For those of us who ventured out into the cold on Tuesday night, December 2nd to hear Julia Truchsess talk about 3D Printers, I’m sure most would agree that the time was well spent. Julia brought along with her an Afinia H480, one of her favorite 3D printers, which won a number of awards and is known for being both reliable and affordable. She set it up on the stage, front and center, and it wasn’t long before we saw it in action. While Julia spoke, she passed around a handful of examples of what she has created with her 3D printers, one of which was a lithograph of her parents’ wedding photo.
Julia is an electrical engineer and has been designing consumer products since 1976, but she confessed that deep down she is an inventor. Julia is president of Pragmatic Designs and over the years has been involved with working on many interesting products, including the first musical greeting cards and one of the first digital picture frames. She spends the bulk of her time nestled in her office in Sandy Hook, prototyping new products for her clients, which is what she enjoys doing the most. Many of her clients can’t tell what a product is going to look like from a 2D drawing. Over the years Julia has brought to market over 1,000 products and has been granted several U.S. patents. Julia has had so much fun both using and learning about 3D printing that she considers it to be more of a hobby than work.
Julia told us that there is something magical about an object being created layer after layer out of a simple material like plastic. The two types of plastic that dominate the market are ABS and PLA, which are both known as thermoplastics because they become soft and moldable when they are heated and return to a solid when they are cooled. Julia prefers using ABS, which is a stronger material and is recommended for beginners. ABS is an oil based material that requires a printer that has a heated bed. PLA is a plant based material that is biodegradable and can be made from corn, potatoes and sugar-beets and melts at a lower temperature.
As far as 3D printers go, the first decision point is whether to get a printer that comes with integrated software or to use a printer that relies on open-source software; there are pros and cons to each. The open source software isn’t designed to work with a specific printer, which means it needs to be all things to all printers, and Julia felt that this could present a problem for you since it is harder to set up. If you really want the ability to play with all the different options then she said it would make sense to use open source software. There are more open source printers on the market, a few websites Julia recommended going to were the Makergear.com which sells the Makergear M2 3D printer, or if you need more material flexibility, you may want to take a look at the 3D printers on the Ultimaker.com website.
Julia prefers using integrated over open source software, since it usually comes with a manageable number of settings such as letting you pick photo paper or plain paper and choose how thick each of the layers are. Julia likes to use an Integrated cloud based software called Tinkercad – she said it’s fairly simple and easy to learn and, once you get over the learning curve, you can use it to create very complex objects. She explained that a 3D printer first reads the industry-standard STL file that gets processed by the ‘slicer’ program, which divides the model into printable layers and plots the path to fill them in.
Now in case you’d like the ability to create something on a 3D printer but perhaps don’t feel the need to own one yourself, Julia said that there are a few big companies that have very large 3D printers and offer the ability for you to use their printers for a fee. Shapeways.com, iMaterialise.com and Scupteo.com are three companies that offer this service and let you choose from a catalog of products created by third-party designers and will also let you upload your own digital design, typically in the standardized .STL file format.
Julia said that there are too many 3D printers on the market now to go over all of them, but a few she liked in the under $1,000 category were the UP Mini 3D Desktop printer, which retails for $599 on Octave.com. She also recommended the XYZprinting Da Vinci 1.0 3D printer, which retails for about $449 on Amazon.com. If you have over $1,000 in your budget, she suggested getting the Afinia H480 3D printer that she brought with her, which retails for $1,149 on Octave.com. Julia mentioned that the Newtown Library is using this printer. If the Afinia H480 isn’t big enough for your needs, you could consider getting the Zortrax M200, which retails for $1,990 on zortrax.com.
After you’ve settled on the 3D printer you want, the next step is figuring out what to print. Thingiverse.com and MyMiniFactory.com both have repositories of models that can be printed, some are free and some are for sale. With a little digging, you can even find websites that give you the ability to recreate famous renaissance sculptures.
Before the evening was over, Julia had created another 3D printout to add to her collection. This time it was a spoon rider, one of those plastic figurines that used to be found in cereal boxes back in the 1960’s. Julia said an acetone vapor bath would clean up the bumps in your 3D object. After Julia’s presentation was over, she answered questions from the audience and many people took advantage of the opportunity to see what a 3D printer looks like up close. Thank you Julia, for a very informative night and for sharing your 3D printer knowledge with all of us.