pcmhacking.net

Will be interesting with hot water. Depends on plastic type but my 3d printed models went soft and sagged in a hot car in summer. ABS is better (and needs higher print temp) than PLA.

Says it does both ABS and PLA but they recommend ABS so would hopefully work well enough with it?

Pretty cool and the prices make it tempting, be interested to see how it goes for you!

doesn't look like a bad printer, though the $300 aliexpress purusa ones are getting surprisingly good nowdays. There very fidly machines but you can do some great stuff with them, Let me know how the auto bed level goes, that's one thing you waste alot of time on is leveling, i design and print spare parts all day at work on ours, ive found tinkercad the easiest to use, im not cad orientated so found 123d and others painful.

Yeah it was the auto leveling, non stop good reviews and overall easy to use design that sold me. Hoping Ill spend more time printing and less time fixing!
I looked at all the cheapo units on ali and ebay.. although... its the lack of technical support, documentation and software for the devices which let them down. I even forked out the extra bit of money for the extended warranty just to be certain lol. Hoping Iv made a good choice!

Tinkercad looks good to use! Seems easy to navigate and use. Im still having a few issues doing some more complex tasks in 123D but getting there slowly. Be nice if there was a list of parts used, and if you could 'hide' each part to see others more easily.

Im pretty sure Im going to be printing stuff just for the sake of printing haha. Would be pretty cool to 3D print a miniture engine. Great learning tool it would be.

I've got one of the aliexpress Reprap's. Had it for around 2 yrs now and never missed a beat. You only level the bed once unless you move the printer to a new location. Takes all of 5 minutes to do.

I print through about 1kg of filament a week and it has seen many hundreds of hours of use. The build instructions are in the format of a DVD with a CAD reconstruction of piece by piece being assembled. There is no language barrier there and makes assembly a breeze. It still took 3 nights to assemble it though with what seemed like 5000 pieces.

The linear bearings have a bit of play but no issues with print quality.

For software, I use DesignSpark Mechanical for CAD and the converter/slicer that came with the printer. Both free.

I use it mostly for enclosures for my gadgets that I sell but lately I've been making sand casting molds and masters. Great little toy!

BennVenn wrote:I've got one of the aliexpress Reprap's. Had it for around 2 yrs now and never missed a beat. You only level the bed once unless you move the printer to a new location. Takes all of 5 minutes to do.

I print through about 1kg of filament a week and it has seen many hundreds of hours of use. The build instructions are in the format of a DVD with a CAD reconstruction of piece by piece being assembled. There is no language barrier there and makes assembly a breeze. It still took 3 nights to assemble it though with what seemed like 5000 pieces.

The linear bearings have a bit of play but no issues with print quality.

For software, I use DesignSpark Mechanical for CAD and the converter/slicer that came with the printer. Both free.

I use it mostly for enclosures for my gadgets that I sell but lately I've been making sand casting molds and masters. Great little toy!

I have been interesting in your casting process. Very impressed with those manifold.

I wish I had these skills and capabilities, then I would be casting my own V6 performance manifolds.

If you want a hand to get set up I'm happy to help. You might need a bigger print bed for a V6 manifold, unless you build it in pieces. Or - Do it the old way with wood + putty

there is a lot of complexity and numerical accuracy needed to do it by hand. I have 0 artistic capability haha so hand moulding is out of the question.

I don't think I would want to get a printer and steep learning just to make one thing.

The manifold I'd like already exists as a mould and very likely as a cad file too. Just they are not in production and owned by another company.

Casting my own would be awesome as this existing design can be improved provided the cad files exist.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but how complex is the V6 design? Multiple cores/masters?

*Grabs out the popcorn*
Im all for learning how to cast!