What’s a Clonedel? It’s the latest craze sweeping the RepRap hobbyist market. The folks at Open3DP figured a way to print molds of the parts required to build a RepRap Prusa 3D printer, and there are many who are trying this approach. Why? Because if you’ve got a mold, you can cast the same parts much more quickly than 3D printing them. In other words, you’ve got yourself the beginnings of a mass-production operation. RepRap blogger Neil Underwood recently examined some of these “cast parts” to see how well they stand up. His conclusion? The cast parts are better than those he could print himself, but not as good as custom-built equivalents available at higher cost. The cast parts are more fragile than normal ABS parts, but they’re still quite usable, assuming you have a drill press to punch through the necessary holes, which do not appear on the cast parts as delivered.
Here’s the really interesting part: this approach changes utterly the economics for RepRap parts. Underwood writes:
18 Months ago the plastic parts for a Mendel where going for $700+, 12 Months ago the price settled down to $250-$400, 3 Months Ago Prusa Mendel dropped the price for the RP parts to $125-$150. Now the Clonedel cast RP parts are going for $50 (I personally know of 3 shops gearing up to start selling them).
We’re looking forward to these inexpensive parts. That and watching Neil attempt to break more parts on live video.
Via RepRap
Thanks for the writeup, we've been producing parts at Metrix Create:Space all month. We have pushed out about 50 sets(!) of parts so far, and have also sent out molds to a few hackerspaces and reprap shops. We have printed parts for people, and now we have poured them. Because we like to use our robots for printing *things* and we want to have more people with 3D printers, we really have embraced the clonedel in a big way. If you walk in to Metrix Create:Space, we can pour you a set -while you wait-
As far as the low-priced molds go, the pricing we set was *introductory* and will end on Apr. 1st. If you are interested in getting in on this deal, you have a couple of days left to do it.
http://metrixcreatespace.com/clonefactory
Thanks for the writeup, we've been producing parts at Metrix Create:Space all month. We have pushed out about 50 sets(!) of parts so far, and have also sent out molds to a few hackerspaces and reprap shops. We have printed parts for people, and now we have poured them. Because we like to use our robots for printing *things* and we want to have more people with 3D printers, we really have embraced the clonedel in a big way. If you walk in to Metrix Create:Space, we can pour you a set -while you wait-
As far as the low-priced molds go, the pricing we set was *introductory* and will end on Apr. 1st. If you are interested in getting in on this deal, you have a couple of days left to do it.
http://metrixcreatespace.com/clonefactory