83-Year-Old Inventor Wins $40,000 3D Printing Competition 146
harrymcc writes "The Desktop Factory Competition was a contest to create an open-source design for a low-cost machine capable of turning cheap plastic pellets into the filament used by 3D printers, with a prize of $40,000. The winner is being announced today — and he was born during the Hoover administration. I interviewed 83-year-old retiree Hugh Lyman — a proud member of the maker movement — for a story over at TIME.com. From the article: 'Lyman describes himself as an “undergraduate engineer” — he studied engineering from 1948-1953 at the University of Utah, but didn’t earn a degree. Though he holds eight patents, he says he’s “not educated enough to be able to do calculations of torque and so forth.” So implementing his contest entry “was trial and error. I tinkered with it and used common sense.”'"
Trial & Error Works (Score:5, Informative)
Often better than calculations. It works, because of the assumptions often needed to do calculations are wrong. I've seen a guy spend an inordinate amount of time doing calculations and what not, and then have things still not work. go back make more calculations and wash rinse repeat. He didn't understand the problem.
Meanwhile an old timer looked and figured out the issue and had it fixed in about ten minutes.
Granted, this is just a single example, and not every case is like this.
Re:Recycling ABS? (Score:4, Informative)
Thermoplastics tend to degrade slightly each time they're processed, generally losing strength. In industry regrind is mixed with virgin material before reuse. Most polymer manufacturers suggest maximum regrind levels on their datasheets. Usually it's 25-50%, but for non critical applications you can happily use 100% regrind.
Re:Combustion plate (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Combustion plate (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Which is the best 3d printer? (Score:5, Informative)
I am interested in buying a 3D printer. Does anyone have experience / recommendations? The cheapest I have seen is $500 at http://store.solidoodle.com/ [solidoodle.com] but I'm curious if it is worth spending more for a 'higher quality' printer.
Figure out what you want to print. There's a fairly large variation in build area, so if you're wanting to print stuff the size of textbooks you're going to want a larger printer. Likewise, most extrusion printers have a minimum print resolution in the 0.5mm or thereabouts area, so if you want fine detail you may be wasting your money on an extrusion-type printer. Printers with better resolution are usually photolithography-based and an order of magnitude more expensive, at which point a commercial print service like shapeways seems a lot more attractive.
With any extrusion-type printer, I think the most important item is that it's popular, because you're going to spend time debugging and adjusting and generally fussing around with it; if you get a snazzy brand-new design you're the beta tester. If you get something that has three years of hundreds of people working with it, all the problems you can encounter have already been encountered and dealt with.
If you want to get more printer for less money you can build it yourself: there are a variety of plans where you buy a printed set of parts, source all the structural parts yourself, and make your own. What I said above about finding one where design and implementation issues are well-known and there's a support community in place goes double for this option.
I strongly recommend that you only start down the 3d printer path if you have projects for which you already have need for printed items; if you get one just because it's the hip thing to do for geeks, you're likely to be wasting your money. With that said, once you have one, you suddenly start printing a whole lot of things you never thought you would, because you can: I have friends who print live animal traps, plumbing parts, and light bulb fixture components now that they have 3d printers.