Amit Zoran of the MIT Media Lab -- yes, the same soul who helped dream up a 3D food printer early this year -- has now printed a fully-functional concert flute with a minimum of human intervention. Directing an Objet Connex500 3D printer (which can handle multiple materials at the same time) to spit out his CAD design, dollop by tiny dollop, in a single 15-hour run, he merely had to wash off support material, add springs, and assemble four printed pieces to finish the instrument up.
Comments
interesting I wonder how long before this is achievable on entusiast grade 3d printers
right off the bat I can see the guy made a rookie mistake of printing it flat if he'd done a more vertical design it probably wouldn't have needed the support material.
It's probably not far off being makerbot/reprap printable tho break it into smaller parts separate the moving parts for later assembly and reorient and tweak the design to remove the need for support materials. You'd need to add some seals manually rather than print them I would think but they are just o-rings so not hard.