5th article, Malaysia.

 TRENDS: 3-D printing comes home

 By : Izwan Ismail

If you think producing a product prototype at home is expensive, think again. Izwan Ismail says the age of ’personal manufacturing’ has arrived.

The UP! Mini 3-D printer in printing mode.

BUSINESSMAN C.H. Poh is playing with his five-year-old son at home when his toy Transformers accidently breaks an arm.

No cause for alarm. Poh takes the broken arm, measures it and computes the details into a special 3-D design software on his notebook.

Once the 3-D drawing is done, he connects his notebook to a portable 3-D printer via a USB cable.

Poh presses the print command and three hours later, the model of an arm that resembles the original one is produced.

What Poh needs to do is just colour it accordingly, and attach it back to the robot.

PORTABLE

Thanks to the advancement in technology, 3-D printers are now accessible to home consumers.

Poh, who distributes 3-D printers for home and small businesses, says many of the devices are portable and affordable.

“The UP! Mini and UP! Plus, for example, are among the first 3-D printers for homes that are available in Malaysia. Now you can do small product prototyping at home.”

Poh himself uses the UP! Mini at home to make toys, replacement parts, and decorative stuff for his son and wife.

“The UP! printer works like a normal inkjet. The only difference is that it takes a longer time to print (as it prints in 3-D). Besides that, it doesn’t print in the normal picture format like .JPG, but a 3-D file format called stereo lightography or .STL.”

And unlike the inkjet printer, the 3-D printer uses a plastic wire-like material as their “ink”, called ABS.

“The ABS is fed into the printer’s head, where it will be melted at 260-degree Celsius while printing,” says Poh.

The printer will print from the base and up until it finishes.

Poh says with such printers, the economies of scale no longer applies.

“If before this you have to produce prototype products in 10 or 20 units, now you can just print one and the cost is just RM20 per product compared to RM3,000 in the past,” he says.

APPLICATIONS

Since the new generation 3-D printers are meant for home and small business use, their applications are limitless.

Users are not just limited to printing or producing prototypes, but just about anything that comes to mind.

The UP! printer comes with a software called UP! 3-D layout software and a driver, but users can also get for free 3-D designs for printing at websites like www.thingiverse.com where people share their 3-D design files.

Poh says while one can purchase professional design software AutoCAD and AutoDESK pro, freeware like 3-DTin.com and SketchUP are also available on the Net.

UP! Plus is priced at RM5,000 while the UP! Mini goes for RM3,000.

The UP! Plus has a bigger platform size of 140mm x 140mm x 135mm height with better resolution of 0.2mm in layer thickness, while the UP! Mini measures 120mm x 120mm x 120mm. It’s resolution is 0.25, which is slightly more coarse than the UP! Plus.