Who has a large scale 3D Printer?  Cost to print 10in cylinder?........... - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Smokey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2017, 11:18:04 pm
content: I'm just curious about how much it would cost to have a 10in diameter x 4in height cylinder printed in PLA? Not sure how much the inner detail matters or if it's just priced on volume but there are a bunch of radial slots in the wheel with about a 1in hole down the middle.And yes I know Shapeways can probably give a quote, but I'm not done with the design of the thing yet, plus I absolutely don't need super high quality from professional machines. Desktop would be more than adequate.Edit to say infill can be low. Like 15%

author: Smokey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 02:47:57 am
content: I'm mostly just looking for a ball park number here.$50? $100? $300? More?

author: AlessandroAU
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 02:59:26 am
content: Much easier to get a machine shop to machine this out of some sewer pipe or similar.Edit: Sorry I thought that this was a thin shell type part.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 05:04:19 am
content: I doubt anybody could give you any sort of useful estimate based on that description.For raw material. PLA starts about $25US/KG for cheap stuff.If you feed the STL into cura it would spit out a lineal amount of filament used, weight and estimated time to print (which is usually quite underestimated)Example based on your measurements and what I imagine you meant... (no I don't have a printer this big, just an example), 25% infill 0.32m layer height, with a 0.4mm nozzle, you're looking over 1 kilo of filament, about 2 days solid printing, and 350 odd meters.

author: Smokey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 06:07:22 am
content: I know my details suck. I'm still working on the part. You have the right idea through. More radial slots and the hole in the middle is much bigger at like 4 inches now.I just checked Cura, and it's saying 88 hours print time and 1.8kg of PLA.Do people typically charge by the hour of machine time?

author: kaz911
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 07:54:08 am
content: There is always 3DHubs - that is where you can get prints from a range of machines from desktop to pro. It is a hub where anyone with a 3D printer can sign up.Many are done by "garage printers" - so often it is hobby guys doing it - so usually cheaper than Shapeways. But with such a big print - there is always a risk of layers splitting. So it is a high risk model to print dependent on the printer.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 09:36:31 am
content: Quote from: Smokey on March 20, 2017, 11:18:04 pmA few years ago I built my own machine from a kitset (an earlier iteration of this one) with enough interior volume to print that (in fact it was about 300x300x300).But it's extremely difficult to actually print something that big, because of shrinkage as the object cools, and subsequent warping, causing the current top surface to no longer be dead flat, and then the print head crashes into it. Which is not good.My solution was to use a sheet of window glass as the print surface, and spray it with hairspray just before starting printing. The object being printed was then stuck down so well that you could not pry it off at all! I'd pop them off by putting the sheet of glass, with the printed object, in the freezer. 15 or 20 minutes later it would be nicely and cleanly popped off.This is probably the largest thing I printed:http://hoult.org/bruce/spanner.jpgIt was to undo a large plastic nut on the bottom of a toilet cistern. I could not find any commercially available spanner that would come anywhere near doing the job. This one worked great! Needed only a strip of metal (from an old baked bean can) and a couple of screws to stop the jaws opening once it was in place (slotted over the pipe and then slid into position over the nut).A friend and I designed and made something with a design a bit similar to what you want, but smaller.http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10466You make all these things heavily honey-combed, so they use less material than you'd think, but they're still strong. For the spanner I used a square grid "honeycomb" not hexagonal, to let the print head run in straight lines at high speed. It still took about two hours to print. The Momo boss was more like three hours, I think, though that was on a smaller older machine (original Makerbot).

author: Smokey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2017, 06:48:00 pm
content: Cool. I have a currently out of commission Monoprice mp select mini that I was using the glass bed+hairspray for before it broke. That worked really well.Now the question comes down to, would it cost more to have the thing printed by someone or to get a large scale kit. The FT-5 kit is only $500. I'm in no hurry, so that's a plus on the kit side.Seems like a large scale kit people like:https://folgertech.com/products/folger-tech-ft-5-large-scale-3d-printer-kit