New machine day Renishaw AM-250 DMLM

Finally after three months shes arrived. We didn't realize how much work it is to prepare for this thing. Static resistant floors, extra AC units with dehumidifiers (seems Titanium and Aluminum powder is quite explosive).

Showoff.





I looked at the first picture and went "Ok... but what is it?" until I got to the second picture. Freaking cool. You get all the fun toys.

I was expecting something much bigger but didn't realize it only ways 1000 pounds and is single phase. Had the room all wired 3 Phase. oh well, plenty of juice for something else.

g-coder05 said:

I was expecting something much bigger but didn't realize it only ways 1000 pounds and is single phase. Had the room all wired 3 Phase. oh well, plenty of juice for something else.

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When you get it up and running, I would totally love to hear how well it actually works in practice.

Someone I know in passing is bringing a printed titanium bike part to market, mostly as an experiment/exploration of the technology's suitability to production in it's current state. He has gone through a LOT of bullshit, and it is so far away from being easy to make parts, it's not even funny. Even he admits that he would have been better off with a 5 axis mill and a Raptor fixture about 2 print iterations into the project.

gkoenig said:

Someone I know in passing is bringing a printed titanium bike part to market...

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Now I truly believe you're in Portland! Not to derail the thread, but what's the part?

Wow! I could not even fathom what a Ti printed bike would cost. This machine only has 250X250X300mm travel and was $780,000.00. I don't even know of a DMLM or DMLS large enough to do a full frame.

g-coder05 said:

Wow! I could not even fathom what a Ti printed bike would cost. This machine only has 250X250X300mm travel and was $780,000.00. I don't even know of a DMLM or DMLS large enough to do a full frame.

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To be fair, this one's sectional: Empire's 3D Printed MX6-R > News > Empire Cycles > Empire Cycles Ltd

But gkoenig did say bike part, not bike frame.

Hey G-coder, what are you guys planning to make with this? A research lab in our area put in for a big Canadian research grant for one of these and although the official announcement hasn't happened yet, I'm hoping to hear later this week on the DL if it looks promising. I'm not sure what I'd do if I had local access to one but I would be interested if you could do maybe complex optical parts on it in aluminum.

But gkoenig did say bike part, not bike frame.

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Yeah, was an oversight on my part.

[Hey G-coder, what are you guys planning to make with this?/QUOTE]

Originally it was part of our marketing as we ordered the first Haas 5 Axis in China and they where just to compliment each other with a pallet system to do finish machining on the printed prototype parts.

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Cool. Sadly I found out my colleague didn't get his funding so we won't have one to mess around with locally in the immediate future. Show us pics when you get it running anyway....

Atomkinder said:

Now I truly believe you're in Portland! Not to derail the thread, but what's the part?

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Spencer is, ironically, not in Portland... He's a NYC industrial designer. His part is a 3D printed titanium seat topper dingus and he wrote up the whole experience as a 3 part series:

3D Printing Titanium (Part 1) - 3D Printing Industry

Anyone who actually uses a 3D printer realizes that there is way too much hype about how amazing it is for usable parts.

jid2 said:

Anyone who actually uses a 3D printer realizes that there is way too much hype about how amazing it is for usable parts.

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I think you're an idiot!

I was speaking with Steve (the marketing manager for Renishaw) recently and one of their customers is saving around 100 kg (IIRC) per aircraft frame by 3D printing the tray table brackets as opposed to conventionally subtractive manufacturing them. The unique thing about 3D printing is that the parts can be made with a honeycomb internal structure (just as an example), but still be one piece. That would be impossible to do with conventional machining without, say, machining and welding two pieces back together, and even then the machining would be quite time consuming in titanium.

To the OP, I'm curious as to how much your titanium powder is costing you and how much argon you finish up using with each build cycle?

Weirdly enough I actually had an (indirect) positive useful experience with 3D printing - in a niche case.

The application was making flasks for aluminum parts to be cast - impellors for oil pumps among other things - that went on race engines that were, shall we say, immature. Meaning we had very small batches poured, and changed the design every engine iteration (like every few weeks) and the savings on patterns was huge, and the time savings alone made it worthwhile. (well, the whole project was a botch in the end, but....) This was a part that would have taken weeks and weeks to machine, which is why they're general cast.

I think the whole topic has gotten silly, but that hides some useful reality. Just like CNC doesn't magically solve all problems (though it magically solves a lot of them), or EDM is uncompetitive or downright useless for many tasks but the absolute bees knees for the things it excels at. I expect 3D printing will turn out to be like EDM - the dominate way, the only way, to do some tasks, but uneconomic for many others.

I will be quite interested to hear of G-coder05's experiences going forward - are there steady customers? Are any of them NOT aerospace? Do any parts end up in production, or are they all for development?

Interesting. I think the main limitation in 3D printing at the moment is all the hype that's put out there by the the general media and lapped up by the ignorant or stupid.. The problem is then these bozos compare that manufacturing technique with some they're familiar with and start heaving crap on 3D printing. 3D printing, even the best, isn't a 5 axis VMC, accept that and move on, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have serious uses, even cheap FDM printers. That's why I'm hoping some of the idiots will abandon this forum and leave it for serious discussion about what can and can't be done with this technology. Only this morning I read an article in Modern Machine Shop magazine of a commercial organisation that prints in FDM, with 100 printers run by a single operator. Their target market is machine shops etc as a way to do their grunt work so expensive precision machines in a business are freed up to do what they're designed to do instead of just making crap to service a job.

I haven't tried using a 3D print as a pattern but have definitely heard of both that and lost PLA investment casting. It makes sense to use the technology in cases like yours where it's changing frequently, and infinitely better than lost foam casting. I'd like to give it a try at some stage just to see how it goes. This is exactly the type of use I'd like to see people put up here to spark the imagination on what can (maybe easily) be done that we wouldn't have even thought of before.

At a trade show I saw some medical educational models being 3D printed on a Stratasys production printer and I think medicine in general is another area that doesn't mind big price tags if the results are worth it. Many of the patents for the various 3D print technologies are expiring now and/or being purchased and released into the wild, as Autodesk just did with SLA. In my opinion much of the real interesting development is happening in the open-source community with inexpensive SLA printers and goop available now, that will be an interesting area to keep an eye on over the next year or two. I believe the patent on some of the laser based sintering/melting technologies has just expired, and with relatively high power lasers and focussing mechanisms available cheaply, it should be good to see what some of the geeks come up with there. The cycle seems to be a closed source to invent the technology, it finds its way to open source on patent expiry and they push the envelope but it's all a bit geeky, then various companies pick up the ball and run with it, close it off again but make it much more user friendly.

Another "nice" that seems like to go some where is single sided tooling for "soft" forming of sheet metal. As in making tools for use in machines like this: Beckwood Press Manufactures Triform Forming Solutions - Beckwood Press Company

It's another case where the thing the 3d printer makes isn't the part - it's some kind of tool used to make the part....

gkoenig said:

Spencer is, ironically, not in Portland... He's a NYC industrial designer. His part is a 3D printed titanium seat topper dingus and he wrote up the whole experience as a 3 part series:

3D Printing Titanium (Part 1) - 3D Printing Industry

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This is one of the best descriptions of what it is really like to print a part. Your friend did a nice job.

jid2 said:

Anyone who actually uses a 3D printer realizes that there is way too much hype about how amazing it is for usable parts.

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Tell that to Spacex.

SpaceX Launches 3D-Printed Part to Space, Creates Printed Engine Chamber | SpaceX

No way - it is awesome.