This is another model for my train layout
I used a number of images of old traffic lights to suggest the design.
I got the parts printed by Shapeways a while back, using their highest resolution printer. Here’s the result, with a short length of brass 1/16" tubing as the post:
It’s a little over an inch high. It has a 2x3 mm (I think) yellow surface mount LED. The light is steady here, but I want to have it blinking slowly, using an Arduino board.
I won’t go into too much detail at the moment, but wanted to share this:
ETA: No working video at the moment. I’ll try to fix it later…
In the meantime, here’s a photo:
The model is from Printables:
Printed on a Prusa i3 MK3.9S with Polymaker PolyLite PETG in Translucent Red.
I love it!
I love vase mode printings but they tend to be… fragile.
Love the color!
One the work machine so I don’t have pictures or access to things, but I mostly print out stuff I find on places like MakerWorld, Printables, and Thingiverse. I do make some of my own stuff using TinkerCAD, but it’s mostly functional prints. (There is the biohazard sign I spent a morning putting together and an afternoon printing it.)
Since the printer I bought has the four spool system (X1-Carbon with AMS) I also bought the lithophane kit that Bambu Labs sells, and I’ve made a handful of those.
It’s my first time trying out Vase Mode. I’m hoping PETG helps mitigate the fragility somewhat.
I printed a couple of others:
The Green one on the right was supposed to be much taller, but my wife saw it and said “Stop it, I want it to be that short!” so here we are.
Left to right:
Printed in Polymaker PolyLite PETG Translucent Blue
Printed in Polymaker PolyLite PETG Translucent Red
Printed (shorter) in Polymaker PolyLite PETG Translucent Green
All printed on a Prusa i3 MK3.9S.
Nice. I wouldn’t have thought hearts could be space filling, but that pattern qualifies. I assume you used your own printer?
I swear when I saw “plant pot” I read it as “pot plant.”
Yes. I got a Prusa i3 MK3S several years ago. I took a break from it for a while because I botched an upgrade, but dusted it off a few months ago and got it working again. For Xmas, I got an upgrade kit to bring it up to a 3.9S, which effectively doubled the print speed among other things.
I’m curious, how much are you paying for those prints from Shapeways? Feel free to keep that information to yourself, if you’d prefer. If you want to share one of your STLs (or 3MFs), I’d be happy to slice it and give you an estimate of how long and how much filament it would take. Obviously those aren’t the only costs to consider, but it should at least give a rough idea so you could better understand what the markup is like.
Unfortunately, the resurrection of Shapeways didn’t include the records of orders. However I was able to track down my Paypal receipts. For example the sign shown here was about $27 for a full color print (which I had to paint anyway because the final color didn’t really match what it looked like in my file). The cup part of the design (shown on the completed model) cost about $11. Shipping for both was about $10.
The sign is about three inches wide; the cup (using the highest resolution printer) is about 1 1/4", so both are pretty small. I’ve spent a lot more on bigger items.
The rest of the model uses most of the kit parts shown in the first link; e.g., the plastic passenger car and the wood kitchen to the left. I did a lot of cutting and gluing and so on.
Here’s my extremely rough mockup and estimate on the sign, since it’s the easier one to reproduce.
Clearly the details are different, but I’m just trying to get a estimate of the filament usage. It says 8.2g, but let’s go ahead and double that for safety and then round up to 20g. Prusament costs $30/kg, which is by no means the low end, as Polymaker costs just $22/kg and VoxelPLA costs $16/kg. Assuming Prusament, that’s ~$0.60 in raw materials. Post processing is negligible, so I wouldn’t asses a cost for that. A couple quick searches suggest that my printer uses ~100W while printing, so this would use 0.025 kwh. Doing a very simple calculation on my recent electric bill gives me a figure of $0.13/kwh, so that would be $0.00325 in electricity. Looking at the first few results on Amazon for bubble mailers, which I think would be appropriate for this, I can get them for ~$0.25 each. There’s plenty of calculations that could go into figuring out the wear on the printer, but I’m just going to pretend it’s $1 and move on. Finally, there’s the cost of labor to set up the print, retrieve it, put it in the mailer, and ship it. I’m going to use the Federal minimum wage of $20 and call it 15 minutes of labor for convenience. A properly set up shop should streamline this somewhat, so I expect actual to be less.
I’m going to ignore shipping costs because they vary widely and you already mentioned $10 was a separate charge for that anyway.
Let’s break it down with a table:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Material | $0.60 |
| Power | $0.00325 |
| Packing Material | $0.25 |
| Equipment | $1.00 |
| Labor | $5 |
| Total | $6.85325 |
About $7, but that’s with some pretty rough back of the napkin math, and that’s cost without profit, although I believe I did inflate things slightly.
I’m definitely not trying to question your choices, I just wanted to get an idea of how much of a disparity, as I’ve never used one of the print on demand services. It might be worth shopping around a bit, as I’m sure there are some alternatives. I know for sure that some of the PCB fabrication services also do 3D printing, like PCBWay and JLCPCB, but it might also be worth seeing if there are any people local to you that would be willing to print on something like Prusa World. There’s also the option of finding a local makerspace or library, but that gets a lot more hands-on, which might be more than you’re ready for/interested in.
Thanks for the info, it gave me some food for thought.
From that base cost, triple the value to compensate for losses, misprints, degradation of the equipment and maintenance of the working space.
18 is still below 27, but IIRC that is not filament but colored sand, and those printers are quite more expensive (and extracting and cleaning figurines from sand printers is a bit more labor intensive), and you don’t have to share your margin with investors 
That’s a lot cheaper! I guess the thought of buying my own machine doesn’t appeal to me – especially one that could give the high resolution (0.2 mm?) like in the traffic light. A couple of years ago I tried to track down the printer used by Shapeways, and it was an HP that cost $50,000. Probably less expensive nowadays but still . . . Also, I’d be afraid that, like so many other hobby devices I’ve bought, I wouldn’t use it enough to warrant the capital costs (like that air brush setup in the basement corner that I haven’t used much at all). Alas I have grandiose ideas that would take me 100 years to implement.
BTW I love how your sign looks! The “DINER” really looks like a neon sign. Is that how it would print?
I tried to account for that with my $1 figure, since it’s such a short print, but I admit that my math may have been naive.
I didn’t see anything in the linked post that looked like anything that couldn’t be printed on a standard consumer grade FDM printer, but certainly if the materials were more expensive, that could account for some of the cost difference.
Totally fair. Owning and running a 3D printer is a hobby all by itself. For reference, my printer is capable 0.2mm layer resolution as well as 0.1mm if you want really small layers.
For reference, my original MK3S cost ~$700, and the upgrade to the MK3.9S cost ~$400. A brand new MK4S costs $1000 fully assembled, or $730 as a kit.
Same.
It is, but literally. That screenshot is from PrusaSlicer, and that’s what the sliced view looks like. It shows the paths the extruder would take to print the object. In reality, I think the filament would flatten out enough so that the adjacent lines would likely fuse together and create a fairly smooth surface.
I’m sure it’s possible to create a pretty convincing neon-style sign at that scale, but it’s beyond my current capabilities.
I missed that reference. He’s refering to the old HP Zprinters that nowadays are part of another company. They are the sand printers I was telling. Is like laser sintering, except instead of heat they use either starch or sand and a binding polimer and ink, both deployed from inkjet cartridges. Because the material is deployed fully layer per layer, you get better supported models, and you get full color printing.
On the other hand, is quite expensive, material wastage is high (not as high as the new multi material extruders, though), prints are a bit on the fragile side and color is always a bit washed out.
@kxkvi nowadays i would recommend looking at resin printers for what you do. FDM (aka the “prusa” style printers) are capable of very good resolution but they are really not meant for that. And they tend to be more compact (specially if you are not going to print big parts). On the other hand, they are slow, and the chemicals you will handle are skin irritants and the gas is also recommended to vent. So you’ll need a well ventilated area far from children and animals.
OTOH you can get pretty fine detail nowadays with a FDM. You will need a special nozzle (you can do 0.1 mm layers but if you’re extruding 0.4mm material they are going to look squished) and there are materials that work better than others. You will probably have to do some light sanding, priming and painting, but I guess you already do that
And the good (?) thing is once you have one of these printers, you’ll probably won’t want to stop at printing miniatures 
people start to chant One of us!, One of us!
Ah that makes sense.
I’ve seen articles on that in model railroad magazines. Basic idea is to scratch letters, drawings, etc. onto clear plastic, paint the scratches, then light it from the edge:
I’ve never tried it. I suppose the sign could be 3D printed, but the light would probably illuminate any ridges from the printing process. Using fluorescent colors and a UV light might keep the ridges from showing. Perhaps sanding the surface down to a very high grit might help.
Just scratching clear plastic with a dental pick as in the article would be just as effective.
Even if a smooth build plate was used, you’ll still see lines from the filament, unfortunately. Getting a smooth, clear plate using a 3d printer is extraordinarily difficult without a lot of hair pulling.
Now, you might be able to print on top of a clear plastic plate, but that also involves a bit of tweaking and shenaniganry.
A CNC engraver on acrylic would be absolutely the right tool for the job.
Or take a piece of clear plastic to an engraving service!
I have a couple images of stuff I’ve printed lately:
and 
Right now the printer is printing a new filament spool winder, because the old one broke trying to get a badly spooled roll of filament transfered over to a new spool. There was frustration and ~$20 worth of filament that went directly into the trash bin due to that incident.
Funny!
