Fabbers

[Maine farmer]

As someone who tries to make as many on-farm repairs to equipment as is practical as well as possible, I am very interested in the relatively new 3-D printer technology and it's potential to reduce harvest downtime and perhaps save money on parts. I understand that there is a website (which I have not yet looked for) with instuctions on how to make your own fabber. I am so excited about the possibilities of this technocogy that I fear it may cloud my better judgement. Has anyone here had any experience with the fabber technology? Would constructing my own fabber be a good use of my limited time?

[Gordon Freeman]

As someone who tries to make as many on-farm repairs to equipment as is practical as well as possible, I am very interested in the relatively new 3-D printer technology and it's potential to reduce harvest downtime and perhaps save money on parts. I understand that there is a website (which I have not yet looked for) with instuctions on how to make your own fabber. I am so excited about the possibilities of this technocogy that I fear it may cloud my better judgement. Has anyone here had any experience with the fabber technology? Would constructing my own fabber be a good use of my limited time?

 

There are commercial grade three-dimensional printers, none too cheap, that you can buy. However, they wouldn't be of any practical use except for model designs at this point since they only make solid items, with unmovable parts. Not to mention the material the "print" is made of is undesirable in your situation.

 

You do bring up an interesting topic though, because when they do adapt this technology, society will get more practical things out of it; for example (for farming, in this case) a self-replicating (or self-mending) fence would be handy.

 

If it gets really advanced, we might make a "replicator" out of it, like they had in Star Trek, where food is atomically made on the spot. But that's probably a ways away at the current time.

 

So right now, not really. They wouldn't be very useful, but keep looking into it, they'll come around soon.

[CraigD]

As someone who tries to make as many on-farm repairs to equipment as is practical as well as possible, I am very interested in the relatively new 3-D printer technology and it's potential to reduce harvest downtime and perhaps save money on parts.

As I understand it, 3-D printers are devices that either build up solid objects either by depositing some liquid material such as plaster or melted metal in layers, or use beams of light to cure portions of volume of some material so that the unwanted parts can be washed away to leave the desired object.

 

I'm hopeful and excited by the prospect that 3D printers will in the near future allow electronics to be fabricated at much less of the cost of the $US1,000,000+ photolithography factories that make them now. From what I've seen of them (on TV and the internet only), they aren't much good at making hard, durable objects - ie: machine parts - more at making models, and blanks used to make molds to cast parts using conventional techniques.

 

For machine parts - the sort of thing needed to repair buses and backhoes - I think existing computer-controlled machine tools (eg: lathes and drill-presses) are best. I've been amazed watching these machines in industry shows as far back as the mid 1980s, and knew some mine operators who saved money with these US$100,000+ machines by making replacement parts near on-site rather than having to wait for parts to be shipped cross-country or oversea while machine sat broken down.

 

If you're going to try your hand at making a fabber, GG, this might be how you want to go: take a lathe spindle and motor, turn it vertical, build a table that can move it in 2-dimensions under a movable cutter and a drill press, get all the pieces to move under servo control, then get a computer to control them. Assuming you're an absolute wizard of a machinist and computer technologists, though, unless you have almost zero need for sleep, I find it hard to imagine finding enough free time to makes such a thing in less than a few years. :blink:

 

I understand that there is a website (which I have not yet looked for) with instuctions on how to make your own fabber.

I know of two main movements along these line:

• Fab Lab. A spinoff of the popular MIT course "how to build practically anything", which is supported by sites like fabfolk.com. FabFolk's annual conference is August 15-19 in Lima, Peru - registration's a cheap US$250, but for us US-ians and Europeans, it's a bit of a trip. :(
  
• RepRap. More geared toward homebuilders and more web-centric, but also focused on building small machine that can build, and ultimately assemble, copies of themselves, realizing the old and somewhat scary Self-replicating machine idea, not so much on making a machine that would be of practical use on a farm, repair shop, mine, etc.