Fab@home
January 22nd, 2007 by c4ck4 | 
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Rapid Prototyping or 3D printers as they are sometimes called is relatively new technology. It involves taking a 3D model and through various means ‘printing’ that item into a physical 3D object. This is used in prototyping for all sorts of products that will eventually be made with injection molding and other processes. For anybody that does 3D modeling as a hobby or professionally such as myself, this is the ultimate dream. The ability to make a statuette or toy out of something you designed and created digitally is very exciting.
The problem is that these machines typically cost tens of thousands of dollars and are expensive to operate. There are a few services online that will do the prototyping for you, but these can be fairly expensive as well and have limitations. The cheapest and most flexible service that I’ve found is http://3darttopart.com/. They accept a wider variety of file formats than most and their pricing is cheaper than most as well.
Hod Lipson and Evan Malone are working a project called Fab@home. Their goal is to get this technology cheap enough to get it into the hands of the common computer user. They are hoping that this type of technology will be used in the future where people can manufacture everyday objects in their homes rather than having to buy replacements or throw things away. They made a wiki of all the information they provide including plans, parts lists and vendors to buy from. It comes out to a total of around $2500 USD using the cheapest manufacturers they can currently find. This puts it well within the range of the serious hobbyist to manufacture items at home. Below is a video that shows the fabber Model 1 in action making a silicone rubber squeeze bulb. The quality isn’t great however, there is a larger version at their site. It is 16mb though so you may just want to check out the youTube version below.
If you find fab@home impressive you might also want to take at look at the RepRap project out of the University of Bath in the UK…
http://reprap.org
Their soon-to-be released machine is also open source, has a proper plastics extruder presently qualified for polycapralactone which can make usuable, hard objects. Whereas the fab@home machine costs $2,400 for parts, the RepRap Darwin is on track to cost no more than $400.
A spinoff of the RepRap project, Tommelise, is focussed on the American parts environment and uses somewhat different technology and a different control strategy. It’s also an open source specification will let anybody with a few hand tools and primitive woodworking skills bootstrap themselves into 3D fabrication for about $150. Tommelise’s extruder is qualified for polycapralactone and is presently being qualified as well for both high density polypropylene (HDPE, the stuff your plastic cutting board is made of) and polypropylene (HPP, the stuff your coffee maker and plastic electric kettle is made of). You can keep an eye on the Tommelise project at…
http://3dReplicators.com
Have fun!
Thanks a lot for the information. Those projects are also very interesting. I’m glad to see more than one project working on home fabrication at a budget price.