge in this area so please correct), this is the first stereolithography (SL) based printer for under 10000 usd. It is a cheap printer, but it is supposed to be a new generation cheap printer. It is not thermoplastic extrusion.

I use 16 microns which is still not good enough but the best I can afford, given what a 6mm vehicle sells for.
The 16 micron prints still require me to spend time sanding away the print lines.

Had I the money I would get wax masters printed.

AB-thanks. Any idea what resolution would be required so they could be used directly i.e. No sanding.

I had some samples from a UK place that were printed in a different fashion, not sure on the resolution but they looked like injection moulding in terms of visible print lines (ie there were not any).

However there were a lot of errors, such as tiny bits of the model missing, simply not printed.
One sample was bigger than the other and both were bigger then the actual file sizes!

Still very much hit and miss for me, all about learning!

But it depends on what you will accept.
There have been quite a few models on TMP that have clearly been made from printed masters as the print lines were very obvious, to me at any rate.

These were models much bigger than 6mm too.

$3 USDk is still quite an investment to print your own figures. As AB says, you will still need a file to print from, and the quality offered is a long way below something that would be commercially viable. Bit like making your own figurs out of FIMO as a replacement for resin offerings :-)

I had some samples from a UK place that were printed in a different fashion, not sure on the resolution but they looked like injection moulding in terms of visible print lines (ie there were not any)

If that's the sample I saw, the print lines are still visible and would still show up in moulding… just not as obvious as some current examples I have seen.

It is them Geoff, but they sent me a sample of my Pathfinder IFV which passed the blu-tac test fine.
Just a shame about the other errors…