3D Printing

One of the most hotly talked about subjects in Science at the moment. 3D printers are able to make objects by building up layers of material - usually plastic, but they have made 3D printers which print in metal, paper and other materials too. At the moment they are very costly (around £1000!) but prices are beginning to fall.
Discuss 3D printers here? Does anyone own one or want to own one? What object would you print?

Rumour has it that some Asda stores are starting to offer 3D printing.

I would consider getting one once the price comes down in a few years. Use it to make parts for customising: heads, hands, weapons, accessories.

Once 3D printers become readily available, there will be plenty of sites spring up offering 3D images for printing. One of the main sites currently is Shapeways: http://www.shapeways.com/ A little pricy.

I hope to create figures with 3d printing soon

It would be awesome to have one so you can print out Doctor Who characters etc  

TheIronLAD wrote:It would be awesome to have one so you can print out Doctor Who characters etc  

They would be more in the nature of figurines or statuettes, unless you could get images of specific parts

I know , I like statues anyway :)

If you can do a head and adapt an existing body... that is the theory anyway...

We might finally get a 5" scale Capaldi figure if 3D printing technology becomes affordable! However it does have more serious uses other than just model making - for example, in the future astronauts will be able to 3D print tools when in space. This will save on the cost of bringing all the tools up and if they lose one they can just print another.

I'd seriously love to own a 3D printer. If you followed the way that CO articulates their figures by making the pieces separately and then piecing the figures together, in theory you could make articulated action figures. I guess that depends on the strength of the plastic though.

It depends on how rigid the plastic turns out to be... is is soft enough to heat and pop into a figure join or not

Kevin's Customs wrote:It depends on how rigid the plastic turns out to be... is is soft enough to heat and pop into a figure join or not

There are quite a few different grades available from soft flexible to ceramic.