3D Printing Extrusion

[kesavadh]

Has anyone had any success 3D printing an extrusion?

 

[Vec]

What's the use case for this? And what material are you using to print?

I mean you can print something that looks like a rail or something... but how will it work? Most additive plastic printers are going to be weak in some direction of force. And rough in other dimensions.

I've printed stuff like flag stops that work with rails, but printing rails seems to not be as practical on the hobbyist level. Even larger industrial machines typically tend to have pretty limited build volumes.

 

[mkasdin]

The 3D printers are good for limited runs, custom parts and rapid prototyping. Not necessarily making high volume, industrial parts? The world of 3D is changing and I now see houses getting 3D printed with concrete and maybe in the next 30-50 years they will colonize a planet using 3D printers, so it’s not an unreasonable request. The filaments are expensive when you work with exotic resins, nylon filaments to achieve the requisite tensile and shear strengths? Try calling MatterHackers in lake forest, California. They make a Nylon-X prusa clone and they have various nylons and carbon fiber filaments. The stuff is pricey so be prepared and the printers are typically slow.....

 

[Michael Kellough]

Not really relevant but not worth starting a new thread.

[attachimg=1]

This is a detail of a valve manifold to be used to upgrade the water reclamation unit on the International Space Station. (my recently retired step-brother worked on this project)

It is 3D printed titanium with secondary machining. Posting because I didn’t know printing titanium was possible.

 

[six-point socket II]

Impressive, thanks for sharing!

Kind regards,
Oliver

 

[Cheese]

Not really relevant but not worth starting a new thread.

[attachimg=1]

This is a detail of a valve manifold to be used to upgrade the water reclamation unit on the International Space Station. (my recently retired step-brother worked on this project)

It is 3D printed titanium with secondary machining. Posting because I didn’t know printing titanium was possible.

I just found out a few weeks ago that 3D printing stainless was a fairly new option.

 

[luvmytoolz]

I've got a 3D resin printer and although I hardly use it at this stage it works great, with the exception that because it's a liquid, support for the object during printing become even more important. Done to a decent wall thickness it works really well and the prints hold up to abuse well. I printed up some 107mm to 80mm adaptors for fitting a CNC spindle to a router lift.

Some of the better PLA/ABS printers do an amazing amount of detail, with the resin printers generally better still. The finish is astounding when done well.

 

[Francis_Beland]

I haven't but thanks for the idea. I have some high resistance PLA that might be a good candidate for this. I'll do some tests.

 

[Francis_Beland]

I did some test with a 2020 extrusion print and it seems to be solid enough for a lot of usage. I even threaded the center hole with M5 threads to join some. However, I don't think it worth it financially.

 

[woodferret]

I've done really short sections of 2020 for testing/mock purposes along with DIN rails.  I wouldn't consider it a replacement though because the tolerances are crap.  Ender 3 Pro, but it's the slicer having to remain inside the volume (on outside and inside corners) and the fact that the plastic noodle is round that makes it meh.

Assuming you're printing upwards, the layers are also oriented in what'd be the weakest orientation so you're not going to be spanning very far if you're thinking structural.