Hi from a man who makes 3d printed model trains
Posted: 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
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