3D printing is gonna be the next big thing...
I've been looking for a way to produce a certain plastic part to serve a specific function.
The part is small & not extremely complex, yet it needs to have very specific dimensions.
I've spoken to many local experts in the field of plastic fabrication and the consensus is that the "only" way to make this part would be by thermoplastic injection molding.
Injection molding would set me back about R20K - and thats before I've even produced the first part.
Fair enough, once the initial outlay is taken care of, the parts can be produced in their thousands at a few cents per part... but I'm not there yet.
At this stage I only want a few hundred at most to see how the market responds.
So in order to test the idea, I've been dabbling in resin casting with silicone molds, aluminium sand casting, hand making the part out of silver (which produced an excellent master version of the part BUT it took 3 days).
I then made a vulcanized rubber mold of the silver master, with the intention of casting the part out of aluminium via lost-wax casting... but the 10% shrinkage which comes about through this process proved to be a problem and at this point I wasn't up for another 3 days of fiddling around in my dad's jewellery workshop and keeping him out of work at the same time.
Somewhere along the way in my extensive web research I came across 3D printing & Rapid Prototyping.
I immediately assumed that this was way out of my league as the commercial printing solutions would cost WAY too much. Outsourcing the job to a commercial 3D printing service would cost hundreds of Rands per part - again not economically viable.
It was then that I stumbled upon the RepRap project.
A RepRap is a sort of DIY 3D printer which can print things out of plastic.
Here's some of the key features of a RepRap:
I've been looking for a way to produce a certain plastic part to serve a specific function.
The part is small & not extremely complex, yet it needs to have very specific dimensions.
I've spoken to many local experts in the field of plastic fabrication and the consensus is that the "only" way to make this part would be by thermoplastic injection molding.
Injection molding would set me back about R20K - and thats before I've even produced the first part.
Fair enough, once the initial outlay is taken care of, the parts can be produced in their thousands at a few cents per part... but I'm not there yet.
At this stage I only want a few hundred at most to see how the market responds.
So in order to test the idea, I've been dabbling in resin casting with silicone molds, aluminium sand casting, hand making the part out of silver (which produced an excellent master version of the part BUT it took 3 days).
I then made a vulcanized rubber mold of the silver master, with the intention of casting the part out of aluminium via lost-wax casting... but the 10% shrinkage which comes about through this process proved to be a problem and at this point I wasn't up for another 3 days of fiddling around in my dad's jewellery workshop and keeping him out of work at the same time.
Somewhere along the way in my extensive web research I came across 3D printing & Rapid Prototyping.
I immediately assumed that this was way out of my league as the commercial printing solutions would cost WAY too much. Outsourcing the job to a commercial 3D printing service would cost hundreds of Rands per part - again not economically viable.
It was then that I stumbled upon the RepRap project.
A RepRap is a sort of DIY 3D printer which can print things out of plastic.
Here's some of the key features of a RepRap:
- The majority of it can be built out of parts which are fairly easy to source (the mechanical & electric parts)
- A working RepRap printer can print a large majority of its own parts - in other words a RepRap can clone itself - or even upgrade itself to the next version when it becomes available
- Its open-source, meaning that the plans and instructions to build one are freely available and reproduction of it is encouraged by the community.
- Even the software required to draw your 3D models and print them is open-source and freely available
So to keep a long story long, I went and ordered the parts to build my own RepRap Mendel (Mendel is the current version of RepRap).
Now I am eagerly awaiting their arrival by courier - at which time I have no doubt there will be several days and nights of tinkering to get it all built up, calibrated and tested so I can begin printing my first plastic parts.
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