There will be a 3D printing conference taking place in Northwest Indiana next weekend. Check out
http://midwestreprapfest.org/ if you have an interest in 3D printing. It is absolutely amazing how far this technology has come. We make a lot of our low stress tooling for fixtures at work on our Dimension BST768. That model is obosolete, but ours has been running since around 2002 (so I've been told).
We also have an Objet 30 pro that prints clear but that technology is a liquid photopolymer, so the 3D technology is more like inkjet but it has a resolution of 100 micron. I went to this show last year and it was busting at the seams. This year, they expect 5,000 people, everyone from hobbyists and hackers to people like me, wanting the technology of a $50,000 Objet in a $5,000 open source system. Hope to see you there! I will report on what I see next weekend.
What this technology does for people is amazing. If you need a certain jig that has a tolerance of +/- 0.010"? No problem, you can print it up. That being said, I work with Autodesk Inventor and the design process to printing is seamless. At a more basic level, I don't know what is out there for low cost or no cost open source 3D CAD programs.
What have I been able to do with the 3D printer? More work jigs than I can shake a stick at. When they wear out, we print more. On our dimension, we can print up production intent models, sand them, fill them with body filler, sand them, paint them and you are going to be hard pressed to not think they didn't come off a finished plastic injection molded tool. 3D printers will never replace injection molding but they are a great complimentary tool.
If it would take you a couple of days to make a jig that you can draw up in 3D and print while you sleep...well...we do it. Right now for us, it is feast or famine. We can go months running the printer 24/7 then go a few days with nothing to do. But, trust me, this technology is here to stay.
Want a pool table leg? Design it in 3D, 3D print it, 3D scan it, and voila, you have your CNC wood engraving equipment doing custom designs. That reminds me, I have to check out 3D CAD to 3D woodworking CNC....
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Originally Posted by Jason Hilton
to try it out. Its not a molder, but its the slicing and layup engine. Because its an older version, it didn't list configs for my brand new Taz5 (just released late Feb 2015) so I had to learn myself. Which is probably a good thing as I learned more than if I had been given the proiles. I think its got WAY better support generation than Cura, and it allows manual placement of supports The slicing is way faster and does a better job than Slicer or Cura. And the generated Gcode is faster. I recent example that I compared. I loaded up a STL (same one in both apps). I set the same layer sizes, same fill rates but I disabled supprts so I could compare even steven. Cura and slicer both produced an estimate of 53 minutes print time. When I run the same STL in Simplify3D with all the appreciably comparable settings set to identical settings, it produced a print that estimated at 18 minutes. I printed it in both. Both estimates were pretty spot on. The prints were different in quality! The Cura sliced one was noticeably poorer quality than the same STL printed from Simplify3D. And the Simplify3D print took 1/3 the time! I have to say, I am pretty impressed and I will probably buy Simplify3D. Its $150. 
