Soooo... you want to join the CAD/CAM age.. to make jobs like this in 2 hours..! lets explore your options and explain what you need. (this will be less painful than you think.) 1: Do you need a mill or a printer? Entry level printers will cost you in the region AU$35K .. and then be aware that your local casting house likely has 5 of its bigger brothers (+- AU$90K) and they want to sell their gold and casting so they sell their prints at near or even below cost... What this means to you is that it actually works out cheaper for you to have stuff printed by your casting company than to make the massive investment into a poor entry level printer for yourself. Truth about printers.... many people will research this and be told that mill have alignment issues and that printers don't... BS! Printers have all new alignment issues making rings grow trapezoidal or even being out in scale in one of 3 different axis's. Printers also rely on very similar technology to drive the photo head that mills do and are subject to similar servicing needs.. the big difference here is that with a hex driver you can adjust your mill in a half hour for zero cost.. your printer however will have to be crated up, shipped back to the US/China and about AU$5K later and a month to two down the track you will have it back. Printers require handling of hazardous substances and cleaning/combining fluids and super expensive print fluids. Mills use .. well .. they use wax :) I'll let you do the math on that.. discuss service options and maintanance costs with the next guy trying to smear a printer off on you ;) You be surprised to find that printer costing up to half more again in under 5 years while your mill will pay itself off in under 1... 2:What strengths do mills have that printers dont? Mills can achive the same or better resolution that printers do at double to triple the speed to prodiuce a model. A printer can print a a super high resolution job.. but at huge time delay and at large running cost.. (which is why most the time you will see print jobs with "woodgrain" steplines on them from rushed (5 to 10hr) prints. A mill cuts regular wax.. NO burnout issues and the wax can be treated as any other normal carving wax is, so if you feel the need to do any regular work on a wax beside CAM you have that option. Most printer "wax" leaves ash in the investment after burnout which leaves pitting and incomplete surfaces, and some companies in order to beat this run burnout cycles for printed objects up into platinum temperatures to try beat this.. or even more bizarre they add exhaust flute to investments and literally blow the ash out the hot investment...once again surface finish suffers. Mills can cut metal and wood and hard plastics amongst other things. Laser engraving can be added to a standard mill at under $350AU. Most importantly... the Scenario! Mrs'K comes in at 8AM... has a design drawn up.. and you can tell her to be back at 3PM to fit the wax ring... MAJOR selling point.. another advantage to the speed Mills work at is that if you did it wrong you will know about it in under 2 hours in most cases.. and in the largest majority of cases you can recover from a bad cut with manual wax tools... CAN YOU SAY 12 HOUR REPRINT!??!!! with your Printer!! (#@$%@%&*^$#&%!!!!!) So lets continue onward now that we made the decison to leave the expensive awkward printing equipment to casting companies that will always undercut your printing cost on pure volume.. YOU WANT A MILL!! Click Here to Continue my Blurb with pretty Pictures or http://www.minitech.com |
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