A professional engineering community deserves a professional 3D printer. And sometimes, peering at a model via renders or our 3D viewer doesn't cut it - we want to have the physical model of it. So GrabCAD is setting out on a quest to find the best 3D printer out there! And we need your help.
Two weeks ago, we blogged about our MakerBot 3D printer and how great it was to have around the office. It is great, but, unfortunately, the MakerBot simply isn't intended or designed to handle the complex curves and intricate designs that many models on GrabCAD exhibit. There are a great deal of 3D printing technologies out there: Fused Deposition Modelling, Selective Laser Sinteration or Stereolitheography, to name a few. All sorts of materials are being used nowadays - stainless steel, nylon, ceramic, even stone!
In a perfect world, we'd like to have a printer that can accurately print any type of model from the GrabCAD library. A lot of users have seen 3D printers in their office or school and are familiar with the best ones, so we'd love to hear from all of you about which one we should choose. No suggestion is a bad one - just keep in mind we'd prefer a versatile machine but do have some budget restrictions.
3D printing blog 3Ders.org as well as Solidsmack.com have 3D printing resource pages which list a lot of different printers. Take a look and tell us what stands out and why. If you were in our shoes, which printer would you order?
