The Pulsar Engineering Community Board

Dear all,

would it be possible to get base plate from performance edition from some of you ( price, time)? I tried to get it here in Switzerland, but price is crazy

Regards
Oleg

I use hubs.com and the price is about $250 USD, though the quality is very good. Takes about 2 weeks for them.

There are cheaper vendors, maybe you could find $150 from a low price one.

The SLS technique is not something most people would have at home, there are builds here with PLA but it's not ideal.

In 2019 I got mine from Materialize at 80€ (SLS). 250 looks more like CNC machining or did the price just became crazy?

Thanks a lot Andy,

250$ is fine (comparing to swiss prices), will try it

andy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 14, 2023 8:44 am I use hubs.com and the price is about $250 USD, though the quality is very good. Takes about 2 weeks for them.

There are cheaper vendors, maybe you could find $150 from a low price one.

The SLS technique is not something most people would have at home, there are builds here with PLA but it's not ideal.

Out of curiosity, what are the practical with printing in PLA? Modern FDM printers are pretty dang good these days...

It's mostly a question of stiffness, damping and resilience even at very high fill ratio. For some applications it's ~okay~ but for demanding application it typically catch a lot of vibration which produces blurry images; I've also found that with time it tends to move/live which induce de-alignement over time.

At the office we use FDM a lot (we have two ultimakers that are quite busy) but it's restricted to non-structural parts: mock-up, alignment tooling etc. I sometimes have to "fight" to not have FDM prints at some location and every time I wasn't listened I was finally proven right and we had to change the part.

I do like 3D printing but for optics it's almost a de facto choice for me to go to SLS and it's already a good solution for prototypes. I had an OpenRAMAN built in SLS (all custom parts) operates for >6 months without any realignment necessary and we are talking about microns sensitivity!

For more demanding applications, SLS is not an option either. I'm thinking typically of interferometry where thick steel is the norm. Things like microscopy setups can become sensitive to vibration as well if the baseplate has a bad aspect ratio. That's also the reason the OpenRAMAN baseplate is 12 mm thick.

A very good rule of thumb is to consider that in optics we're dealing in the range 1 nm ~ 1 µm. Anything that's not stable at that order of magnitudes is not welcome.