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Design for 3D-Printing

(blog.rahix.de)
837 points q3k | 1 comments | 04 May 25 17:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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no_wizard ◴[04 May 25 18:51 UTC] No.43888612[source]▶
I always thought 3D printing would make multi widget machine[0] manufacturing possible

While it’s done a lot of cool stuff and enabled rapid prototyping etc it never scaled the way I really thought it would

[0]: there may be a better turn for this however this is what I mean: that is one machine that can output a wide variety of different things using the same common material, IE maybe one day it produces ball bearings and the next it could produce a bunch of car pistons, with only having to make minimal changes to the machine itself if not changing anything at all

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1. immibis ◴[05 May 25 13:10 UTC] No.43894731[source]▶
It turns out there's a massive speed advantage to parallel processing that outweighs the cost of making the molds when you're making hundreds of the same item. Look at a machine that makes plastic bottles - it stamps out something like 1 to 10 bottles per second per machine, by inflating a bubble of plastic inside a mold. You will never ever get that speed with something that only prints one part of the bottle at a time.

Resin printers are kind of parallel but I don't know how much faster they are. And they still won't beat the bottle molding machine.

For serial processing for expensive parts made of strong materials, wasn't there already CNC milling?