Hackaday: There’s an old joke about the Thermos bottle that keeps things hot and cold, so someone loaded it with soup and ice cream. That joke is a little close to home when it comes to FDM 3D printers.
You want to melt plastic, of course, or things won’t print, so you need heat. But if the plastic filament gets hot too early, it will get soft, expand, and jam.
2 comments:
I’ve heard about the difficulty of 3D printing, as in I’ve seen people showing off things they printed as they say things like “third try” or “seventh try” and I always assumed the issues came from mistakes made by the artists who designed the print. Before reading this I never considered that perhaps the technology is not perfect as it is so incredibly new, and they are still figuring out the details so they can print more and print faster in the future. I think the water cooling is very cool and high tech and I’m hopeful that it will make 3D printing way more practical and fast so we can start building big and interesting things like houses and stuff. However, scaling this process up worries me as how much plastic would that be? Can we print with other hardening materials like concrete or perhaps some sort of mortar/brick combination?
3D printers are such an incredible invention and it has been wild to see the evolution of technology like this in real time. I remember back in middle school my technology program at school invested and bought one of the first 3D printers so that kids in the tech class could experiment with designs on tinker cad. Yet now, in only five years, my 12-year-old little brother was able to save up birthday money for a personal 3D Printer. While I don’t know the exact model of printer he has, I’ve used it quite a bit to print out little figures and model heads, and the level of quality is incredible for how relatively cheap it was. There is so much capable with 3D printers, and I absolutely love that they are becoming way more affordable for everyday people to use. While this video feels very click bait esc, I actually thought it was pretty informative in showing how incredibly advanced cheaper 3D printers are when compared with factory grade precision quality ones. I definitely at some point would like to invest in a 3D printer, because the capabilities with such a device are infinite. Recently I’ve been experimenting more and more with AutoCAD and Photoshop and I would definitely like to expand my capabilities in 3D design in programs like Tinkercad.
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