Richard Smith needed to build a wall-climbing robot for a customer — so he printed one.
Smith, director of Smith Engineering Gb Ltd., used a CAD program to design a 3D model of the WallRover, a dual-track roving robot with a spinning rotor in the chassis that creates enough suction to hold the device to a wall. He then sent the design file for each component to a 3D printer, which sliced the objects into sections less than 1/100th of an inch thick by printing it, one layer at a time, using molten ABS plastic as the “ink.”
As a 3D printer begins fabricating an object, each layer gets fused or glued to the previous one and the product gradually gets built up. Under the hood, 3D printers use a variety of different fabrication techniques, several of which are based on ink-jet technology, and can use many different types of “build” materials to print three-dimensional objects. (To learn more about the different types of 3D printers, check out our comparison chart.)
Before buying a 3D printer, Smith would send its designs to a service bureau for fabrication, and parts took three or four days to turn around. Had Smith used a service bureau for the WallRover project — which went through 22 design iterations — it would have taken six months to complete, Smith says.
Instead, Smith was able to get a final design and fully functional prototype to the client within two weeks.
And he did it using a consumer-grade 3D “plastic jet printer” that he built from a kit. The RapMan, from 3D Systems’ Bits From Bytes division, cost just $1,500. Smith spent another $180 for plastic filament — the “ink” consumed by the printer. “It saved five months of development time and somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $20,000 in models” that were created in-house instead of being sent to a service bureau, he says.
Smaller and cheaper
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