3DPrinting

There's a reason you don't often see machines over 300x300x400. At that point it gets hard to keep tolerances tight, requiring manufacturing changes or else you end up with printing artifacts.

This thing prints at 300mm/s at 1100x1100x820 and it's manufactured in a first world nation at low volumes.

It's hard to see, but I think they made the gantry (the whole Z platform, I mean) out of two plates of aluminum. They didn't bolt i beams together, it's just two massive plates with holes cut into them. That's the sort of engineering they did to get this thing to work at that size, with that speed.

Doing that is expensive.

The support is awesome.

The mixing nozzle/extruder is one of the better ones.

What you call medicore specs are decent parts. They use ball bearings fan, Misumi stepper, etc. paired with decent workmanship like strain relieving the cables.

~~What could be cheaper are the nozzle replacements at 70€ each.~~ Still not the worst out there in terms of nozzle pricing (e.g.150€ for a brass nozzle + heater ... [different company]).

Edit: It was 70€ for 2 builder nozzles or 175€ for 6.

If you have one of the consumer metal printers and a consumer plastic printer, it means you can print your own car parts from aluminum, iron, or lower carbon steel pellets, and all the trim with the plastic printer.

Congratulations, you have a body shop, and an example car.

Getting ahold of the original specifications becomes the biggest challenge at that point, so that you can manufacture the parts within tolerance.

slaps roof This baby has been going since the early '20s. We've been through a lot together, almost every part has been replaced, and it's still not reliable!

Gotta do the study properly. Diverse pool, control groups. Relatively long periods…

anything below 7 doesn't count