from 3D model to useful object, at home
OfflineWe don't have personal star trek replicators yet, but it certainly is possible to change digital information into a useful object, in a semiautomated way.
The most obvious way is to print designs on paper and glue them together. But such objects aren't terribly useful because they can be destroyed both by heat and by water.
A bit better are homemade 3D printers. You could build one using lego (including programmable lego parts), a syringe, and maybe some other easy to obtain parts. There are two types: glue in powder, and [something] in air. The shapes that can be produced by the latter are limited, because gravity will pull down unattached parts. On the other hand, something-in-air allows for more choice in materials and bigger objects (unless you have LOTS of whatever powder you are using).
One good choice for something-in-air is wax, because it's easy to make the "impossible" shapes by pushing parts together and heating the contact points. Also, it can be used for making plaster moulds, which can then be used for making metal objects. And of course it can be recycled.
Metal probably is the most useful material for homemade objects, exactly the opposite of paper. You could even use it for making a better wax printer 
. Melting it at home (well, I would recommend outside your home) is a bit difficult, but possible.
If anyone has different ideas for making useful objects from digital designs at home, or just feels like commenting, I'm very curious.
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Well, there is one obvious way of doing it. Create 3D designs in your computer, split it into easy to read stages (blueprints) for various modular components, create those components according to these blueprints and then put the components together into a final product.
Digital technology helps a lot here because it lets you simulate everything digitally first to be sure that you can build it and that it can work, and only then start working on the real life thing.
But 3D printers are a lot more efficient, except that you first have to make one which doesn't seem like an easy thing to do... how exactly do they work anyway? I roughly know that they are basically sculpting rough materials into various shapes, but I've seen some really well detailed objects with precise components and wondered, how in the world could the above process create something like that?
I guess I should just read it at wikipedia or something, but I'll hit submit on this anyway, for the sake of conversation.
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Related to this, RepRap is a self copying 3D printer because it is built of plastic and can copy all of its own parts. Its design is under the GPL.
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Metal probably is the most useful material for homemade objects, exactly the opposite of paper. You could even use it for making a better wax printer
. Melting it at home (well, I would recommend outside your home) is a bit difficult, but possible.
I would proberbly use plastics, as they melt at lower tempratures and can also be machined like composite board. The problem with plasticts is that most come from oil and let off rather dodgy chemicals in their production and sometimes while working with it. It should be possible to recreate the 3D printer out of plastics as there are thermoset types.
As for the mechanism of how 3D printers work, they can use the reactions between to chemical componenents to make a solid object (something akin to the two chemicals being sprayed on the same place and they set when they hit each other, though this is rather messy), you also have the mechanical type of printers wich are basically like CNC machines, with revolving bits which move in x,y and z directions around the material to create the object, though these have some limiteation, as you have to have something with doesn't get machined on the material conected to a clamp or some such device to limit movement.
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Plastics are indeed quite useful, but most of them can't be used for things that get hot, and many indeed have toxic byproducts.
I know the wax -> plaster -> metal process is used in practice for small quantity production, so it would make a lot of sense to me to have a wax printer. Apparently the thermoplastic used in the RepRap is suitable as a replacement for wax in this process.
RepRap is definitely going somewhere, and I think I would like to get/build one once the machine is a little more capable.
There's also fab@home, which unfortunately needs ms windows.
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