http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/01/09/introducing-the-makerbot-replicator/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 10, 2012 (Brooklyn, NY) – MakerBot Industries is excited to announce the launch of its latest product, The MakerBot Replicator™, which will debut at CES in Las Vegas, NV on Tuesday, January 10th. Available in the MakerBot store for pre-order today!

The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. Starting at $1749, The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop.

Hmmmm... this is relevant to my interests... yess....

Last time I checked in on this was a few months ago, so my information may be a little out of date:

It's a commercialisation of the REPRAP project - an open source project aiming for self replicating 3d printers.

A reprap kit can be bought for about $200, by comparison.

Reprap is not suitable for our purposes becuase the resolution isn't really much better then 1mm. If you are very skilled at building and tweaking I hear you can get down to 0.2mm but stratification between layers is still a problem.

The makerbot has superior 3d analysis software, which improves the resolution and reduces stratification compared to the reprap mendel bot.

BUT ultimately, I don't believe a plastic extrusion machine will ever produce the tiny figures at super high detail we're after. The forces involved in extruding such a small cross section are really quite difficult to overcome.

(AS a side not, I showed some of O-man's work to a Masters of Engineering and Manufacturing student a few years ago. He almost changed thesis topic. Apparently we're at the edge of technology )

Excuse me while I go check the couch cushions for loose change...

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

I think we're at the bottom of a steep curve that will look like Moore's Law. I bet that in 10 years time, 3D printers will be good enough to print 28mm models and will cost a few hundred (€$£).

oh yeah, but I want to print 6mm figures, or 1:3000 warships.
ideal detail would be 0.1mm, 0.2mm will do.

Extrusion at that detail is near impossible outside of low visocsity wax. And even there I'm not sure.

I do have to wonder whether widescale adoption of two things could radically change the way we consume goods: programming skills and home fabrication.

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I imagine it means that we'll be selling/renting designs rather than miniatures in the long, long term. Either that or moving more into virtual gaming to make a profit.

In the short term (10-20 years), economy of scale will make it cheaper for people to buy through us than make there own unless customers want huge amounts of goods. It will make it easier for people to set up gaming companies through and more competition is always good for the hobby.

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Could this machine 'print' 28mm scale models to sufficient quality?
How much of the material is wasted in production?
How long would one take to 'print'?

1kg of material = £20 and 1 28mm model only weighs about (guessing) 0.01kg. So if none were wasted you could produce 100 models for £20.

You could potentially make a lot of money depending on the details....

I'll have significant stepping. I know the minimum detail size on forumware is generally .2mm, but I think to get that the resolution needs to be somewhat smaller. Perhaps an expert can tell us what the resolution is a shapeways these days?

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

Shapeways is .1mm for frosted Ultra

http://www.shapeways.com/materials/frosted_detail

So only a fourfold increase. I can wait.

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

16 microns = 0.016mm

http://www.objet.com/PRODUCTS/PolyJet_Technology/

I'm seriously thinking about building one of these (REPRAP) in the next month or so....I have SOOOOO many deadlines right now, terrain building will be about impossible for me in the next couple of months. But with one of these babies....Game changer.

I too am intrested in a RepRap, but I need to get back to the UK first.

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