Acquiring a 3D Printer?

[jgerstein]

Originally Posted by ImMoMo

So, has anyone had any luck in asking or contacting a company in regards to donating a 3D printer to the their team?

1257 was fortunate with Formlabs and a Form1+, but it helped that Max Lobovsky, the CEO and cofounder, was one of our founding members. Among other uses, we used it to get very smooth wheels for the lift on our elevator in 2015.

Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss

Do you know of any specific teams that use SLS? I know 3824 had a few parts made on an ARCAM machine via EBM for their 2013 bot. It might be interesting to find all the teams that use methods of additive manufacturing other than FDM.

So far, we've only used FDM and SLA parts on our robot. However, this year we may have SLS and/or DMLS access through a sponsor.

I'd also say that there are some FDM variants that are beyond what people think of in that context. In particular, the Markforged printers are FDM, but produce remarkably strong parts - the primary material for a Markforged printer is nylon with continous lengths of carbon fiber as reinforcement.