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3D Printing


steve_b_wales
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Sintered Nylon (SLS) is very strong but the cost would be prohibitive in this case due to the way the price is calculated. It would then need to be dyed yellow - not impossible to do but adds to the cost. 3D printing with FDM (which is what most domestic machines are) is cheaper but the finish and strength are not as good. Range rules say they need to be yellow and I don't have that colour anyway.

 

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I bought a Wanhao i3 Duplicator Plus, it was about £200 but you can get the parts and the support. They're quite customisable too but it's a steep learning curve.

To design your own parts, which I recommend, I'd suggest you learn to use OpenSCAD - again, a steep learning curve but once you have your model constructed, making minor tweaks is very simple. More complex programmes like AutoCAD may give you a quicker initial result but to make a minor tweak can be very time consuming.

For example, if you have a simple solid block with a circular hole through it. In both programmes you tell it to draw the box and to produce the hole, you tell it to draw a cylinder and subtract it (there are other ways in AutoCAD but the principle is the same). Once this is done should you desire to move the hole slightly, in AutoCAD you'd have to draw another cylinder to fill it in and then draw a third cylinder to subtract again. In OpenSCAD you can just change the positioning parameters of the first cylinder. It also has the advantage of being free and the file sizes are tiny (roughly 1% of the AutoCAD equivalent). It can also do things AutoCAD can't do, like scale an object and stretching it on different axes (AutoCAD can only scale uniformly). It's also trivially easy to engrave text into objects, something the Mac version of AutoCAD can't do either!

 

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Edited by spandit
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  • 8 months later...

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