How much does it cost to build your own 3D Printer? I want to use an entire room for printing... well, at least most of it. Here are the measurements for the 3D printer I want to build: 10' x 10' x 8'
The only thing that should move is the printer head though because the size of the printer just about takes up the size of the room, making a moveable printing platform impossible.
I also have it in my head to recycle the scrap left behind from printing and use it again for the next print job, provided this is possible. Can someone help me?
Let me make myself perfect clear however:
I want to know the cost to set this up before I do anything. A rough estimate is good enough so long as the cost is not too low.
Well, let's break the whole set up down that you are wanting.
1- the heated bed. Presumably, you want to have one. In theory, you could link several standard-sized heated beds together, like floor tiles. It should heat up like normal, though you would have to boost the power coming in. Or you could go with a custom heating rig, similar in construction to floor heating systems that some houses have (basically pipes that continually pump warm water through them, radiantly heating the floor), though that would need to be a closed steam system in order to get the heat up to the appropriate temp. Or you could go with something like the "eyes" on an electric stove, though on a much larger scale.
2- the framework for the printer. Going over things in my mind, your best option here would be a delta-style printer, where the head is the only thing that moves around. You could do it like the standard 3-pillar system for the delta, or a 4-way delta system, where there are four pillars, and some system of steppers and such that move the print head about, similar to how the NFL has that camera that zooms all over the field during football games. The latter would have to be a custom rig, as I don't know of any style that you could copy off of as easily as the 3 pillar. The cables normally used would probably have to be some thin aircraft cable, so as to support the weight of the print head.
3- the print head/extruder. Well, this part you should be able to scale up fairly easily. Most heads are pretty similar in design, with a few differences of course. you would just need to decide on the appropriate design. The big issue here would be your filament. If you scale the extruder up, you would need a bigger filament, and I don't know about any filament suppliers that would carry stuff larger than the standard sizes.
4- control board. I dont see why you couldn't use a standard setup, so long as you made sure that putting the stepper motors on a load wouldn't fry your chips. A proper power supply would be good, though you may have to design that one yourself.
All in all, you could probably get away with a more-or-less functional room sized printer for about $10,000, so long as you source your parts well, and know when to work with the pros on the design. The driver board and microcontroller may have to be a custom job, but could easily be done. Maybe call it a "holy-$&@#-duino".
There would be a problem with increasing the filament diameter by a factor of 10 (rough scaling from normal to room sized printer). The volume of material per mm extruded would increase by a factor of 100 so it would store 100x as much heat but would actually take more than100x longer to cool.
I can't see the room sized print extruding molten plastic - you might be able to use a two part material which reacts chemically and sets very fast (but these reactions are often exothermic).
I know some people have experimented with 3D printing concrete but I'm not sure how they stop it slumping as it sets.
