No more tedious snorkeling trips! Have the ocean brought to you!
Interesting. I don't see any secondary support material.
Don't know how long that run took but probably many hours, if you slow things down and let the plastic harden you can get away with a structure like that.
True. But that still limits your geometry abilities a bit. Think about if any of those branches had pointed down, for example.
At work we have an FDM machine to get prototypes for our plastic latches. It uses a PC/ABS material, and has a secondary support material that can be easily dissolved away in a hot chemical bath. It works really good for what it is, but it's a ten year old machine. Nowadays they are doing much more interesting things in materials, colors, finer layer thickness, better layer connection, and even multiple materials.
Heck, we just had a company called Incodema make us 3D printed rubberlike bellows using a Polyjet process, and it came out fantastic! Even though it was layered process, the final product (with no secondary operations) you'd never know it. And it stretched and behaved just like a real bellows.
Since we are an injection molding plant, we are looking into a new machine from Arburg that actually uses the plastic pellets that injection molding machines use to do the 3D printing. But it also has the issue of not using a secondary support material.
Topic: It's Time For GIFtrax! (Read 920553 times)
