Hackaday: Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire or hot air, thermoplastics like PLA can be further tweaked with a similar method.
2 comments:
I hope this is a super cool technique that can be used to further the limits of what a personal 3D printer is able to accomplish. I think what makes 3D printers already so cool and special is the ability to pretty much make whatever you were able to design to an extremely high precision level. I do think that because of how 3D printers fundamentally work there are still certain things that are very difficult to achieve, especially if you're trying to avoid using supports. I think this idea of thermoforming is just taking the fundamental concepts of 3D printing and really pushing them and expanding the way we use 3D printers. I know something I was experimenting with for a while is melting down wasted filament and trying to turn that into usable new filament by using a heat gun and I think this is a super similar concept. I definitely think it would be cool to see how printing a mold and a thin piece and then heating up the thin piece before putting it in the 3D printed mold could push the shapes we are able to make.
This seems obvious, but I am realizing I don’t think I have ever heard of someone modifying the shape of 3d prints after printing before! I have heard of sanding the prints in order to get a better surface finish and installing heat-set threaded inserts in order to add hardware to the print, but never manipulating the entire print. While this article suggested the advantage of quicker print times, I am not sure how advantageous that actually is. In my mind the whole point of 3d printing is to figure out exactly how something is going to fit together, and get a 3d object that is going to fit exactly how you need it straight off the print bed. If you ned to open up CAD software anyway to get your point, there is no point in not fully modeling the object and drawing everything. That being said, I did appreciate this idea, and do think it might be helpful for some projects if a print is not quite the right shape and you need to coax it just a little bit.
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