On 02/05/2014 03:34 PM, scott wrote:
>> Does anybody really use 3D printers much? I mean, I can imagine there
>> are products for which this might be really useful, but if you're just
>> making (for example) plastic sandwich boxes, do you really need to
>> prototype that?
>
> So you'd be confident enough that the sandwich box hinge and latching
> mechanism was going to work properly and not snap off, and that it would
> feel right, and the MD is not going to complain the box feels too
> flimsy, just by looking at CAD data on your screen and perhaps some
> simulations that tell you the stiffness is X N/mm at certain points and
> you need X N of force to open the latch?

Given that a 3D prototype will be made of a totally different material 
with totally different properties, I'm not sure how having a prototype 
lets you check this.

> FWIW I've *never* seen tooling get
> made exactly right first time, there is *always* something that needs to
> be fixed or changed

Really? I find that quite surprising. (Then again, I don't work in this 
industry.) I had assumed that by now, making something trivial like a 
cube-shaped box would be easy. Of course, if you're making something 
complicated like the casing for a camera or something, that seems much 
harder to get right...

>> Also: I was given to believe that 3D printed objects have approximately
>> the structural rigidity of jellybaby.
>
> Did you miss the story a while back of the guy who made a functional
> *gun* from 3D printed parts? The whole point of professional 3D printed
> parts is that they match the performance of the real moulded plastic.
> FWIW here we put butanone at 6 bar into 3D printed parts without issue.

That's impressive, given that even "real moulded plastic" isn't strong 
enough to make a gun... They're made out of metal for a reason, after all.

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