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RE: Horizon Zero Dawn 3D Models Released!
You would be surprised how cheap 3D Printing is.
You can get a decent 3D Printer below $200. I recommend to spend more, but you can get some amazing prints out of a sub $200 printer.
The monthly cost of the material is far less than 2D printing! 2.2lbs of filament costs me $13-30 for a spool, and I can print around the clock for a month and have trouble using more than 1-2 spools.
My father spends hundreds of dollars/month on Inkjet Ink.
Wow that is a lot cheaper than I could have imagined ! I love design so I will have to get me one of these. My dad is buying one soon but I forgot the name of the brand. I also hope to learn to do casting equipment with 3D so I could smelt silver or something else and make jewelry or other decorations
If you're thinking about getting into 3D printing and you haven't spent a lot of time working with building kit electronics, there are some out-of-the-box solutions which as Mark says, cost in the $200 range and which provide some incredible prints.
One of the best out-of-the-box experiences that you can probably get is with the Monoprice Select Mini V2, which if you keep an eye out you can find for under $200 brand-new and can literally be printing within 20 minutes of plopping it onto your table.
My personal choice was to get in early on the Kickstarter of the Monoprice Mini Delta which is also a fantastic printer in the "about $200" range but is still early in the production run and only a few have been up for sale publicly yet. If you're not looking to buy immediately and can afford to wait and look around a bit, that's certainly one that you could put on your "keep an eye on" list and get back around to.
It's absolutely true that a kilo of PLA is both cheap and lasts forever. I have a few roles that I picked up early on that I just can't seem to make any headway into. I print, and I print, and I print – but I still have a huge amount of material left. It might be maddening if it wasn't hilarious and wonderful. I feel like my investment in that stuff was not wasted.
If you're thinking about printing with other materials, you have to start thinking about whether you're storing it in a sufficiently dry environment. In particular, ABS loves to soak up water and when it soaks up water – it is terrible to print with. A number of other filaments have similar sort of caretaking issues, so that's something to watch, but PLA is the cheapest, easiest thing to print with and will serve 99% of the purposes that you have which don't involve things needing to be in hot environments.
You can also do lost material casting with 3D prints, as long as you're careful that the vented burning plastic doesn't go in your face or anywhere near your lungs. Given that you probably wouldn't want anything else that you were burning out of a mold to be inhaled, you're probably in good shape.
If you want to do some jewelry design and actually get it printed in metal, you can do that through a number of services including Shapeways and 3D Hubs. Worth looking into if that's the sort of thing you want to end up with because their industrial 3D printers are pretty impressive, and at the scale of most jewelry designs having a service printed for you isn't terribly painful.
Good luck, and I hope you find the things along the way that you're looking for!
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Wow you taught me everything i need to know ! Thank you so much for taking the time and giving me all this good information! It is much appreciated ! tip! 0.1
I am nothing if not an endless font of weird and sometimes useless information. Thank you.