DVICE: With a 3D printer, you can create anything you want by adding multiple layers of material one on top of another. With a 3D mill, you can create anything you want by removing multiple layers of material, one after another. It's the other half of your desktop DIY kit, and it's now affordable, more or less.
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Mini 3D mill is like a mini 3D printer, except the exact opposite
DVICE: With a 3D printer, you can create anything you want by adding multiple layers of material one on top of another. With a 3D mill, you can create anything you want by removing multiple layers of material, one after another. It's the other half of your desktop DIY kit, and it's now affordable, more or less.
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5 comments:
This is a cool small scale CNC mill but will the difference in resolution against 3D printers be enough to matter enough to have another tool. With all of the CNC equipment we are getting into resolutions where errors in the computer modeling are significant enough to far overshadow the resolution issues. If there are problems with resolution we can also fix it by hand faster than the CNC mill will finish it. Speed in CNC milling and in 3D printing seems to be the downfall of these machines at this time.
Although I don't necessarily think this is worth it as a personal purchase, it is a cool "little" concept. I'm sure there are still some flaws in the small version of this technology, but it is interesting to see how even formerly very large shop tools are becoming miniaturized for every day use. The availability of technology and ease of its use is increasing rapidly - I will be interested to see where both the small and large versions of products such as this end up ten to twenty years from today.
This is sweet. The article doesn't really say anything about the computer program. I'm curious how easy it is to use, what limitations it has, and if you can import files from other 3D programs to the printer as well. The use I thought of for this right away is that you could create things to cast, and then make a metal thing of it from the cast (sorry if that's not the correct way to describe it). I took a metalsmithing class and it would be awesome to design something on a computer program to be made out of metal, instead of carving something by hand out of wax (to then make a mold or whatever the correct terminology is)
CNC mills make a lot of sense on a small scale. I have seen CNC 3D printers extrude molten plastic to make small prototypes and objects on a layer-by-layer basis, but like the article mentions, the thickness of each layer is limited by the printer itself. Also, it seems to me that time would be saved by using subtractive building instead of additive building, since the device does not have to generate large solid areas that may be present in the model(s) being created. I would love to see something like this next to a MakerBot or other additive CNC tool and set them on a race to see which can produce the object more quickly.
The difference between a 3D Mill, 3D Printer seem to almost be too similar. Whether you are working from an additive process or subtractive, I agree that the time it takes is significantly longer than we can hope for, even though the outcome of the project is much greater than anything done by hand. I feel that you could create a subtractive or an additive process in either machine depending on how you work or manipulate your device. Maybe once I get my spare $1,000 I will waste it on a 3D mill...I will make all the little toys I want, very small ones. The size and cost ratio to CNC machines will hopefully greatly adjust in the future.
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