OMGosh, that's tempting. $600 for a home 3D printer. $50/spool for supplies. About .1mm resolution. Which seems weird, since they also say the print head extrudes at .35mm, so how do they manage .1mm?
Edit: On closer reading, I think what they mean is that the precision for edge placement is about .1mm, but the finest width of an extrusion is going to be something larger than .35mm, maybe up to .5mm. So you can lay layers of plastic .5mm wide with .1mm precision, or some such.
I have this little piano lamp I've used as a reading lamp for years, and the lampshade thingy -- the tube that confines the light to one axis has disintegrated. The thing is more than 40 years old so no chance of getting a new one, but I love this lamp -- probably not $600 worth though....
But one of my Outbound Model 125 Laptops is also missing a couple of little latch thingies, and I could make replacements for those -- a bear to model those though.
And model rockets. I could do so many cool shapes for model rockets. Custom nose cones, and fin cans, and stuff.
And I have a ten-year-old....I could replace him with plastic -- uh, no, that's not what I meant. He would love it.
Any idea whether the ABS plastic is typical for 3D printing? I've read that some of the plastics used are extremely durable and strong, but I don't remember what kind that was. I think it was for a powder sintering process.
The cool thing about this little lamp is that it has a tiny little cylindrical base (small footprint) about 3"D X 2"H and then there's a telescoping boom mounted on that base, like an old radio antenna. The boom pivots forwards and backwards on the base, so it can stand straight up from the base, or lean way over forward, to reach over the music and keyboard of a piano.
The lamp part is at the end of the boom, and it pivots and rotates on the boom. The lamp portion is also a cylinder, the same diameter as the base, and about 3" long with the shade. If you collapse the boom all the way, you're left with the two cyclinders sitting on top of each other, and you have a compact little package about 3"D X 5"H
The base contains a simple transformer, and the lamp bulb is a car 12V/14.7V tail light bulb.
A few new lamps come close, but they either have a (relatively) giant base, or the boom doesn't telescope, or other similar limitations. This one is such a clean and elegant design. It has a few electrical contact problems, mainly where the boom connects with the pivoting/rotating lamp portion, but I bought an electroplating kit to remedy that. And I had to rebuild the bakelite portion of the guts out of perf board at one point.