Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleRed
Very true... Our team is lucky to get to use Ultem. Though we also have a printer made by the same company at our school that has very high quality prints made out of ABS.
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I think what Adam was getting at had little to do with the fact that the machine was printing in Ultem, but the fact that a machine that can print Ultem is a completely different beast than what's available in First Choice.
Don't get me wrong, the FIRST Choice Printers are more than capable of handling a lot of 'odd work' for most (if not all) FRC teams with very little expertise. It's reasonable to expect all of those printers to be able to handle Things like brackets, mounts, interfaces, etc - but implying that they'd be able to handle high stress or high precision components is a bit of a dangerous proposition.
A Fortus for example, whether is be running ABS, or Ultem 9085 is a $100,000 Machine that you don't just 'plug' into a wall outlet. Those machines are intended to be '3D production' Machines rather than a Rapid Prototyping Machine, or a '3D Printer'. Comparing the parts that come out of a Fortus, or even a Dimension Machine are misleading to say the least.
In any case, I don't mean to belittle the efforts of you and your team in getting more 3D printers out to as many teams as possible, it's really awesome. I'm just a bit concerned at some of the misinformation being thrown about regarding what each machine is actually capable of and would hate to see teams losing a bunch of time because they gambled on something they didn't fully understand.