How an 83-year-old inventor beat the high cost of 3D printing

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/04/how-an-83-year-old-inventor-beat-the-high-cost-of-3d-printing/

by technologizer • 13 years ago

125 36 13 years ago

techland.time.com

axusgrad• 13 years ago

Contests are a great way to attract a lot of interest to neglected problems.

001sky• 13 years ago

This home-made filament dramatically improves the economics of 3D printing. For instance, producing 392 chess pieces in a particular color requires one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plastic. Buy one spool of mass-produced filament, and that will cost you about $50. Buy a kilogram of pellets and make your own filament, and the cost goes down to $10. Buy 25 kilograms of pellets in bulk, and you can print the chess pieces for just $5.

-- Seems to meet the "10x better" criterion.

Nice work.

Someone• 13 years ago

Maybe. What is the price of 25 kg of filament in bulk?

I know almost nothing about producing filament, but if I had to guess, I would say its price is high because of low demand. If demand goes up, competition will drive the price down.

simcop23873• 13 years ago

It's partly low demand (relatively speaking) and partly because the machines to make it have historically been on the expensive side (i've heard something like half a million or so). Then there's the time that it takes to run a batch of filament and all the other normal business issues there. It'll definitely come down but it'll likely only approach the range that has been hit with lyman's machine. The pellets have high demand and extremely high quantity (injection moulding). That being said, even when commercial costs come down to this realm they'll still likely have more consistent and higher quality filaments (longer runs tend to even out issues in the plastic).

bnegreve2• 13 years ago

Yep, you can get 9800 chess pieces for a total price of $49000. (392 per kg x 25kg x $5). Still a significant investment :)

brianobush• 13 years ago

minus the 980 errors :)

chongli• 13 years ago

$5 per 392 pieces, not $5 each. So that's 9800 pieces for $125.

simcop23873• 13 years ago

You should check your math there.

They talk about the filament ending up $5/kg. So the cost is $5/kg * 25 kg = $125.

392 pieces/kg * 25 kg = 9800 pieces.

So you end up with about 306 (9800/32 pieces) chess sets for $125. That's less than a dollar a set. I don't know what you'd need with that many sets but it really does change things.

unwind• 13 years ago

Based on the numbers for cost of pellets vs cost of filament, it seems reasonable for someone to simply integrate this and make a printer that takes pellets instead of filament.

The device shown doesn't look overly complicated, and I would guess/hope the "crucial core" parts cost even less than the competition's requirement since that was for the whole machine.

kefka5• 13 years ago

You would require a Bowden extruder to build a pellet-filament engine. There's no way a Mendel I2 or similar models could handle the inertial load on the Y and Z axis.

And the video shows rather slow extrusion speed. My printer tip velocity is about 2x faster.

Dont get me wrong: reduction of filament costs by a factor of 10 is AMAZING.

DannoHung• 13 years ago

My guess is that it'd be a bit of a pain to switch between filament colors like this.

Maybe when multi-head extruders become very common.

kefka5• 13 years ago

Not really. Just run maybe 50g of new material. You'll end up with blended colors, and then solid color of new material.

If you are really deadset on perfect color, you can take it apart and detail clean it.

HOWEVER, this is also a way to make new colors not purchasable: you can mix quantities of each color in a bucket, and then put the mixture in the hopper. Out comes new color. This is how the injection molded plastics companies do their products. In the drawings/contract, exact mixture is specified.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

For a number of reasons this isn't as useful as you might hope, many have been mentioned (the mass on the extruder head being perhaps the most killer)

That said it seems like it is fast enough that you could connect the filament coming out of it into a typical filament extruder head and use the slack available as a signal to turn on the filament maker or not.

That would mean you would always have "fresh" filament to work with, and in moist environments that can improve repeat ability since PLA especially doesn't "age" well in humid environments.

msds• 13 years ago

I actually have access to such a printer - but it's massive and can't really print objects smaller than a few inches. We've tried scaling the extruder down, but it seems that pellet/flake extruders just don't have the control and homogeneity required for high-resolution printing at small scales.

Here's some media coverage of our device: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2156557...

ohwp3• 13 years ago

Seems to me this method is patented. How are they going to sell these kits?

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastics_extrusion

fr0sty• 13 years ago

Care to quote any section of that page that mentions patents?

"Patent", "Patented", "Pat.", "USPTO", "Proprietary", or "Protected" do not appear in the body of the article.

Also, there is this: "The first thermoplastic extrusion was in 1935 by Paul Troester in Germany." Looks like a decent prior-art claim.

ohwp3• 13 years ago

This one for example: http://www.google.com/patents/US4118163

I know it won't be a problem when people use this at home, but Lulzbot is going to sell assembled versions. I hope they don't get in trouble for that.

kefka5• 13 years ago

We deal with your type fairly regularly over at hackaday and other discussion sites.

The Lyman extruder documents (including BOM and assembly and 3 view drawings) are published for free. The parts are easy to obtain.

How are you (the possible patent holder) going to stop individuals from sourcing the parts and building these machines?

The reprap machines are also, Im sure, violating multiple patents in the US. Go ahead and try to stop the international audience from furthering the science and art. I'll just use TOR and download the assembly drawings from evil foreign servers.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

"You wouldn't download a car, would you?"

A whole class of patent holders are about to get napstered. Once you can simulate just about any electronic board with a RasPi for $25 and make just about any plastic part on your 3d printer, what good will a patent even be?

I'm making popcorn.

ohwp3• 13 years ago

I was not talking about individuals but companies like Lulzbot who are going to sell them pre-assembled.

masonhensley• 13 years ago

The guys at makibox have been tinkering with this idea. I think it is on the back burner until they ship their printers. (per request of printer pre-orderers)

http://makibox.com/details/product/ramen_kit

samstave• 13 years ago

THis is awesome - the only modification which I think would make it better would be to have the filament loop back to a spool that is attached to and turned by the same motor that is pushing the material out.

In the video - he shows the filament being spooled across the room by a device with a separate power source. Make it a singular closed little process.

lancefisher• 13 years ago

So if you can make it at home so cheaply, why can't it be mass produced in a factory even more cheaply? It doesn't seem like shipping pellets would be much less expensive than shipping filament.

adventured• 13 years ago

It's because the demand for plastic pellets is radically larger than for plastic filament.

Since the filament side of things has been caught in a sea of change - where sudden demand swamps supply - companies making the filament are able to start and hold prices from a high point. This kind of event is common, and it usually just takes time + competition to bring prices down.

krschultz• 13 years ago

Great work, and if the spools continue to be $50 I definitely would want one. However I don't think the spools are $50 because they cost $50 to make, they probably cost $1 to make. It's the razors/blades or printer/ink cartridge business model. I'm sure all the 3D printing companies are making fat profits off the spools of plastics, and this will push those prices down a bit.

rorrr• 13 years ago

ABS pellets are $1000-2000 per ton ($0.45 - $0.91 per lb).

I'm surprised nobody is selling cheap spools in the $5/lb range.

EDIT:

Acutally, they do.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/542698056/Best_Quality_ABS...

Zuph• 13 years ago

Speaking from experience, Chinese plastic filament is almost always out-of-spec enough to mess up prints on today's 3D printers.

smoyer• 13 years ago

Interesting ... I've been playing around with the idea of having a hopper (mounted above the 3D printer) that fed pellets to the print head and used the same heater to extrude the filament right as it was being joined to the work-piece.

The two stage process is convenient for existing printers, but wouldn't it be nicer if new printers took pellets as their raw material?

joshuaheard• 13 years ago

I would like to see this technology built into existing 3d printers. I would also like to see 3d scanners built in. I envision a single device that will allow you to put in a model, have it scanned, then replicated using cheap plastic material. You could even used recycled plastic with a macro shredder.

How an 83-year-old inventor beat the high cost of 3D printing

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