I don’t understand anyone that has a problem with 3-D parts .Why ? Well think about how much resin and P.E. the car guys use . If they complain about 3-D maybe they are jealous ! I personally laud anyone who bothers to mess with the 3-D items .
The early products or home-made items had the same growing pains . And the material WAS hard to work with . Early resin was prone to warpage and breakage in shipment till they learned to deal with it .
3D has had problems with the material the parts are made out of .The few examples I have ( a Dinosaur and a Dragon ) were almost impossible to get smooth and paintable . I had to mask off areas when priming to keep detail sharp .
The lines in the product were hard to make disappear , do too , again , the material . Resin was no different . Holes and rough surfaces abounded and were hard to fix on some items . I have the So Called corrected Deckhouse for the 1/350 Alabama .Whatta piece of crap ! But I made it work on the Washington after being informed by the Alabama Museum that Trumpeter’s kit was accurate !
As a matter of fact , It’s the one they sell in the Gift Shop aboard ! Back to 3-d .The parts are now crisp and accurate . No leaning toward printing one’s own model yet .It’s just not done yet . Like Resin it will happen . But , to those die hards who don’t like 3-d products . Resin came into being and you now use it with impunity . 3-d will be the same . Maybe more expensive . More accurate . Isn’t that why we buy aftermarket parts anyway ? Get over it !! 3-d is like Resin , Here to stay !
Of couse I agree with you, take a look at my BD-5 on the civil aircraft section. It was all 3D printed and I wouldn’t want to do the same one agian. tons of sanding and putty, of course my machine at work is not capable of fine detail so I do what I have to. I must have 20-30 projects I 've 3d printed that I’ll do along side my injected molded ones. Lol I’ve increased my stash count!
I have no problem with 3d parts. I’m a former CAD operator, so I’m quite familar with them. And eventually, that’s all there will be.
In fact, the concern about the hobby dying out because there are no young people coming into it ignores the very real truth that young people still build models… on the computer!
No paint, no storage space issues, and no searching for kits. I myself do some 3d modeling (in Blender if you ask), but haven’t switched over entirely.
Recently I have bought a 3D print from our friend here - MickeyBugs95. He designed and sold vie Shapeways a set of Tank intercom system. This little set is pricey, BUT - the detail is incredible. The intercom boxes are like 2x2mm in size and still the tiny knobs are reproduced with no problems. There’s no visible grain on the parts and they are perfectly paintable. Here’s a photo of a machine piece using one of them boxes:
There is also a trend I see recently - people design and 3d-prit masters for sets that are later sold as resin copies. It’s cheaper that way. So it’s no direct “versus”
There was a member here called Model Nerd who used 3D printing to make masters for resin casting. If I recall, some of his stuff turned out really nice! This was years and years ago, and he used a service to make the parts.
I just purchased some 3-D parts from Shapeways for an upcoming project. I am curious to see how they will work out. They are a huge improvement over the original kit parts. Although I am a bit disappointed on some warpage of one part…
I don’t see any versus there. Commercially available 3D stuff is a new thing in any quantity in the modeling hobby. It’s been used for a while in my field of architecture, but then 3D models and CAD files are available for the subjects.
It’ll get better as demand increases. I’ve bought a few things and the quality is pretty good.
One thing I find a little annoying is that most of it is marketed showing CAD generated drawings of the objects rather than actual product. This can be deceiving…
I saw some 3D sub weapons on Shapeways a while back and was very skeptical at first. I got a deckgun and some 20mm Oerlikons for my 1/144 Gato sub. I was blown away by the level of details specially with the 3" gun. No resin, plastic or metal comes close to it. The barrel is bored out, all the gears, wheels, pedals etc. are just a work of art.
I got some 3D printed parts for my millennium falcon build I will be getting more too. So far I’ve only ran into one guy at my LHS who is against 3D printed parts but uses resin and PE on every build.
I agree that the stuff that you can buy off the internet appears to be very good, and that home made stuff may not yet be fully a reality. However, even on my inexpensive 3D printer (~$300) I have been able to print alot of stuff for some scratchbuilt things I have worked on. You do end up needing to do a fair bit of sanding and filling with the printed parts, but overall its not much different from other things that I have tried for scratchbuilding.
I think we have to be careful with our terminology here. In our hobby the term resin typically is short for urethane resin. It does not say how the resin is formed into the part. Usually we mean by casting in a flexible RTV mold. That resin has low surface tension, improving detail. Also, RTV molds hold fine detail. So the advantage is that one can cast parts without the major investment needed in metal molds, so a small company loves this process.
3D printers can use a variety of materials, from various resins, to metals, to whatever. 3D printers vary greatly in the resolution of the stepper motors and controls, in all axes. Really good professional machines can step fractions of a mil, cheap ones several mils per step. I would suspect that good professional 3D printers could rival urethane resin cast in RTV molds. But, if they are small, low budget companies of the type that cast resin kits, they probably cannot afford those hi-res machines.
Like so many comparisons, the devil is in the details.
I see no problem with 3D parts. I used several 3D printed droids in my Blue Leader X-Wing diorama that I ordered from Shapeways. The detail was pretty decent, though the panel lines on the astromechs were really faint. But they took paint well after a coat of primer. I’m with the crowd thinking that 3D printing is going to be a mainstay of the hobby in the future.
3D printing does not lend itself to mass production that well. It is like resin in that the cost of a die is eliminated, so useful for specialty low volume parts. But the process is slow, so for large volumes the producer has to buy a number of machines and run them in parallel, so their advantage vs injection molding is reduced. And I have seen the molding detail in injection molding really become excellent in past decade. I don’t see 3D printing replacing injection molding, but it could replace resin casting, which is primarily low volume stuff where cost of die is not paid for in small runs.
Hi. I think I agree that 3D printing is probably mostly of value for limited runs of stuff, like prototyping and/or relatively small batches of “print on order” things like you can get off Shapeways, etc.
Overall, I don’t really expect that it will fully ever replace resin casting though, but it may end up complementing both resin and injection molding. Recently I purchased a small (1/32 scale) resin car body off eBay that looks alot like the mold used was formed off a 3D printed master (you can see visible faceting of some curved surfaces and such). And I’ve seen reviews of a DDG1000 injection molded kit that others have suggested also looks like a 3D printed prototype was used in making the molds.
As such, I think I see some areas where 3D printing may be prefered but others where it may only complement other processes, and overall I think all 3 types of production (injection molding, resin casting, and 3D printing) will likely continue for some time to come.
You did a bang up job on that , as I commented .This definitely proves my point .It has growing pains , but it will be a very important tool to the serious tool for the Museum Level Modeler . Or just a really devoted one .
I guess I am old fashioned that way though . Although I have done it at the office , I really don’t care for Computer Modeling . Why ? Well it’s true , You can achieve a level never before reached .
You cannot hold it , smell it , or hand it around to other modelers at a meet . And how would you enter it in contests ? I have done the Garret Airesearch Engines for a Falcon Jet Aircraft conversion , and we had to change some structural components . That’s where I learned it .
At that time it was very primitive and not at all what today allows . Still , I believe there is a place for it too . T.B.
I did that because I couldn’t think of another way of getting the topic together . I will admit , there really is no Versus . I have some 3-D parts for a ship and I still look at my Resin parts of the same thing from a year ago and stare in amazement !
Now , that said ,When you look for fidelity 3-d has it . I expect that there are those folks who will have their resin masters made in this discipline and then cast parts that blow you away .
See , they are both valuable . I saw an article , I believe in a Ships in Scale about a year or so ago that talked about this very subject , Where ships are concerned .The photos of the parts blew me away !
I see , really , a beautiful marriage of the two technologies in the future . T.B.
I see 3-D printing as complementary technology to resin casting. There are some things that lend themselves better to 3-D printing, like afterburner rings, which are too delicate to survive being sawed off a resin pour block.
The CAD that is used to make 3-D patterns makes it almost child’s play to create tires and hubs - a section profile turned into a solid of rotation will yield the basic shape, nuts and bolts can be precisely spaced, only the tread pattern if not circumferential will offer a challenge.
Like any new tech, 3-D printing will go through an evolution, with better resolution and lower prices. In the near term, perhaps having your designs printed by a third party like Shapeways is the best solution to get high quality parts.
I’m thinking of CADing a combustion ring for a LeDuc ramjet as well as some wheels for a Sukhoi T-4 ”Sotka” and Beriev Be-10 ”Mallow”.
I agree that extrusions are easy to do in 3D CAD. However, many, many operations are not, even tapered extrusions. When I learned 2D CAD it wasn’t that bad. I had drafting at college, I was bad at it due to penmanship, but I remembered the concepts. However, 3D CAD just has me buffaloed. Maybe the real expensive CADs that cost multi-hundreds of bucks would be easier, but not ones I can afford. Still looking for a low-cost or shareware program that has a decent manual or tutorials. At least my Cricut machine only requires 2D.
BTW, I was fine in Analytic Geometry in school, until the last couple of weeks of the semester when we went to 3D Analyt- then I fell apart.
