3D Printing

[qtrain23]

Shouldn't be too difficult. I've been printing customized pens for people that use the guts from a bic. It's smaller than some ear socks.

But have you printed rubber yet

 

[Rustpot]

I'm just curious how much our industries may cross. Do you have much experience with Hypalon or CPE in "pure" or blended forms? If so, what type of uses to you see for it in your industry?

I'm not familiar with Hypalon or CPE. We use poly tubing for water traced active thermal insulation on flexible lines running in robot dress out.

The majority of what we do is heating/cooling of water to exchange temperature with paints, sealers, adhesives, inks, etc. A lot of industrial automated fluids processes have target temperatures near enough to room temperature that brunt force heating or cooling can't adequately control to the given setpoint. So we work from point of dispense/application and build a thermal load model to determine the amount of energy required to maintain a target temperature within the customer's requirements.

For instance, a robot spraying paint on a car has paint formulated to lay and adhere at something like 76°. If it's 85° in the booth you'll have a hard time getting the paint to lay without sags and drips. If you bring in a fresh drum from the storage room that isn't insulated and it's 50° in the winter you'll have a hard time getting enough volume down to build the correct layer thickness. The old dudes that painted cars were artists to a certain degree and could compensate; robots not so much. So we provide temperature control to ensure the paint reaches the nozzle at 76° year-round, to within 0.1°F.

This is one of the main reasons we saw so many crap paint jobs on cars during the automation surge that automakers individually have been going through. They took a manual process and automated it without know the true intricacies of the job. Poor primer adhesion and the entire paint job will lift off the car. Not to mention the paint companies had to scramble to reformulate based on nonsense input and impossible requirements from the new autonomous processes. We see much better paint now due to the leap forward in coatings technologies and understanding the automated coating process. The current hurdle is durability as the trend moves towards fewer coats, blended coats, no prime, no top. Reducing time in the booth, cure time, number of robots, gallons of paint, weight of paint, inconsistency in coatings is the current name of the game, trending towards a controlled single coat for paint. It produces a less robust surface currently, and it's harder to keep a show-quality paint job with current low and mid-tier brands. Not that it's a real concern to the automakers, but still.

 

[THE X-MAN]

Q,you use an .stl file to send to printer?
What software to create the geometry do you use?

 

[qtrain23]

Q,you use an .stl file to send to printer?
What software to create the geometry do you use?

Inventor for solid modeling

Simplify3D for slicing the stls

 

[kronin323]

Idle thought - it'd be funny to see an ebay auction where somebody DIY'd some earsocks by dipping the earstems in wax like making a candle... or in that rubber stuff you can use to coat tool handles and the like, I forget what it's called...

 

[qtrain23]

Plastidip

 

[joecool862]

Seems like the earsocks would be the biggest printing challenge, being a small hollow tube...

I actually don't think this would be hard to do with a printer or casting them. The hard part with casting would be the nose bombs because they are a complex 3D structure inside. We need somebody to try to figure this out