3D printed ring

[Binraker]

Here is my first 3D printed ring (well 3D printed wax and cast) just after its initial polish with the silicone wheels



Design was done in Blender and the print and cast was done by NextDayWax.com in palladium (as I have never used palladium, or to my knowledge handled it, this seamed like a good opportunity to get my hands on some)

I have the same design being made by cooksons DMLS process but that has not arrived yet.

[josef1]

Nice job, I will be interested in seeing the DMLS process surface finish aswell

[medusa]

Is it hard to get the hang of 3d software or did you have a good grounding in it beforehand?

I have the same design being made by cooksons DMLS process but that has not arrived yet.

out of curiosity, how much would that cost?

[Lucie]

Lovely job Out of interest; do you know if they offerva service to scan and print 3d objects? I've been trying to find someone for quite some time now, but no one seems to want to tackle it.

[LydiaNiz]

same here Lucie!

[Binraker]

Blender is a bit of an odd beast. I just bought a book on it and followed a few video tutorials. I have a background in parametric CAD for engineering which was of limited help as there is a big difference between designing mechanical components which are all about precision and sculpting which is about look. I chose blender because it has a scripting interface and I want to do some procedural space frame stuff.

The cookson pricing is rather weird for a 3D printing service as they production costs scale quite dramatically with number of units form £200 for 1 to £100 for 20+ but as this was my first order the production cost was about £60 and then about £30 of metal if I remember.

I don't know of anyone who does scan and print but there are a few companies that will scan an object for you and then you can send that file to a production company, of course that costs.

I have a few things I would like to scan and print too but the cost was a bit prohibitive last i looked. For that reason I plan to have a bash at building a structured light scanner. Just another one of the thousand jobs to do...

[medusa]

….. scripting interface and I want to do some procedural space frame stuff.

that sounds amazing. I don't have a clue what you mean but it sounds fab!

The cookson pricing is rather weird for a 3D printing service as they production costs scale quite dramatically with number of units form £200 for 1 to £100 for 20+ but as this was my first order the production cost was about £60 and then about £30 of metal if I remember.

So £90 then for that single ring? I can see the point for big runs maybe of very complicated stuff but that seems an awful lot for a simple ring. That said i have no idea how much a palladium ring would normally cost.

[Binraker]

The one from cookson is in 18k gold rather than palladium (They didn't give me any other options so I assume they don't do other metals)

[Lucie]

The printing costs tally with figures I've been quoted before from a number of companies. For some reason it seems almost impossible to find anyone who'll do the scanning. I usually get told they'll quote & I never hear back

[josef1]

Its difficult to scan small shiny objects with a high enough resolution to be able to produce a workable cad model the scanners that can are very expensive and even then you need to spend time making sure the scanned file 'watertight'. If you can imagine the cad model has a very fine mesh covering the surface if you have a missing part of the scan the model will have a hole in it,this needs to be repaired before the file can be used, its like a massive dot to dot picture if one of the dots is missing you don't have a complete picture the human mind can visualise this but computers dont and just get stuck,you need to tell them what to do. there are softwares to allow you to do this but its still time consuming ,you can scan bigger items and scale them smaller with better results but its usually less time consuming to just model what you want in cad.