What to read about 3D printing, overview and digest?

Question

3D

Good afternoon

I want to understand the possibilities and horizons of using 3D printing in real life. The general background seems to indicate that in our time it is already possible to print anything: from wristwatches to a spaceship. In real life, everything is somehow incomprehensible, all my friends who use 3D printing do it, rather, for fun, extremely rarely falling into some kind of practical sense, usually these are printers that melt some kind of plastic and this is a friend in layers they weld on to each other, which gives not quite the same and applicable result. How to understand at what practical level the technology is now, not laboratory developments, but exactly what can really be bought, what materials, what can be obtained from them and how much does it cost? Are there any review articles that list technologies that are already in service, their capabilities and features, pros and cons, costs and all that? Otherwise, all the literature that I come across is either practical and narrow about one printer or type of printers, or already quite general, like a fantastic story ...

Thanks in advance for your replies

Answer 1

George, it all depends on what exactly you want to get at the output.
I looked at a 3D printer for a year and thought why I need it and what I will print on it. I wrote down everything I wanted to do.
After the volume of what I want to print exceeded the critical one, I realized that I was ready to buy. It became clear that the money spent would not be thrown away.
But here you need to understand one underwater pebble - the technology is far from out of the box. You will need:

• Draw. Draw a lot. A hell of a lot of drawing. Understand at least 1 drafting program and create your own models. You won't be fed up with foreign models
  
• Know. You will have to study in detail the features of your printer. Not only do the models differ from the model, but also within the same model, different printers come out. Plus, the assembly is different - for example, at what height you place the stop sensor, the maximum height for leveling the table will depend
  
• Think. There are still no answers to many questions. Or rather, they are, but it is difficult to find them. You will often have to reinvent your wheel. For example, on the weekend I made a heat chamber and put the spool of thread higher. I made it so that it somehow rotated, homemade. As a result, the print has become disgusting - the layers melt and that's it. 3 days twisted. In the end, I found out that the plastic does not melt, but it is simply not enough - the homemade product did not provide easy rotation of the coil and the plastic did not have time to enter the nozzle. As a result, it didn't print.
  
• Etc.
  

The general idea is to read anything is useless. Find out for yourself whether you need it or not. In this case, the saying "The grandmother had no problems, the grandmother bought a pig" works.
PS But besides the pig you buy 10 tons of pleasure from what you do yourself :)
Good luck :)

Answer 2

From my acquaintances who practice printing, I can recall architectural models of buildings (they used to be glued out of paper), prototypes of some bowls, for which it is planned to order a mold in the future, knobs for a car dashboard (which it is not clear where to order, or for a very long time ), figurines for board games, souvenirs, parts for cosplay costumes.
I believe that 3D printing is not needed for a "housewife". Printing figurines of your favorite cat will get boring pretty quickly, it’s more profitable to buy ready-made cups and vases or, if you need a custom design, you can order their printing. You don't need hundreds of vases, do you? And ordering a few vases is usually cheaper than buying yourself a decent printer. In addition, you will have to master the skill of 3D printing, because there are a lot of ways to mess up .
But for the workshop is already much more interesting. These are small plastic parts, and burnt models for casting, all kinds of adapters. But only when you need a small amount of these things. In mass production, it is usually cheaper to cast or grind parts.
A brief overview of the available mass technologies: https://3dpt.ru/page/3d-printer-types
From the fact that it does not cost all the money in the world, and you can put it at home - this is, as you put it, "fusing plastic in layers" (FDM) and photopolymers cured by UV laser (SLA) or DLP projector . Photopolymers have much higher accuracy and a better presentation, but the materials are much more expensive.
Any laser sintering of metal (SLM), plastic, glass and other powders (SLS) is incredibly cool, and is actively used by large companies, but the price is not "home".
Of those that "spray" you can see reviews flyingbear ghost 5 (costs about 30k).

Answer 3

Available to the consumer (read cheap) 3D printers can only print a limited list of things, because:
* the list of materials is limited
metals - this is not for everyday life, they need printers with seven-eight-digit prices in rubles, expensive powders, not cheap specialists - which significantly increases the final cost of the product
* limiting accuracy is limited (and it is very low, the size of the error reaches millimeters and you have to take on post-processing)
the moment is very controversial, there may be situations when the printer will print the product with an accuracy of mechanical accuracy and nozzle size, t .e. 0.1-0.2mm (this is a very good accuracy for everyday tasks), but such situations need to be understood and models should be designed for them in advance.
Product dimensions and print times are highly dependent on the required accuracy and the materials used. You can set the nozzle to 0.2mm, but then printing a product a few centimeters in size can take several days.
Stereolithography, resins, of course, have fallen in price, but in the cheap segment, the quality of the result is low (i.e., a lot of nuances) and yes, having picked up a not cheap high-quality printer, expensive (a dozen tr. litre) resins, you can hope for a result of 0.040mm accuracy
And yes, supports, in all technologies they can screw up a lot, making that accuracy will depend on the quality of post-processing, turning automatic production into a 'do it yourself'.
ps but now the main thing, due to the fact that the economy around the world has turned the final cost of products inside out, when having spent on production X and transport Y, the real price turns into 100 * (X + Y) due to politics and corruption.
Under these conditions, an expensive way of manufacturing products becomes quite adequate for the price, only due to the fact that it is nearby (or even at your home).
A classic example is plastic parts in foreign cars, a market has fully formed around their replacement ...
The price here generally determines everything. While the market was held by a single company, holding inadequately high prices through patents, no one needed these technologies. Well, who will pay half a thousand rubles per gram? But when the patent ended and the cost went down to a dozen another ... the conversation went completely different.

Answer 4

You can look at 3dtoday.ru - there is a lot of information there.
But - "printers that melt some kind of plastic and melt it in layers on top of each other" - this is 90% of home printers. the remaining 10% are photopolymer (and these models are built in layers, it's just that the layers are thinner there), there is nothing more homely, as other technologies are too expensive and energy-consuming.