Maplin selling a £700 3d printer

[sted]

http://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/57573-pop-maplin-today-buy-3d-printer-700/

 

now im getting tempted just need to know how on earth you design something to print and find an excuse to find the cash lol

[Steve21]

Any 3D CAD/CAM style software can be used

 

Cash is the easy part, go go school budget for errr development and new tech! yes yes

 

Steve

[sted]

Any 3D CAD/CAM style software can be used

 

Cash is the easy part, go go school budget for errr development and new tech! yes yes

 

Steve

 

i dont technically work for a school but a 3rd party though i could always pester the boss until he gives in lol

[creese]

You could soon get your money back.

Shapeways - Make, buy, and sell products with 3D Printing

[plexer]

The K8200 can only use one colour at a time and you can't swap the print head during a job. To print a multi coloured object you have to build it from separate components.

 

Not quite true you could easily add more filament behind the first one to create multicolour objects.

 

Ben

[pcstru]

Next Day RepRap do 3d printer kits for £500.

 

Many CAD packages can be used - generally you need to be able to export STL files. Many people use OpenSCAD - which is an open source procedural CSG modelling package - quite easy to use once you understand the basics but not a WYSIWYG editor. Sketchup is also quite popular, blender less so. Check out the Thingverse for thousands of examples.

 

3D printing is *slow* and can be ... particular. There is a learning process to go through before you really understand what the limitations are and how to design round them. We are at about the same stage in 3d printing now as we were with personal computers in 1978. I can only begin to imagine how this technology is going to change our world over the next 30 years.

Edited July 9, 2013 by pcstru

[pcstru]

Not quite true you could easily add more filament behind the first one to create multicolour objects.

 

I think this would be very tricky. You would need to be quite precise in knowing how much filament would be used (so you can predict when the colors change). My experience is when I change filament, the old colour tends to be retained in the hot end for a while. You need to purge quite a bit of filament before you exhaust the old stock.

[plexer]

When we bought our mendels we were going to get next day reprap kits but they were out of stock we went with RepRapPro instead:

 

Mono Mendel FULL Kit UK shipping £499.90+£12P&P=£511.90

 

But I expect both of these to take a bit more assembly than the Vellman extruded aluminium one.

 

I think it's more of being able to pop to Maplins and get one.

 

Colour changes well it depends on what you are looking for if you want a crisp change at a layer then yes that's more difficult if you just want to have pretty multi-coloured items like the expanding bracelets then you could slam in some more filament.

 

Ben

[plexer]

I would avoid Next Day Reprap

 

We're sorry, the following item(s) isn't available at this time:

Prusa Mendel Kit - £499

Item number: 8010

 

We also found a phone number for them once and that's been disconnected.

 

Ben

[plexer]

It's also a shame that it's 3mm pla as whilst £30 for a kg of pla is a bit high it's not bad for being able to walk in to a shop and buy in but my printers run on 1.75mm.

 

If I buy pla from the Netherlands I can get 1KG of 1.75mm pla for £19 a kg

 

Ben