VMD-L Mailing List

From: Karsten Suhre (Karsten.Suhre_at_igs.cnrs-mrs.fr)
Date: Tue Feb 10 2004 - 06:50:59 CST

Hi Steve,

  thank you very for your mail. In fact, the objective of my mail to the list
aims at what you suggest, collecting arguments to convince our institute to
buy and maintain such a printer as a service to several laboratories. Given
the impressive results that one can obtain with vmd and 3-D printers, I was
wondering whether there are any private companies around that operate this
kind of printers comercially. Finding such a service would first allow me to
obtain a sample of a protein studied at our institute as an argument for
buying such a machine for ourselves, and secondly, if it turns out that such
an operation would not be affordable (from the production times you give on
your Web site one should produce 2-3 models a day to get the printer fully
charged), a good alternative would probably be sending one's models to such a
company and just pay for the service.

Kind regards,

Karsten Suhre.

IGS-CNRS, Marseille, France.

On Monday 09 February 2004 17:49, John Stone wrote:
> Karsten,
> Though I don't personally have any significant involvement in
> 3-D printing other than writing and maintaining the VRML-2 and STL
> scene exporters in VMD, I know that they are fairly complex devices
> and they need more care and attention than most computer peripherals.
> The 3-D printing equipment we use here is managed by an independent
> group that provides services to the entire institute, billing each
> department and research group for use. Since these 3-D printers typically
> require a bit of expertise to run and maintain, and they tend to be
> somewhat costly, getting one for shared use by many research groups
> is probably the best way to go. I'd direct you to talk to the managers
> of our facility here, but they are so overwhelmed with this kind of
> email I fear they would not answer your question. You can see some of
> the 3-D printing equipment our institute maintains here:
> http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/
>
> They have a page for one of our older 3-D printers here:
> http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/vmil/equipment/genisys.htm
>
> Hope that helps,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 03:30:25PM +0100, Karsten Suhre wrote:
> > Dear VMD users,
> >
> > I was very impressed about VMD's capabilities to produce real 3-D
> > protein models using a 3-D printer (as presented on the VMD home page as
> > spotlight 4: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/spotlight/).
> >
> > In order to investigate the possibility to buy such a printer at our
> > institute, I would be pleased to hear more about other users' experience
> > with this technique, i.e.
> >
> > * What would be a good printer for low-throughput applications (in fact,
> > what would be the minimum amount of money to put up to obtain a
> > reasonable solution)?
> >
> > * Or alternatively, does someone know about private companies that would
> > be able to produce such protein models on command?
> >
> > Thank you very much for your comments,
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Karsten Suhre
> >
> > IGS-CNRS, Marseille, France.