I looked around and couldn’t find anything about this, so I’m going to ask here. Feel free to place it in a ‘daft ideas’ or even ‘beentherewontwork’ category.
What I am thinking of is a ‘barrel’ 3d printer. To put this as simply as I can. Imagine a typical Cartesian printer with the Y axis as a rotation. i.e., the plate would be barrel shaped…( or possibly even a spindle? )
I admit it hurts my head to think about the mechanics of it, but could it present a new paradigm for FDM printing? Perhaps thinking of it as sort of additive lathe?
Does anyone know if this has been tried?
It has been done to a limited extent with 5-axis printers. Only really one-off demo prints though. It’s easy to build turntable hardware but hard to program slicers to do entirely new things…
When you look at the guts of slicers, they’re basically just doing polygon intersection and line offsetting type math operations to turn a 3D model into a toolpath, which is a deterministic and straightforward algorithm when you strip out all the fancy features. But how do you “slice” objects for a rotating printer or a five-axis printer? I don’t know of any generalized proposals for how to tackle this, aside from some special usage cases where you don’t really need a slicer so much as custom gcode generation scripts that only do one thing.
@Ryan_Carlyle Thanks for your reply. Yes, I suppose the crunch will come with a slicer. I can see your point there. I’m now trying to imagine Simplify3D with a barrel instead of a plate representation - its an uncomfortable thought. Still, I suppose in principle it might work - just needs someone completely mad to develop it. 