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socalnative

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About socalnative

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    San Bernardino, CA
  • In My Garage:
    VFR1200X, R1200GS, Sprint ST, ST3S, VF750r/F-(sold), XR650R plated, XT600, TW200, RM250Z

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  1. 3D printers have come a long ways in the last 5 years. Yes you can make actual parts from your solid models. Most of the printers come with a software package that will facilitate your printing needs. But they aren't usually helpful if you want to actually model up your ideas. There are a lot of "free" solid model apps, but solidworks is probably the leader in the cad world. Yes there are higher end products that the huge manufacturers use, but solidworks can do just about everything NX, ProE, and the others can. And it's learning curve it's as bad as the other high end apps. As far as producing a finish product that depends on what you are going after and willing to live with. Most plastic 3D printers lay down .002"-.010" thick "layers". Which seems pretty good until you delve deeper into their function and realize that they aren't laying down solid layers, for many reasons, cost, time, weight, thermal issues. And what you end up with are very small voids throughout the finished part. For quick mocking up or laying out parts they are hard to beat. It would take many hours of CNC machining to do what a 3D printer can do but there difference is that the CNC part could be used in it's final state. Where as the 3D part is a layered plastic model of what you wanted. There are sintered metal 3D printers which can make anything out of such materials as aluminum, titanium, various steels, inconel, and almost anything you ever heard about or would need. The same limitations apply and any close toleranced feature would have to be machined after the part was made. This technology will continue to improve but it will be a while before "anyone" can make a high precision part, with little or no manufacturing or machining experience. I'll give you a real world example: Have you seen the 3D scanners or mobile CMMs? The Faro arm is one such machine and a few years ago it was speculated that within a couple years it would totally dominate the CMM market. Well it's been more than a few and the classic immovable large granite based CMMs are still the only way to measure parts that have close tolerances. Yes the movable or portable CMMs and 3D scanners have their place but it's not in the world of +/- .001" tolerances. They are several decimal places still off. But when something is large and the tolerances are not in the thousandths, they have their place. Sorry for the long winded and rambling answer. I'm not sure exactly what you want to accomplish but if you think you can "print" out custom bike parts, in many colors, and just package them up and ship them out right off the printer you have a few years to wait. Because there is a considerable amount of finishing work that would need to be done to them to make them presentable or marketable. If on the other hand you simply want to quickly mock-up actual size creations and trial fit them to other pieces this may be the way to go to get you to market the quickest. But you will still have to fall back on traditional manufacturing methods for the actual finished product. Good luck in your project and if this is something that interests you I'd find a community college or industrial training center that teaches CAD-CAM, and take some solidworks modeling courses. Maybe a CAM course or two also.
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