And gets better

This is an HO scale building.  The window I printed on the Afinia.  In the building it has been given an alcohol and ink wash, no paint.  The Afinia prints in ABS, so it is solvent weldable, and paintable.  The second picture is during clean-up...removing the raft and the support material.

Good, but...

Not quite to the level of plastic injection molded parts, yet, is it?

George

Yes, Good, but

No, with a home printer that most could afford, you just can't get to injection molding fine detail.  You can, however, do any design you want, and affordably.  You cannot do that with injection molding.

Now, if you want fine quality detail, and are willing to pay for it.  You can get it printed at shapeways.com.  I have only had small items printed there, as the price for larger items is out of my price range.

Here is an elevator tower for roof detail.  The roof, door, and vents are all separate pieces.  I just used some rubber cement to hold things together for a quick pic.  I will prime and detail when it warms up later in the week.  This is about 1-3/8" square, and the vent is see through.  I have had finer vents made at shapeways, but they cost a few bucks, and this is a few cents.

Affordable?

Ok, I guess its more affordable than injection molding, but $1500 for the printer seems pretty steep for home use.  There are others out there, but don't know how they compare specs wise.  One I found was the the solidoodle gen2 for $499, can print bigger parts 6" cube vice 5" cube, both the solidoodle and afinia use 1.75 mm filaments, so that one seems a much better deal.

So I was wondering anyone else have 3d printers at home they use for model railroad work?

Many printers use the same

Many printers use the same plastic, that is not the issue.  The issue is how small of detail will they print.  The reason we, I have a friend that went in on the cost with me, went with the Afinia was that is was top rated, and easy to set up.  There are faster, and fine detail printers in the same price range, but they were hard to use, or they are kits.  Personally, I wanted to build RR models, not printers.  At this point, I am just in the learning stage.

Also, the software used to run the printer, sometimes proprietary to the printer, needs to be bug free.  The Afinia was a proven product. 

As I said in my first post, " In five months this will be old technology".  The people on the cutting edge already consider this old, and are two generations beyond this, but they are very expensive, or you have to build it.

Cost per part?

I was listening to a discussion on the radio yesterday about 3D printers that were exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas last week and the impression I got was that it is not just the price of the printers, but the price per part that can be daunting. From the discuss, I gathered that the filament rolls are quite expensive (they mentioned a price of about $45 a roll) and implied that it takes a lot of filament to make even a small part.

George

Cost per part

I woudl just have to say no, it is cheap.  There are 700 grams on a roll, with some freight, about .07 per gram. This is HO scale, about 10' square, with vents on three sides.  Including raft and support material, there are less than 20 grams in it.  So, $1.40 for actual cost of material.  It took the purchase of a printer, and about an hour and 45 minutes to print.  Obviously there is also drawing/design time, and some trial and error prints, but I still don't have $3.00 in actual material cost, even though everything failed on the first print, and had to be redesigned.  Being new, I am still learning how to make things work the first time.

This printer is not really made to make the high detail small parts, but I have printed a soda pop machine and a candy machine, both of which use about one gram.  I will post pictures of the painted items tomorrow.

Thanks for the Info

Thanks for the info on the price per part. While I'm not completely sold on it (yet) it does sound interesting.

An hour and a half, eh?

Might be interesting to have a face off between the 3D printer and a modeler with some styrene, an Xacto knife, and some glue!

Sort of a modern day Jawn Henry challenge! LOL

The first laser printer I

The first laser printer I encountered, cost as much as a small car,was slower than a dot matrix printer and needed special cooling and air filtration.

today I have one on my desk that does color.  This is just the beginning.

- Doug M

printing time

Yeah, it can take a while.  There are several projects I have looked at and decided to build them out of styrene.  And at least one I printed, and then said, wow, it would have been easier to build in wood.  I have a print I hope to do this week end that is a small house, due to it's size, it will be printed in two sections.  I am guessing it will take six hours., and that is no roof or windows, just a bunch of curved walls.  If they were straight walls, I would build it out of sheet styrene.

I have a $45,000 printer at

I have a $45,000 printer at

The machine that Moddler uses costs $250,000.  That thing must be running 24/7/365 just to pay it off.   But judging from their gallery, it does spectacular work.

http://www.moddler.com/portfolio

Steve S

Amazing Detail

We are rapidly approaching the day when talented people will be able to produce 3D drawings of any railway model you can think of and those who want a particular model will pay them to have one 3D printed.  Take a look at these HO and Nn3 items I found just doing a quick look through the Shapeways gallery (there's plenty more as well).

http://www.shapeways.com/model/542216/nn3-scale-class-a-16-ton-t-boiler-shay.html?li=productBox-search

http://www.shapeways.com/model/225243/sprinter-lighttrain-h0.html?li=productBox-search

Scroll sideways through the pictures, the quality is excellent.  I wonder why the person who produced the files for the passenger train didn't include interior furniture and people.  Amazing stuff.

Any Scale

Forgot to mention that you can also create your drawings in 1:1 scale then scale them down to any size so Shapeways and Moddler will be able to produce the train model in all but the very tiniest of scales.  They are already producing N and Z Scale items.

Presumably you will also be able to select expensive drawings (models with lots of detail) or cheaper ones that have less detail.  Amazing times ahead of us.

Un3k

just the beginning

The Afinia printer is just the beginning.  I have also designed and bought many items from shapeways.  The Afinia detail, in my mind, is about the same as what shapeways calls "detail", and is available in colors.  The Afinia canno print at the detail of the shapeways frosted detail, or even close to their frosted ultra detail.  I will try and post some items I have done in both this weekend.

Print at Any Scale?

Uh, not quite. You'd have to readjust the thickness of walls, support structures and free-standing details.

For example, the sheet metal used in a car side is probably 1/8"-1/4" thick, but the minimum printing thickness will be something analagous to 3-4" scale thickness. Even if scratchbuilding a car side using styrene sheet and strip, you probably wouldn't go less than .020" sheet so the model has some sort of basic structural rigidity. That's close to a scale 2" thickness.

Bottom line, you pretty much have to design for the scale you're targeting, not just resize down or you're going to have problems with things being to thin for any sort of structural integrity.

Comps to shapeways

I did not go in on purchasing the Afinia to make small details, but to find out what it will do, I have printed several small items.  The Afinia was purchased to print large items that would be to expensive to print at shapeways.  Regardless, here are a couple of comparison photos, showing similar items printed at shapeways and printed on the Afinia.

The red soda pop machine is the Afinia print, and the other is from shapeways.  On these very small HO scale items, you can clearly see the difference.  The Afinia, due to it extruding hot plastic, rounds all corners, only slightly, but it does show.

On these desks, the center two were printed on the Afinia, and the end units were printed at shapeways.  Again, one can see the rounded drawer fronts on the Afina units, and again these are HO scale, so the writing surface of the desks are less than 3/8" high.  IMHO, when the desks are inside a building, the difference will be hard to see.  The cost of the Afinia desk is a fraction of the cost of the shapeways units.  However, the roll top desk could not be printed on the Afinia.  Actually, I have had to lobby shapeways to let me print it, as it is under specs, in their opinion. 

3D modeling

Completed elevator head tower

HO scale, with see through vents.  The vents, door, wall and roof are all printed as separate pieces.  The shingles are paper shingles I designed drew in photoshop.  3D printing still has a ways to go, but the technology is improving.

Airline stairs for truck mount

This is something I designed in SketchUp and printed on my Afinia H Series printer.

I added the hydraulic cylinders and added the styrene bands on the sides, other wise it is a one piece print.  It has been primed with white primer.

Concrete Track Bumper

This was based on a plan in an old MR article.  I will change the hidden design next time to save on material, but it was only 6 grams of plastic as it is.  It just took 54 minutes to print.

And after it is panted.

3 - D Printing

Like all new consumer technologies there is a curve for learning, quality and an acceptable price range.  What we have here is a wonderful hobby where practitioners of our discipline are willing to try and experiment.  .When I take a look at today's models and the work, ingenuity, attention to detail and prototipical matching detail I think back to my youth and other than a few switches and bridges we had to pretend. I just marvel at what's being accomplished. It takes a willingness to experiment and that spirit is evident in the tremendous layouts created and ideas shared at our website.     

Saguaro Cactus size?

Actually the smaller the item, the better you would be having shapeways print it.  This type of printer is more for larger items.

So how big is a saguaro cactus?  Give me some dimensions to work with, it should be easy to try.

Saguaro, buy them from Plastruct

They could be designed and printed at shapeways.com, but you can buy them from plastruct.com easier and cheaper than that.  The extruder type printer that are reasonably common for home use, like I have, would not do a good job on these.  Particularly in N scale.