Stratasys and Dimension machines

Hi,

Two days ago I visited an exhibition on injection molding machines where there was a stand for Stratasys and Dimension too. I was amazed by their speed as my reprap is far slower :-)) No worries, we will catch up...

By the way, anyone knows if its possible to use different materials from ABS, PC and PPS with Stratasys and Dimension machines? I wonder what would happen if I had a 2 mm diameter filament (lets say caprolactones) and try to extrude it on these machines... Does anyone have any experiences regarding these topics or tried it at all? Is it at all possible to change temp and extrusion speed data in their software?

Adam

You are limited to ABS and they "chip" there spools so would be very difficult to try another material. I'm not 100% sure but think you can't change any parameters you give it an STL it gives you a part

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Ian
[www.bitsfrombytes.com]

Stratasys voids your warranty if you try things like that. I heard a lot of complaints from their customers about their doing that to facilitate their price fixing the filament their machines use at about $30/in^3.

For what its worth, I know that the chip they use is a DS2433 4kb 1 wire EEPROM. Drives my engineering teacher crazy that they charge so much for the filament.

It drives all their customers crazy that they do that. They're as bad in that regard as HP are with what they charge for ink in their printer cartridges.

Of course, you could rip out all the control hardware, install your own filament spool and nail in a couple of arduinos...

Warranty shmarranty.

I've been wondering how they'd achieve the speed.
Anyone who's seen a stratsys up close, yes I know it's built in an oven, but I'm wondering, does the thing pressurize?
Would that even make a difference? Will ambient pressure effect the fluidity of the plastic?

Ambient pressure does not affect the fluidity according to my knowledge. When I was at the tradefair where I saw the machines I asked the same thing and they said the envelope is not pressurized. Only the temp is what they change in the envelope which is important for final precision.

Then perhaps they use some solvent?
Does the thing outgas? Is the filament different in some way from the final plastic? I could see mixing the stuff with a softener that'd cook off during the heating. Perhaps blend the stuff with paint thinner and pull a filament from that?

Sort of like why you add salt to water when cooking.

Hi Sean,

i tried with solving ABS-powder in Acetone what makes a paste, which can be dispensed at room-temp and dries to nearly 70%-strong ABS.

But when heating, the evaporating Acetone makes bulbs and foamy areas, so it should be a problem embedding 'normal' solvents.

Maybe you can apply some not evaporating additives for better adhesion, but this would be an internal 'mystery' ...

Viktor

do you guys know if stratasys ever tried to offer some material with flexible characteristics.
I d like to print with thermo-plastic-elastomers. any references with that material?

cheers
phil

Yes, elastomers have certainly been done on Stratasys machines. My own FDM 1600 predates this, but the FDM 1650 was able to run the "E20" elastomer (as well as a specific support material for E20). I'm guessing that this was a direct outgrowth of professor Jan Helge Bøhn's research at Virginia Tech: [www-rp.me.vt.edu]

As far as older comments go with regards to chipping spools, that's only for newer machines - the old FDMs had no such limitations, and I can feed my FDM 1600 kitty litter if I could figure out how to turn it into filament. As such, there were a lot of papers in the late 90s that cleverly hacked the underlying hardware, but you don't see that anymore. Of course, my FDM 1600 runs at a snail's pace in comparison to a RepRap...

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[haveblue.org]