On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Colin K <cwk....@gmail.com> wrote: > > For a long time I was very skeptical of the whole "machine that makes its > own parts" aspect as I thought, "why bother, aluminum extrusion is cheap?" >
I am actually working on a design that uses the printed parts, but replaces the threaded rods with aluminum extrusions. It should be considerably more rigid and allow faster print times without as much of a degradation in print quality. The only downside is cost... instead of $15 in threaded rod, it will require about $45 in al extrusions. I know that raises the price to high for many, but sometimes you cannot avoid it </sarcasm mode off>. > Plus, it's not like you can print your own steppers, bearings, etc., so it > seemed like a frivolous exercise. In the early days, a set of printed parts > for a RepRap costed close to $1000 and the machine they made was not very > good. Now the parts set price is headed towards $100 and below, and the > machine seems pretty decent. So I give up, the vision seems to have worked > out so far. Will they ever print their own stepper motors? Probably not in > the next 10 years, but I would not be shocked if in that time we were > printing PCBs and using the RR as a pick-and-place machine. Even that may > be > enough to significantly alter some of the dynamics of the macro-economy. You cannot print PCBs yet, but you can use the RepRap to apply resist for home etching boards. Personally, I don't see the point when you can buy 10 PCBs from China for $13 delivered, but others like it. It is a nice option to have at least. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
