The ultimate DIY: 3Dprinterstofix farm equipment
Randy Janes believes farm machinery parts will soon be printed instead of traditionally manufactured.
Eventually farmers will have their own 3D printers, said Janes, owner of 3D printing company Wave of the Future. When machinery breaks, they will be able to print their own parts after getting a part design file — an STL file — from implement companies.
“John Deere, Case, New Holland, all these other companies in the world, ... they’re going to slowly figure out what an STL file is and what the value of an STL file is,” said Janes, an exhibitor at Canada’s Farm Progress Show which winds up Friday at Evraz Place.
Buying the design file and printing it yourself would significantly speed up the repair process, said Janes.
“If you’re on your farm and you break a cog on one of your pieces of equipment and you need to get the crop off by tomorrow, you’re not getting it off,” he said. “You print that cog, (and) by lunch time or the next morning, you have the part on your table and you go out and don’t lose your crop.”
Darren Grose, an engineer at Rodono Industries Ltd. — a manufacturing business in Alberta — thinks it will be a long time before 3D printed parts have the durability they need.
“Durability is a big issue with printed parts, whereas traditionally manufactured parts are meant to last 50 or 100 years. So yes, a lot of investment went into them, but they’re meant to last a long time,” he said. “The parts that we manufacture are all steel.”
It’s expensive and difficult to 3D print with steel at this point, although Janes said it has been done before. But Janes isn’t focusing on steel. He thinks polylactic acid (PLA) is the material of the future. PLA is a polyester filament made from renewable materials. He’s been working with a filament made from corn starch and sugar.
He is also developing a new PLA type that is “more heat resistant, more UV guard, more flexible, all those things,” he said. “What’s better than making stuff out of something that’s grown versus fossil fuel plastics?”
Janes is convinced 3D printed parts are durable even though they ’re not steel, based on a camper he made with his 3D printer, the largest in North America. He has also printed parts for his own vehicle and said they are still doing fine two years later.
The camper is printed out of PETG, a filament made from recycled plastic bottles. It took him nine days to print the camper on his 28x5x7-foot printer.
Janes is also working on developing a regenerator system that would allow farmers to recycle their own plastics and turn them into new printed products. He gave the example of taking silo bags and turning them into a new tractor fender.
“3D printing is additive manufacturing, so you have no waste when you’re done with the product,” he said.