There was a stretch of time I was looking at videos of budget gaming PC builds and they’d be like “How to build a gaming PC for $150” and a lot of them went like “Buy a used Optiplex for $120, max out its RAM for $30, then use this GTX 2080 I got from nvidia for free because I have two billion subscribers.”
Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?
Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.
Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?
Reddit: Well, I’m still tuning it for all my filaments. I’ve been through about 40kg, and I’ve got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.
Building a 3d printer is really its own hobby. You don’t build a 3d printer because you want to print stuff, you build one because you want something to tinker with
Yeah, I made nearly that mistake. Twice, actually. First with a monoprice, then a creality. I probably have more money in upgrades on my CR10s than I have in the purchase, and I still haven’t upgraded the board. I keep thinking I’ll fix it but I’ve resolved to strip a couple of parts and throw it away. My Prusa XL preorder came last month. I made one update to it (for better TPU performance), and printed one QoL add-on (nozzle wipers). That’s it. I’m done. It prints like a dream, multi-material supports are indistinguishable from magic, and even swapping nozzles is fairly quick and easy. Now I’m (almost) exclusively printing things for my other hobbies rather than worrying that something on my CR10s will fail or need re-tuning.
Yeah those communities are wild. Before I bought my own printer I thought 3D printing is mostly fixing your printer and buying better parts and bed leveling and tuning etc.
Wasn’t looking forward to it so I bought an off-the-shelf printer with minimal assembly from a “boring” Chinese brand - couldn’t be happier with it, it just prints without any hassle and I have no urge to switch firmwares or tinker with the printer itself instead of with the printed stuff. To each their own I guess.
(Still plugged in a raspberry pi for octoprint and did some initial calibration for the filament of course …)
There is no world in which that machine is under a million dollars.
Hear me out: what if you made it entirely from parts created by a larger CNC machine?
Self replicating CNC Machines. That’s not even a guy operating it, it’s 3 smaller CNC machines in a trench coat and hat
It would be very very impressive if your CNC machine can produce and assemble electric motors, wiring and circuit boards from raw materials. But then it would not be a CNC machine anymore.
Sure it could. A 5 axis CNC head could mill out the shape for a motor and be given a tool that spools out wire… It wouldn’t be easy, but it could build a motor with just that
It could also be given a head to solder circuit boards
CNC (computer numerical control) refers to the control systems rather than the act of milling materials, a 3D printer is a sub category of CNC. They can even use the same control boards.
You also usually process materials before putting them in - they’re good at detail work, but if you start with a block of steel you’re going to lose a fortune changing out expensive heads (and take forever). So it’s fair to assume you’re not using raw materials
These machines are absolutely under a million dollars. You can even buy used ones right now for pennies on the dollar because a shitload of American metal shops just went out of business.
Do it! There are tons of machines to be had, you don’t have to buy brand new!
Pennies on the dollar? I don’t necessarily doubt you, but where do I get that machine for less than 10 grand?
There’s a few on here that I saw for less than $40,000.
https://cncmachines.com/cnc-mill/for-sale/1
Edit: not that specific machine.
Ahhh just a turn of phrase. Not literally pennies on the dollar, but very cheap compared to new!
Literally, on CNCmachines.com they sell 5 axis milling machines for as low as 50K i’ve seen. There’s also tons of auctions on cnc machines due to all of the shops closing like I said.
Always buy used. https://www.allsurplus.com/
You see, there is this unwritten agreement between the creator and the viewer that they like stuff explained to them, but they don’t actually replicate anything shown in the video. At best, they half-arsedly order some materials and then never get to it.
Just ran into this like a week ago with a wood working video. “How to flatten a board without a planer!”. The whole premise was that planers are expensive, so here a little trick for hobbyist… The next scene was them using a router table jig that’s like 5x more expensive then any planer.
Just FYI, you can get a hand planer for pretty cheap. I see them at the thrift store all the time for like $1.
So have you found a solution for that? I’ve also run into the exact problem when i tried to flatten a board and all i can do after getting disappointed is using hand planner/electric hand planner 🤣
A possible solution in a pinch is to get an already flat surface, ideally larger than your board. Cover it in something that will transfer (ink, paint, toner etc). Rub the face of the board you want to flatten across your flat surface**. The** transfer substance will pass onto the high spot in your board. Scrape, chissle or sand the high spots down slightly.
Repeat this until most of your board is marked by the transfer substance. Your board will be mostly flat (or at least as flat as the reference surface).
This technique is used in metal work, but it’s labour intensive. For woodwork to achieve sufficient flatness planes are quicker and produce a better surface finish. But if you don’t have any large ones, this method might work if your desperate and don’t want to buy new tools.
For a less accurate flatness. Place the board on the flat surface and push in the board to fell the points in contact with the flat surface. Then take those parts down.
There’s a pretty easy solution if you have a decent plunging router with a good flattening bit head.
I set up two 2x6" along the length of my board I want to flatten, and then made a jig box for my router. The jig box is able to slide back and forth while resting across the 2x6, using the depth guide to keep the cuts at a level depth as you do your pass overs.
That machine costs well over $381k. We had a much smaller 3 axis lathe installed in the machine shop I worked in during my early 20’s and it was $3M. That was 25 years ago, so it probably costs infinity dollars now, given recent inflation. Hell, you probably can’t even buy them now, just lease them on a subscription for eleventy bajillion dollars per year.
Or, maybe you can still buy it. It still runs! Maybe it only costs $100,000 now!
…but there’s very specific high-impact parts that are no longer made and the since-abandoned software only works on Win95 with a proper license and some kind of bizarrely proprietary serial port connection…
