3 D printing

[Derek]

For some time now my electric window master switch has been playing up, I've looked on the net and when they do come up for sale they are a silly price, are they selling ?, I don't know.

Anyway I took all the window switches apart with the help of Anton in the hope of being able to do some sort of repair, Anton said he may be able to make the broken parts out of metal, I was a little worried as it's milimeters from the brass conntacts , I thought about it for and while and as I know someone that does 3 D printing I asked him if it was possible to do, he said the dear bit would be the drawing of it, the making was cheap , so back to Anton for his skills in CAD and this is the results , the white parts are the ones that Connor did for me.

I picked the parts up from Connor on Saturday and attacked the Switches on Sunday, now all windows work fine and as they should.

I must mention I had to do a little tweaking but not a lot.

Some of you know Connor Smith on here, he's the one that bought the Coronet when he was 13, he still has it and he and his Dad (Martin) are still busy at it when they have the time, well Connor is the one that does the 3 D printing, he said he can do almost anything, so if you have something broken and can't get it from anywhere give Connor a shout.

[Super Sloth]

What a cool project!
Might be worth having half a douzen spares made up to keep safe?

They remind me of the charactors from the space invaders game.

[ScottyDave]

That's great, probably a lot more difficult to find parts will end up sourced this way as good originals become unfindable and unaffordable.

[drewcrane]

That there is very cool ,thanks for the post

[cadboy]

Great work and good drawings too.

It is a clever way of making things

[DaveB]

very clever

[db]

3-d printing is amazing. I'm surprised it hasn't taken off more, especially in the repro parts market.

[Blue]

At the moment the plastic cheap 3D printers use is a bit crap, it has limited use. Things will change though and you can print metal too meaning you can manufacture things you just couldn't do by conventional means such as thin wall titanium tube with an internal honeycomb for strength. That's what formula one cars use for the combination roll bar and lift point.

[Jim]

I own a company that has been selling and servicing professional 3D Printers for over 15 years...
The small low cost FDM machines print low resolution plastic models that don't stand close scrutiny. They are certainly not of any use for producing quality items. When you go up the scale to much more expensive machines there are several different technologies including FDM, Polyjet, SLA, and SLS. These will all produce models in various materials. The highest definition plastic parts will be from SLA (Stereolithography) but the machines are very expensive (most start at about £150,000 upwards) The running costs and maintenance are very high.

There are several metal 3D Printers on the market. 3D Printing in metal is very much the 'buzzword' nowadays, but it is of little use generally. You've got to look at about £500,000 to get one up and running with horrendous running costs and sky high maintenance contracts. The density of the printed parts are not 100%, often much lower, there can be some 'porosity' and surface finish issues. Formula 1 teams and other companies use them for very specialist purposes where money is not a problem and the parts cannot be made any other way. I think we are a long way, if ever, from seeing metal printed parts in general production. There are better and cheaper ways to produce almost anything.

[db]

Gutted! I thought they were going to revolutionise manufacturing. I guess not

[Blue]

Me too, I know very little about this technology but had assumed it would become cheap and widely used.

[db]

When Daisy my eldest was looking at uni last year I got to see in a few of their workshops and a few had 3-d printers. I assume they must have been medium quality models from what they were capable of but the possibilities seemed only limited by the designers imagination.

[Pete]

Great Post, thanks!

[Jim]

Me too, I know very little about this technology but had assumed it would become cheap and widely used.

Well that’s true of course. Over the years I have seen the technology improve greatly, in model quality and resolution, and while the lower end has got cheaper, the high end machines have just got better. There is a crowded market of 3D Printers in the £25k - £50k price range that produce pretty good models. Now some of the patents are expiring I see there are SLA machines coming out of China selling for a little over £100k all included... about half the price of the American 3D Systems machines. Metal printing is never going to be cheap, always in the 100’s of thousands. Running costs though can quickly dwarf the original buying price.

3D Printing can be loads of fun though. We recently printed parts of a Star Wars blaster on a Makerbot Z18 low cost printer. Once assembled it was pretty good.

[cadboy]

Our company produce and sells machine tools with AM (Additive Manufacturing) sure expensive but market is getting bigger.

I asked if we could use to make parts, but as has been said initial cost will take many years to replace.