On Wednesday 03 June 2020 09:23:44 Bruce Layne wrote: > On 6/3/20 2:25 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: > > That sounds like a heated enclosure might be worthwhile, keeping it > > warm enough to stress relieve? > > That completely obvious idea is locked up in a patent held by > Stratasys, that should have already expired, but their lawyers used > the trick developed by pharmaceutical company lawyers to extend the > life of a patent. > > > How does that compare to PLA for the expendables $? > > PLA and ABS filament are around US$15 per kg. Commodity resin goo > costs around US$30 per kg, so it's twice as expensive but the prices > are slowly falling. With more volume, it'll probably reach price > parity with filament. The cost isn't prohibitive when printing a few > small resin parts for your own use. The small build platform, > essentially a cell phone display, is the limiting factor for making > structural parts, but there are some tablet sized LCD UV printers > entering the low cost market. If there's a faster and less messy > finishing process, resin printing will probably displace filament > printing in a few years for many common applications. > Parity still means the stink though, so thats an out of the house job till someone invents a formula that works and doesn't stink. And I expect even a reduction in the smell will be well patented till I'm long gone.
> I've been thinking about getting one of the larger format (300mm X > 300mm X 400mm) filament printers, but I want a direct extruder rather > than the Bowden style, and maybe I should wait for that bogus > Stratasys patent to expire so I can print dimensionally stable ABS. > My first task this morning was to pull the ABS part off my 3D printer, > make some measurements, revise the CAD drawing and reprint the part to > get the critical dimensions I want. Compensating for nonlinear ABS > shrinkage is a pain that the slicer should do for me, but apparently > doesn't. It would have to have knowledge of the shrinkage orientation, and that could change directions every 2 feet coming off the spool. So I expect ABS will not ever get a truly dependable, defined to the .1% level of shrinkage. Take care Bruce and stay well. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
