- Joined
- May 20, 2013
- Messages
- 9
I design products and we use all kinds of rapid prototyping. Ive had parts made by almost everything available. Some of the best lately have been what we call fast casting where a wax is made by either fdm or a type of 3d printing, then investment cast. We can get really nice parts done like this in about a week. I mostly design climbing and ski gear these days and was testing some climbing gear with parts cast this way yesterday on the rocks, not usually possible with most rp stuff.(I do back things up in case of a failure, as a fall from a hundred feet or so usually hurts) I was using grips I designed that were 3d printed and some machined aluminum parts too. Pretty amazing how quickly we can get to a useable prototype these days.
Where most RP stuff is great for part fitting and modeling it's rarely very strong, but its getting better pretty quickly. We have lots of plastic parts CNC'd from the real materials so we can test prototypes in the real world. We're kind unusual that way but for our needs there has to be a balance between testable parts and models.
There are some bicycle dropouts on the market now that are laser sintered, and I think that's where the real breakthroughs will happen. The cutting egde of that is making parts that have better porosity than castings.
I started designing cars in about 1990 and back then, we had the most sophisticated stuff there was. Intrestingly, I'm from the last generation that ever learned to design car bodies by hand using body drafting.
Everything is done on a computer now and it can be faster, but not always.
Now my laptop is more powerful than the $250K Silicon Graphics computer I had then. The speed that the technology is accelerating right now is pretty amazing.
Where most RP stuff is great for part fitting and modeling it's rarely very strong, but its getting better pretty quickly. We have lots of plastic parts CNC'd from the real materials so we can test prototypes in the real world. We're kind unusual that way but for our needs there has to be a balance between testable parts and models.
There are some bicycle dropouts on the market now that are laser sintered, and I think that's where the real breakthroughs will happen. The cutting egde of that is making parts that have better porosity than castings.
I started designing cars in about 1990 and back then, we had the most sophisticated stuff there was. Intrestingly, I'm from the last generation that ever learned to design car bodies by hand using body drafting.
Everything is done on a computer now and it can be faster, but not always.
Now my laptop is more powerful than the $250K Silicon Graphics computer I had then. The speed that the technology is accelerating right now is pretty amazing.