3D Printing in the Woodshop?

[johnny means]

So I'm toying around with this thing. I'm already seeing applications for prototyping hardware, fixtures, and joinery, as well as miniature models. Anyone else applying this technology to "traditional" shop work?

[David Buchhauser]

I have been using a small 3d printer for several months now for prototyping and making useful parts. The most recent parts I made were some replacement drawer slide mounting brackets for a friend who said the factory replacement parts were no longer available. I don't know the brand of the slides, but the original parts were plastic and the replacement parts we made from PLA. We modeled them in Fusion 360. Here are some images showing the front and rear of the bracket.
David

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[Steven Cooper2]

I have made dozens of dust collection adapters for my shop from 1.5 inch to 6 inch.

Petg is my favorite practical material.

Also done some knife sharpening jigs, belt guards, work box covers, positioning jigs... my list goes on and on.

I also have done a couple drawer slide mounts.

So my work has been in fusion 360, but it helps being a mechanical engineer for the unique stuff. I'm also that guy that 3d prints all of the things at work...

Thingiverse and the net have all sorts of useful stuff. Somebody probably built something like what you want.

[Jim Becker]

I think there can be a lot of value with 3D printing for a variety of reasons in the "woodworking" shop. It can also be mentally stimulating because most of our woodworking involves "subtracting" material to get to the end result and 3D printing is exactly the opposite. So I can see many applications for it and it's also on my radar.

[ChrisA Edwards]

Perfect timing, my kids bought me a Prusa 3D printer for my birthday, a few days ago.

Not expected to receive it until late February, but I'm starting to build a list of project items and am educating myself on techniques.

I've dabbled in Fusion 360, but haven't got myself to the point of feeling confident in using it to get to an end product.

[John K Jordan]

Perfect timing, my kids bought me a Prusa 3D printer for my birthday, a few days ago.
Not expected to receive it until late February, but I'm starting to build a list of project items and am educating myself on techniques.
I've dabbled in Fusion 360, but haven't got myself to the point of feeling confident in using it to get to an end product.

After discussing it for a few years, my oldest son (out of state) and I both bought Prusa MK3S kits a few months ago. We communicated a lot and both kit builds took time and attention to detail but were completed without a hitch - both machines worked the first time. The instructions are great. Building the kit certainly provides an education and takes the mystery out of the inner workings of the machine.

First test:
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Our first major projects were centered around making custom environmental enclosures allow printing materials like ASA and ABS - and to help keep dust out!

Set up now in my shop office:
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Having the printer did give me an opportunity to upgrade from an iPad to a computer for the shop, for modeling, slicing, etc. After repeated trips walking up and down the hill between the shop and the house to make a small change in a file, a shop computer suddenly made sense. This one has plenty of ram, all SSD storage, Blu-ray read/write, and a GPU driving dual monitors. (A good computer in the shop is also handy for forums, photography, video editing, music, and research/reference for shop and farm!)

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My son is a free-lance photographer/videographer and so far has designed and made things for his business - brackets, light supports, and various sizes of cable holders like these made from clear flexible TPU. (He made a lot of Christmas presents too - lamps, earrings, etc.)

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I've made a number of things, not yet specifically for woodworking. So far I've used PLA, PETG, and TPU filament.

I'd been following 3D printing technology at the international computer graphics conventions since the first commercial STL machines were showcased. The technology advanced exponentially over the decades but remained exorbitantly expensive for hobby use until recently. When I retired in '06 I was full-time in 3D modeling, graphics, and video but haven't done much of that since. I'm slowly ramping up again, learning some new software. I have already sketched a few designs I want to model and print related to farm, shop, and woodturning.

BTW, one thing that might surprise those new to this hobby is the time it takes to print something. My longest print was about 12 hours, many things took 2-8 hours, a few small things less than an hour. A simple tool tray that snaps onto the side of the printer took about 7 hours. The parts my son printed for his printer enclosure took around 140 hours. He can already see the value of having a second printer.

JKJ

[Bill George]

Used 3D printers for maybe 5-6 years. The last one is a Prusa 1/2 at the price of the US made ones I had and very good. Never print anything in PLA you want to last, PETG or ABS, and I use PETG all the time PLA is biodegradable under some conditions. BTW longest print with this printer was a little over 16 hours, with my MakerGEAR M2 it was 22 hours.

[Steven Cooper2]

Side note: I put a .8mm nozzle on my printer so it lays down plastic really fast. A 4 inch dust collector fitting of ~3" in length takes me about 2 hours to print, but it likely would print up to 50% faster if I bumped up the speed. I probably use about 1kg of filament per week

I find round adapters really easy to design and they print very nicely, as accelerations are much more gradual in the X-Y plane. It takes a while to figure out how best to reduce the need for support, and sometimes it can't be avoided (wear cut resistant gloves removing support, much of my blood has been spilled).

[Cary Falk]

I have had a PRUSA i3-MK3S fo a couple of years now. I bought the kit and put it together. They had the power supply wired wrong so it took a couple of weeks to get it going but it has been problem free since. I have printed in petg, abs and pla. I design things in Fusion 360. I use it for all kinds of things woodworking related and not. I also print star wars and ailens stuff for my wife that I find on Thingiverse. My longest print was about 26 hours. My latest thing are some 1/16" spacers to put op some mosaic tile backsplash. The store bought "+" ones don't work well.

[Rob Young]

I also have a Prusa i3MK3 along with two Ender 3's and a Photon SLA printer. While they mostly get used at work for prototyping cases, making custom fixtures for testing equipment and a bit of useless junk I have printed a handful of things for the shop. Mostly jig parts like angled spacers for setting adjustable fences, clamp pads with complementary shapes to the thing being clamped and a few attempts at layout & marking jigs. But on the whole, the layout and marking jigs were too specialized and it is faster to just figure out a way to do things with a bevel gauge, etc.

I've seen a few designs for doweling jigs that looked intriguing but the TODO list is too long now. Might be a fun CAD exercise to work out some jig parts to make a sort of pseudo Domino using a trim router and some clamps and spacer-stops.

[richard newman]

I'm totally ignorant about these things, but I can see how it would be useful to have one. Have some basic questions:

How do printed plastic parts compare to injection molded parts in strength and durability?

Are the surfaces smooth or does the layering leave a texture?

Can you just walk away and let it print overnight, or does it require any monitoring?

Can one print models for investment casting that will burn out cleanly?

[John K Jordan]

I'm totally ignorant about these things, but I can see how it would be useful to have one. Have some basic questions:

How do printed plastic parts compare to injection molded parts in strength and durability?
Are the surfaces smooth or does the layering leave a texture?
Can you just walk away and let it print overnight, or does it require any monitoring?
Can one print models for investment casting that will burn out cleanly?

Richard, I'm just gaining experience, but:

Some filament materials are stronger than others, some quite strong, some weaker and brittle, some flexible, some biodegradable. There are many types and lots of info on the internet on the properties of each.
Here is the Prusa filament material guide. https://help.prusa3d.com/en/tag/mk3/material-guide_220 There are probably others. Some are easy to print, some are not.

The surfaces have a texture since they are built up by layers. The layer height is user selectible with a tradeoff between height, nozzle size, and print time. The prusa slicer has quality and speed options. Layers with vertical curves and angles can be selectively printed with finer resolution. Some materials can be sanded or otherwise chemically smoothed.

It is typical to walk away for long prints. I watch the first two layers to insure initial adhesion to the bed then check occasionally. My son typically prints all night. The Prusa printers we use have crash detection and a feature that will seamlessly pick up the print in the event of a temporarily power loss. An inexpensive electronic enhancement called OctoPrint can be added to monitor the print statistics remotely and even monitor a video feed of the print. My son uses this and I have the components to add this to my printer.

Don't know about the investment casting - an online check might tell. I have only used lost wax technique and sand mold for casting.

JKJ

[Alex Zeller]

It's amazing how far we have come. I've been reading up on CNC routers and found quite a few people who upgrade them also have a 3d printer. They will make parts so they can mount things like drag chains to the gantry. Even 10 years ago compared to now. Makes you wonder where we will be in 10 years from now.

[Brad Shipton]

The biggest use for 3D printers is prototyping. We CNC types are gadget freaks, so that is why it is common for us to have them. They are too slow for production work, but awesome for one offs. I doubt they will improve much time wise in the future since you have the reality of melting, and cooling whatever filament you are using. Too fast with the cooling step and you get a goopy mess or an uncontrolled amount of shrinkage. I have used ours to make jigs and a hose clamp for festool tube. The festool sanding jig worked very well, but the guy that made the model for the hose clamp was a bit too skimpy in his design and it broke after a few months. Like so many other CNC things the trick is creating the model. The sanding jig below took a few tries to get the geometry correct.

3D printing metal looks promising to me if you are making extremely complex parts. In those cases, one can reduce the machine time and waste a ton.

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[Wes Grass]

3d printing ... woodshop ...

Prompted a dumb idea ...

How about a machine with CNC controlled rollers to create bent laminations without a mold. Maybe the veneers have an RF cured adhesive on them.

Pretty sure the technology is already there for forming metal to odd shapes. Just needs a way to bond the wood together.

[Jim Becker]

Wes, Rollers work nicely with metals because metals tend to retain the shape from the last pass of the rollers. I don't think that is going to work with wood because the properties are very different than metals. But you could make a fixture to bang out those laminations without dancing with a bunch of separate clamps by using fixed and sliding (tracked) cauls clamped with pneumatic/hydraulic cylinders pretty easily I would think. I'd use the CNC to design and build the fixture, but don't think I'd try to computerise the clamping. The nature of the adhesive used would indicate how long things need to stay in the fixture and to conserve energy, I'd design it so that once the pistons fully clamped things, some stops/wedges could be used to hold things closed without air/fluid needing to be pumped.

[Rob Young]

I'm totally ignorant about these things, but I can see how it would be useful to have one. Have some basic questions:

How do printed plastic parts compare to injection molded parts in strength and durability?

Are the surfaces smooth or does the layering leave a texture?

Can you just walk away and let it print overnight, or does it require any monitoring?

Can one print models for investment casting that will burn out cleanly?


The parts will not be as strong as injection molded parts. The layer lines are an inherent weakness. There are discussions of tempering and other methods for increasing the layer-to-layer strength. The best thing to do is think about the design and between that and the slicer software, control the orientation of the print elements to take advantage of "across" vs. "with" the layers. Durability is an odd thing because there are lots of filament formulations to choose from including some with carbon fiber. The best carbon fiber filaments have the fibers aligned along the length of the extruded filament and not chopped up tiny and random orientation. And as I said, the material types have different properties, PLA vs. ABS vs. PETG vs. ASA vs. TPU vs. wood-filled vs. blah-blah-blah. The final aspects of print strength have to do with infill patterns, density and the actual printing conditions, temperature, speed and cooling. Plenty of variables to play with!

The layers will appear as layer lines in a finished print. There are ways to control this during the printing process, again a combination of model design, slicing and the printer's physical aspects like nozzle size, temperature, feeds and speeds. Prints can be smoothed in post processing. ABS can be smoothed by exposure to acetone fumes. PLA can be smoothed a bit by annealing and heat treating as well as mechanical methods and the application of BONDO. Same for the other filament materials.

Yes you can walk away but it is pretty common to set up a Raspberry Pi (tiny, cheap, Linux based computer) with a camera and web connection to monitor & oversee the printer(s). Prints can fail because filament runs out, breaks, nozzles clog, power fails, heaters stop or run-away. Most printers are reasonably reliable once properly set up and calibrated but there are always losses. There are a handful of thermal run-aways every year, most just screw up the hot-end. Some cause much more damage. Besides the (remote) danger of fire there are other possible environmental hazards as it is possible that small particles of plastic are being released as well as fumes. Personally I don't like to stay in the same room with a running printer if it is printing with ABS due to the smell (if I can smell it, it certainly can't be good for long-term exposure) but also the noise.

Yes it is possible to make models for investment casting. PLA is commonly used for this. There may be other materials suitable too.

[Wes Grass]

Wes, Rollers work nicely with metals because metals tend to retain the shape from the last pass of the rollers. I don't think that is going to work with wood because the properties are very different than metals. But you could make a fixture to bang out those laminations without dancing with a bunch of separate clamps by using fixed and sliding (tracked) cauls clamped with pneumatic/hydraulic cylinders pretty easily I would think. I'd use the CNC to design and build the fixture, but don't think I'd try to computerise the clamping. The nature of the adhesive used would indicate how long things need to stay in the fixture and to conserve energy, I'd design it so that once the pistons fully clamped things, some stops/wedges could be used to hold things closed without air/fluid needing to be pumped.


Yeah, it wouldn't be fast, letting the adhesive cure out as you go might slow it down a lot. No experience at all with that technology.

And there'd be a fair bit of experimenting to determine how much to 'overbend' so it springs back to the shape you want. Which would no doubt be highly variable. Same with metal, but much more predictable obviously. CNC press brakes are amazing.

But if it would work ....

I've seen a lot of things proposed in my life that I thought would be impossible or impractical, that came to fruition. This, maybe will prove our doubts correct. Like I said, a 'dumb idea'.

Good cylinders don't leak to a level I'd worry about. Other than hydraulic ... as they say, the only hydraulic system that doesn't leak is one that's empty ;-) Its the nature of them, the seals distort under pressure and cycling it turns them into teeny little pumps. It's a necessity, if they didn't seep a bit they'd wear out very quickly.

[Alex Zeller]

I'm not sure about the roller idea but a CNC router could easily make forms of almost any shape to bend wood around. It could even make a mate for each side of the wood. For example if you were gluing up strips to make a curve and you knew the thickness was going to be say 1/2" you could have the CNC make both an inner and outer form with exactly 1/2" difference.

[Jim Becker]

I actually have made multiple cauls for bent laminations for a client on my CNC...the client tells me the desired radii for both the inside and outside ('have to account for material thickness of the layers) and I then draw them and cut them.

[Tony Latham]

I used a 3D printer to crank out my CNC.


https://youtu.be/RDJJ1duSrOM

[John Lifer]

Didn't know that a Good number of you guys have a Prusa. I started off about 3plus yrs ago with a Tevo tarantula. I still use it occasionally for PLA, but it is like a lot of these, tinkerer machines.
The Prusa MK3 machine is a great machine, the initial $s is more than a lot of folks expect, but it is Well worth it. Put it together and it just prints and prints.... PETG works great, and is strong.
And It can be pretty good structurally. I make a few parts that I could drive my car over. DC fittings, for sure. PLA will last a lot longer if not under stress than folks think. Add a bit more fill and it holds up well.