3D printer to produce coil housing

[Kjamesgraham]

In regards vacuum forming coil shells with molds made with this method, if you add a lip just bigger that the thickness of the plastic used around the bottom of the mold, you can turn it upside down so you can form coil covers for your coils.
Unless you plan to make a separate mold for the covers, i wasted a few sheets before i realised that the covers needed to be slightly bigger to fit properly over the finished coil !.

That is a great idea!

[Midas]

We use 3D printer models quite a bit. The wet-method produces pretty robust and tough models, often good enough for limited production. But they are pricey, and I still wouldn't trust them for a high-impact loop cover. Dry-method 3D is what most of the lower-cost printers use like RepRap and Z-Corp. The models I've made with this method tend to be more brittle.

For loops I would definitely recommend vacuum-formed sheet plastic which is thinner, lighter, & stronger.

Standard Rep-rap is extrusion style (which I think is what you mean when you say wet) usually using ABS or PLA, and certainly makes strong parts. The whole idea is that it makes many of its own parts, brittleness would be no good at all. But when you say dry style (which I'm assuming you mean powder bed style) makes brittle parts its only true of some types. Specifically the type that use a binder to fuse the powder together. These are only good for visual models, but have the advantage of being able to be full color.
Laser sintered powder style on the other hand can make very durable parts with better resolution than extrusion types and out of many materials, even exotic steel alloys. You could use it to make the production vacuum form itself for instance. I agree that all types are still only filling the prototyping limited production run niche.. so far.

[Altra]

Carl, could you clarify what you ment by "wet method" and what brand machines are you using?


I would like to build a 3d printer. You can find inexpensive motor driven extruders online for building your own printer. Trying to figure out what the difference is between a $30K machine from 3dsytems or Stratasys and a well built diy machine? I assume its the extruder and some proprietary software?

This is a video of a bike company making titanium parts, amazing!
http://vimeo.com/47522348