Is 2025 finally the year of non-planar 3D printing? Maybe it won’t have to be if [Ten Tech] gets his way!
Ironing is the act of going over the top surface of your print again with the nozzle, re-melting it flat. Usually, this is limited to working on boring horizontal surfaces, but no more! This post-processing script from [Tenger Technologies], coupled with a heated, ball-shaped attachment, lets you iron the top of arbitrary surfaces.
At first, [Ten Tech] tried out non-planar ironing with a normal nozzle. Indeed, we’ve seen exactly this approach taken last year. But that approach fails at moderate angles because the edge on the nozzle digs in, and the surrounding hot-end parts drag.
[Ten Tech]’s special sauce is taking inspiration from the ball-end mill finishing step in subtractive CNC work: he affixed the round tip of a rivet on the end of a nozzle, and insulating that new tool turned it into an iron that could smooth arbitrary curvy top layers.
One post-processing script later, and the proof of concept is working. Check out the video below to see it in action. As it stands, this requires a toolhead swap and the calibration of a whole bunch of new parameters, but it’s a very promising new idea for the community to iterate on. We love the idea of a dedicated tool and post-processing smoother script working together in concert.
Will 2025 be the year of non-planar 3DP? We’ve seen not one but two superb multi-axis non-planar printer designs so far this year: one from [Joshua Bird] and the other from [Daniel] of [Fractal Robotics]. In both cases, they are not just new machines, but are also supported with novel open-source slicers to make them work. Now [Ten Tech]’s ironer throws its hat in the ring. What will we see next?
Thanks to [Gustav Persson] for the tip!
The more I 3d print, the less enamored I am with it. It’s great for somethings, and sucks at others. The problem is that people are using it for everything under the sun. Did that happen with outher new mediums? Was bakelite used in places it never should have? Fiberglass?
You can say that about anything. For what it’s great at, it’s irreplaceable. For what it sucks at, don’t use it for that. Learning which is which is part of the fun.
‘Learn to MIG and TIG weld you 3d printing freaks.’
Now get off my lawn.
There is a bright future in typewriter repair!
It’s funny, I have a filament-based 3D printer and it has worked well for me in the (limited) applications I have come up with.
But I have been spending a bunch of time looking at various ‘starter’ welding rigs more recently, for the things the printer can’t do well :)
Find something that can do aluminum, or can be extended to do aluminum with the addition of a gas bottle, in my opinion, because it’s just so nice to work with other than that it’s hard to weld.
Get a gas bottle, which gas will depend on which metal.
It will cost as much as a cheapy MIG.
On the cheapy, skip that step.
The Miller 120V MIG/TIG convertible is just a much better welder.
But much more than the $200 used craigslist MIG I started with.
IIRC it’s $1000 without the TIG parts, or a tank.
But you’re spending $500 the cheap way, half of which you will regret.
It’s not $200 vs $1000 it’s $500 vs $1300.
Best bought where ever you get your gas bottle filled.
Miller is good about keeping welders off Amazon.
They are there, but are being sold by someone who bought them at retail.
Problem with all 120V welders is they are underpowered.
The Miller is inverter based, much more efficient.
Less waiting for the welder to cool off.
My cheapy was good for 10% duty cycle at high power setting.
Also the miller is properly adjustable, cheapies just suck.
Also: get some good gloves, the cheap ones kill your touch.
And don’t go too cheap on the hat.
I started getting headaches, so took a second to look at the sun, helmet was strobing.
If you’ve really got to go cheap, get a stick welder.
They’re not terrible, if you learn on one of those, MIG will be easy later.
The example of inappropriate uses that immediately jumps to my mind is radioactive material. Some of the earliest (mis)applications are truly horrifying with the benefit of time and knowledge.
I think asbestos has kinda had the worst of both ends of the spectrum- was used in some questionable applications, and is now considered almost magically evil…
It kinda is. Asbestos fibers never leave your body once they get in, because they don’t dissolve and they kill the macrophages that try to eat them and transport them away. They’re sharp, so they pierce membranes, migrate and lodge themselves in tissues and stay there. They’re also nanometers thin, so they can physically slice through cells.
The body tries to get rid of them by inflammation, but it can’t, so they either get encapsulated by scar tissue in the worst possible place to have scarring (lungs, intestines) and/or you get cancer from the constant mechanical irritation and inflammation 20-40 years later.
It’s worse than radionuclides because human cells have not developed any means to deal with the damage, like DNA repair against ionizing radiation. The ways in which your body tries to isolate and remove the asbestos fibers itself causes damage.
Back in the day people used to make a point by eating asbestos to say “See, this is completely harmless”, and then die of bowel cancer in their 50’s.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I firmly believe a 3D printer should be ONE of the tools in a maker’s arsenal, but not ALL of them. I own hammers, but I own lots of other traditional tools as well.
Sucks at others is probably too strong – there is very little if anything a good 3d printer really can’t do that can be done in plastic (or if you have the budget powdered metal) adequately. The only real downside is minor quibbles like your cheap FDM printer requires you to design for the method (though so does everything really), mostly to compensate for anisotropic nature of FDM, and be very very patient if you want a really pretty end result.
Don’t get me wrong though its not the most efficient option in a vast number of cases – you need a few holes to put switches in on your otherwise rather blank front panel a 3d print (at least off a well calibrated printer) is a perfectly good end result. But you’d get a result that is probably even better looking, and vastly quicker using a regular paper printer guide to let you know where to drill etc.
The real reason I think we are seeing 3d printing get everywhere is it really is the one tool that can do a decent enough job at everything – I have a variety of tools all rather packing my tiny workshop, but nothing I’ve made on any of them absolutely HAD to be made on them, minor design compromise or two at times and the 3d printer (which also lives out there) could have done the job, eventually. Or in one case did in fact do the job over a decade ago, and the only reason that speaker mount is getting replaced in metal now(ish – got to get to that project) is because a clumsy giant (me) broke the printed one and at some point in the decade since has misplaced the 3d printer files… If I had those I’d probably just print another one, as I don’t its a great excuse to play (or perhaps I should say practice) with the lathe and mill, and the end result should be a slightly improved version as the design can be tweaked a bit with the more capable and not at all creep prone material.
3D printing is very accessible: anyone can use it, so there will be more ‘abuse’. Not many people have access to a nuclear powerplant or a Multi-Stage Batch Distillation installation (or have the knowledge to do something useful with it).
3D printers are abundant, relative cheap and very easy to get started with (require very little knowledge)
Bakelite and fiberglass are less accessible for laymen.
‘arbitrary curvy top layers’
Obviously false.
The benchy shown has corners too tight for the tool to reach.
Doesn’t necessarily need a tool change.
Mount multiple ‘ball irons’ at nozzle height around the nozzle.
Should clear during regular layer print.
Tapered copper rods threaded into edges of heat block, user picks the number, end radius, rod diameter, offset, shape etc.
Covered in thermal insulator, except at ends.
Putting them on the model top and sides becomes a software problem.
Not every spot will be reachable, but most will, at one layer or another.
Point is, no tool change required, runs at end of every layer.
Might require part cooling be turned off, or irons will get cold.
Tell me you haven’t watched the video without telling me you haven’t watched the video lol
“Is 2025 finally the year of non-planar 3D printing? Maybe it won’t have to be…”
This bit confuses me. The first question implies that non-planar 3D printing is something being hoped for, but then the next sentence implies the opposite. Which is it? Is non-planar 3D printing something to look forward to, or to avoid?
I believe he was saying something to the effect that non-planar ironing could achieve some of the anticipated attributes of non-planar printing. Since maybe non-planar ironing is here now, that it may satisfy some of the appetite for non-planar printing (which may or may not be set to arrive on the same inbound train as cold fusion).
non-planar is already here, there are slicers for it, it’s just not widely adopted for the reasons stated in the video, namely that the model and the nozzle will have paths that clash because of the nozzle geometry being short, wide and stubby, hence him using a ball tip on the end of a long rod for non-planar ironing.
Interestingly, his ball tip for ironing, might just be a solution for non-planar printing, once someone can figure out how to wrap enough nichrome or an induction heater etc. around a long thin bar shaped nozzle :-)
Some of the newer hotends like creality unicorn or bambu could also be a reasonable method, if someone can move the model cooling fan ducts out of the way.
Maybe hot fusion, but yeah. Still ten years out.
Indeed, experiments in non-planar 3D printing have been going on for almost a decade now. (https://hackaday.com/2016/07/27/3d-printering-non-planar-layer-fdm/) But 99.99% of prints don’t take advantage of it.
Your point about the appetite is probaby it, though. If 90% of everything you’d want to do can be done with normal 2.5D printing, there’s little incentive to push for that extra bit. Still, once slicers and printers catch up, I believe that we’ll all be doing actually-3D prints in the future.
And we’ll be able to throw our old prints in the Mr. Fusion to power it all. :)