3D Printing and Scanning

Dimension printer:

I designed a poppet valve in CAD and had it printed on the Dimension printer. The valve has a poppet that slides inside a cylinder in the part. This printer has a feature resolution (i.e. slice thickness) of about 0.007", and a recommended clearance for movement of 0.012". It prints in ABS plastic with a water soluble support. My moving surfaces are buried deeply in the part, so I decided to give a clearance of 0.025". Picture and result to come asap.

InVision printer:

Looking through some of the digital assembly links to Fab conference presentations from last lecture, I came across a group at Cornell who is working with digital press-fit materials. The unit block fits with many others identical to it to form a 3D free-form solid.I made a model of one of their proposed block units and printed five on the InVision printer. This has a much higher resolution of 0.002" and a recommended clearance for movement of 0.005". It prints in acrylic with a wax support. Picture and result to come asap.

Konica Minolta 3D scanner:

Also known as a digitizer, this machine uses laser beam triangulation to determine the distance to the object being scanned. Coupled with a digital camera, it can create a 3D model with a color map overlaid. I scanned my handheld GPSr with it. The scanner had a little trouble picking up the black colored surfaces, but by increasing the power, a pretty good data set was obtained. The points were then stitched together and exported as an STL and VRML.

Z Corp printer:

The Z-corp color powder printer was online and it was suggested that I take my GPSr scan file and print it in full color. Picture and result to come asap.