Affordable 3D printer?

[melonkernel]

It would be awesome to be able to get a 3D printer. Does anyone here own one, and are they overly expensive?
I have heard of the ones you can assemble yourself (which would be extremely cool) but i am not sure how well they compare to commercial ones and if they could produce custom Lego?

[divonic]

A friend of mine has one. it was pretty inexpensive but it also doesn't have the resolution to print custom Lego Pieces. he's using it to build upgrade pieces so that the resolution will be better, we'll see.

[divonic]

Here is a link to the company that he got the printer from: http://www.makerbot.com/

[melonkernel]

Awesome! Thanks! It looks very interesting.

[Kosh]

I've heard that overall because of the way these work the results will not come out looking/feeling like LEGO pieces. This is direct result of the method's these use to grow a piece, they deposit material layer by layer thus leaving ridges inbetween layers. Since most LEGO piece are injection molded under pressure to achieve the smoothness on the resulting surface this is a fundamental difference in the results. I'm not saying it cannot work but I doubt you'd ever achieve results approaching the quality that LEGO's production pieces end up with. If i understand the history of these types of machines correctly they were originally developed to make prototype parts some they could be test fitted/measured in place etc before finalized production method's were set. My brother belongs to a Maker group that has amongst their various machines one of these and within it's limits it works from what he has told me when I asked about it. If i ever got the desire to go play with the machines they have I'd be more inclined to machine a few replica parts from metal on one of the CnC machines they've built than try and print new designs but that's me