Hi from a man who makes 3d printed model trains

Take some time to introduce yourself!
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tebee
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Oct 16, 2014 10:56 am
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Hi from a man who makes 3d printed model trains

Postby tebee » Thu Oct 30, 2014 3:39 am

Hi - been lurking on here for a few weeks and I thought I'd better get around to introducing myself.

I make 3d printed model trains for a living, I currently use Shapeways to make these and sell them both there and on Ebay.

See here for what I do -
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/tebee

I'm here because I'm looking at starting to make them myself,both to gain more control of the process and to produce better quality models at an affordable price. I'm fairly sure none of the commercial machines will do what I want at a price I can afford, both in terms of capital investment and running costs.

So I'm looking at taking one of the open source SLA machines and modify it to my requirements to be able to produce things at least semi-reliably in a small scale production environment. I'm not 100% sure that is achievable yet, so this is still my research phase, looking here at what other people are doing and achieving. The machine I'm favouring as my starting point is the mUVe DLP - I'm a natural tinker and love understanding how things work then trying to make them work better!

I come from a computer programming background - I started off more years ago than I care to remember as an IBM 360 Assembler applications programmer, but have done all sorts of programming, technical support and consultancy jobs over the years. I've worked almost exclusively as a freelancer - I'm too eccentric to make a good employee.

I'm English with a Chinese wife, but divide my time between France and Thailand with occasional forays to both our homelands.

Tom

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James
Posts: 169
Joined: Mon Dec 02, 2013 1:56 am
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Re: Hi from a man who makes 3d printed model trains

Postby James » Sun Apr 12, 2015 2:16 pm

Hi Tom,

It's James from the Shapeways forum. I've been away from this forum for a few months as I had to tend to other matters. Good to see you here though! You are definitely in the right place if you want to build your own machine or make customizations of an existing machine.

"I'm too eccentric to make a good employee." DING DING DING! That's me too! HAHA! :D

I think you can get SLA to work for your creations, but you'll need to make modifications to account for supports. I too am designing machines to lower the cost of having to hire printers to do the prints I need.

If you cannot get SLA to work because of problems with supports, and you do enough volume in sales, perhaps you could lease a nice ProJet from 3D Systems.

As for SLS, hmmmm... I don't know. I wonder how much resolution one can squeeze out of an SLS machine. I'd be fun to work in this area and investigate the possibilities.

Let us know how you are progressing with your endeavors. That is, if you haven't already in the other parts of Build Your Own SLA/SLS forums. I'm just now looking around after being away for quite a while.
I prefer to know nothing about everything rather than everything about nothing. :)


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