Make Your Own Fabber

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By Bre Pettis
Posted 2006/11/25 @ 1:48 am
Category General

Make: reader, Palenoue, sent me to go check out this great wiki about making your own Fabber. A fabber is something every maker should be dreaming of, imagine how fun it would be to make custom parts with something like this. – Link

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5 Responses to Make Your Own Fabber

Shadyman on November 25th, 2006 at 12:00 am said:

Oooooooooh

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Shadyman on November 25th, 2006 at 12:05 am said:

Barring a 3D fabricator, how about a 3d mill? *searches MAKE and Hackaday archives*

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-soapy- on November 25th, 2006 at 4:18 am said:

A 3D mill is far, far harder, due to the contact nature of the milling process, and also the limitations of starting with something and taking bits off it are far greater than starting with nothing and adding only those bits you want.

Building a laser fabber will also allow the software to work far less hard, as you just have to convert it into slices of the right thickness then create each layer in the right order. With a mill, you have to factor that you cannot cut a hole smaller than your cutter, you can’t cut a horizontal hole unless you have a way to mill from the horizontal axis (hence the creation of 6 axis milling machines! There is a lot a 3 axis machine cannot do), your head will collide if you try to cut deeper than the shank of the tool, etc.

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hammerthumb on November 25th, 2006 at 10:23 am said:

This is an awesome step in the right direction.

I’m concerned about two things:

1) The cost of the consumables – plastic resin in small quanities is kind of expensive. OTOH if this takes off the market should fix that. Also, there may be cheaper alternatives for the DIY person such as recycling waste plastic and paper. Imagine making your own strong 3D recycled, corrugated, thing-a-majig for only the cost of electricity!

2) The obstacles to “Democratization” – Here in America intellectual property law and enforcement is mostly controlled by selfish interests. The DHS has already been active in enforcing IP laws (something to do with rubik’s cubes knock-offs if I recall.) Without the blessing or negligence of the powers-that-be I worry that this project might not be allowed to reach wide adoption due to some sort of copyright, patent, lawyer, bureaucrat, lawmaker nonsense.

These things won’t stop me from putting a Fab@Home on my Christmas Wish List and exercising my voting rights though

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emalone on December 1st, 2006 at 9:28 am said:

Thanks very much for the attention to Fab@Home. I wanted to let everyone know that the official URL is http://www.fabathome.org, and links to the site via other url’s will no longer work. Sorry for the trouble.
Evan (Fab@Home inventor)

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