Printing is good for prototyping and if you are making small numbers/need to have a distributed manufacturing (because of bombs falling on them).

But for mass producing a solid design, 3D printing is the worst solution, because it is slow. Injection molding would be the fast (and cheap) way.

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233mhz 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah but it's fast enough, light, portable, repairable, can be setup directly in your bunker in the middle of the wood if needed, etc.

You're still thinking like it's 1990

	▲	lukan 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And where do you get in the woods all the other mass produced parts needed for a drone, like chips, sensors, engine, battery, ..? Unfortunately 3d printers ain't replicators yet. So yeah, if you have special needs, modifying a special ops drone, or simple part printing, they are great. Or like I said, distributed manufactoring.

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georgemcbay 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But for mass producing a solid design, 3D printing is the worst solution, because it is slow. Injection molding would be the fast (and cheap) way.

~10 years ago I was really into designing my own "drones" (but the kind that don't kill people) and I primarily used a CNC machine (Shapeoko 3).

Multirotor vehicles are a good match for designs that are a series of mostly flat plates connected via simple standoffs and you can knock those out really quick with a CNC machine.

Injection molding is certainly much better than 3D printing for scale, but CNC is a nice middle ground that allows for quick manufacture while still having a lot of the same flexibility for iterative design that you get with 3D printing.

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mdorazio 4 hours ago | parent [-]

CNC is a terrible choice if you’re making flat plates or can modify your design to use flat plates + basic bends and stand offs. Laser or water jet are significantly faster and cheaper.

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georgemcbay 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> CNC is a terrible choice if you’re making flat plates or can modify your design to use flat plates + basic bends and stand offs. Laser or water jet are significantly faster and cheaper.

Laser cutters and waterjets are CNC machines.

And yeah they are generally faster than using a drill, but cheaper is situation specific (can be, depending upon the scale).

	▲	alanbernstein 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		3d printers are also CNC. My impression is that people often use the term to mean CNC mill. Much like "drone" implies "quadcopter" despite the existence of other very different types of "drone".