Cheap, DIY 3D printer

[rleete]

From a small (three man) company, for only $750.  $950 for the deluxe kit, which is still insanely inexpensive.  Most of the other desktop models sell in the $10k range and up.

Not the best resolution, but it's still pretty neat that these guys have come up with something in the reach of most home DIY users, and on par with homemade CNC setups.

http://www.makerbot.com/     No affiliation, but I happened across it the other day, and am seroiusly considering getting one.  Watch the videos to see what it can do.  Seriously cool stuff.

I find it vastly asmusing that the geeks made a 20 sided die for their first project.

[andyf]

Rleete, it looks a bit like a close relation of RepRap (google it), which seems to have a devoted band of followers - I can't imagine why, but that's probably down to my limited imagination. 

Andy

[SAM in LA]

Now that is neat.

  

It won't be long, someone will figure out how to do this cheaply with metal.

SAM

[Yorkshireman]

That is done already with Laser-Sintering.
The wedge here, connecting a cross-head to its piston rod, was made by Laser-Sintering. The surface is a little rough, and that needed to be smoothed a bit.

Johannes

[Bernd]

If your interested in this here's a page from Don Lancaster's web site on what he called "Santa Claus Machines"

http://www.tinaja.com/glib/hack77.pdf

About halfway down the page you'll come across what these guys were doing. He talked about these machines back in 1994. Interesting article.

Bernd

[Festus42]

I have worked with one of these pretty extensively and I have to warn you that they require a lot of attention and tuning before they are usable it has been 6 months and I am still working out the kinks.