Hi EDES 210! Thanks for joining me once again for an exciting new project in this class! It has been a while since my last project, but this time I’ve been experimenting with a completely new technique involving two types of 3D printing!
Given that 3D printing is relatively straightforward and simple, I will try my best to keep my post short and concise! For this particular assignment, we were tasked with printing an “impossible” object using at least two different types of 3D printing. With this in mind, I knew exactly what to do and that I really wanted to print using the Bambu Lab Carbon 3D printer (one that I’m already familiar with) and the FormLabs printer (one that I have no experience with)!
Shortly after picking my 3D object on Thingiverse, I immediately sent the print over to the first available Bambu Lab Carbon 3D printer! Of course, we needed to print more than one so I duplicated the object and decided to print three at a time for maximum time efficiency! To my surprise, these prints took less than two hours and turned out better than I expected (shown below)!
As you can see above, I made the decision to print a sphere within a cube which is usually not able to be achieved through injection molding and other manufacturing techniques! All three of these individual cube shapes had perfect layer adhesion and very few supports that needed to be removed!
I wasn’t done yet since I still wanted to try something new by printing the same object using the FormLabs printer instead! While I definitely expected this printing technique to be much more labor-intensive, I was genuinely surprised by how easy each of the additional steps were (despite the slightly longer wait time)! Sending the 3D object to the printer was just as simple as the prior technique, however, removal of the completed prints (after three hours) required me to wash the two cubes for around 30 minutes in a dedicated machine then transfer them to another box that would entirely cure the two resin 3D prints! Despite all of this, the results truly speak for themselves!
Having never used this kind of 3D printing before, it was surprising for me to see no individual layers and a clear 3D print! Below are all of my completed prints lined up after I carefully removed all of the supports and inspected each one of them for quality!
Now we move to the overall cost breakdown for this project:
Materials: The PLA filament costs around $20 per roll (from Bambu Lab), while generic resin filament costs around $45 per container, which equals to around $65 (assuming you use brand new filament)
Labor: Student employment is around $15 per hour and this project took around 2 hours, which equals to around $30
Tools: The Bambu Lab Carbon 3D printer with the automatic filament system costs around $1099 (from Bambu Lab), while the FormLabs 3D printer including the two additional processing machines costs around $1999, which equals to around $3100
This is definitely quite an expensive project if you only account for making these five specific 3D prints, but this is not a realistic assumption given the amount of stuff you could print over the long run!
Thank you for reading my post and below is a picture of my workspace!
