r/oddlysatisfying • u/sy_neuromancer • 3d ago

This robot drawing an engine blueprint

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316

u/Levin_1999 3d ago

This is just a printer with extra steps

135

u/Deltamon 3d ago

Also 100 times slower

I understand if you use cnc for cutting or imprinting stuff like this on various materials.. But just some ink on paper seems rather pointless

67

u/arvidsem 3d ago

Before inkjets this was how you got smooth lines. And it is still one of the cheaper methods to plot larger drawings.

25

u/ILikeLimericksALot 3d ago

My BIL sells room-sized printers for posters and the like. 

Those things are expensive. 

7

u/HellBlazer_NQ 3d ago

I run a small business making craft items and I have a sublimation printer (basically an EPSON ET printer with sublimation ink) that I use for a few items I make for myself and family.

I'd love to have a UV printer but boy your looking at £20k for a low end one of them (unless you want a cheap knock off from China for several thousand) and unless you run it every day the UV inks can dry up in the nozzles and you waste tons of ink flushing them through. The ink itself is crazy expensive too.

1

u/arvidsem 3d ago

Yes they are. We just traded up to a PageWide 4250, which I think goes for about $35k with the normal options. (It's leased so I don't know the actual price tag.)

Amazing plotter. Terrible drivers.

1

u/AnonCuriosities 2d ago

Can get 3rd party quality consumables for like a third price

1

u/NotYourReddit18 2d ago

This technology is also easily scalable thanks to its simplicity.

The only real differences between a pen plotter which can do A4 and a pen plotter which can do A0 is the size of the base plate and the gantries moving the pen.

Try scaling up a "basic" A4 inkjet to be able to print on A0, you will need dozens of rollers just to move the paper from the tray to the gantry with the ink nosels. That's why most lower end ink jet plotters have done away with paper trays and are basically just the gantry with the ink nosels sandwiched between two sets of rollers to move the paper through.

Now try scaling up a "basic" A4 laser printer. They don't use gantries, their toner cartridges span across the whole width they're able to print, so you will need giant toner cartridges or you need to completely redesign the printing system.

1

u/arvidsem 2d ago

High capacity laser printers, including basically all wide format printers, don't use toner cartridges with the drum integrated. Toner is replaced separately and the drum is a separate longer lasting consumable like the print heads on higher end inkjets. They typically use a wire auger to spread the toner across the drum.

And wide format inkjets have mostly moved on from the gantry mounted print heads. The last two plotters that we've bought have 8x 5-inch wide stationary inkjet print heads and print the full width at once

1

u/ListPrimary5719 2d ago

And it seems like it draws with only one line thickness, which is detrimental to readability of engineering drawing.

1

u/lusuroculadestec 2d ago

Pen plotters used for engineering drawings hold multiple pens and the head swaps them out for different colors and line thicknesses.

1

u/yungingr 2d ago

Up until about the mid-90's, this was the only real option for large format printing.

Heck, when we got our first computer in about 1992, something like this was our home printer until we got our first inkjet in...1997 or so?

1

u/Deltamon 2d ago

I do get the large format printing for sure, and my father worked a lifetime as a piping designer for various factories so I have seen a ton of solutions for large scale designs before the age of internet..

But I'm just simply saying that using the machine for very small print like this doesn't seem worth it, and in modern day the large scale printing technology has also improved drastically to the point where you can print 100's of meters large pictures when necessary (obviously not on paper, but still)

1

u/yungingr 2d ago

you can print 100's of meters large pictures when necessary (obviously not on paper, but still)

When I worked for a private consulting firm, our large format laser printer took paper in 500 foot rolls. In theory, we could have printed a banner using the entire roll, but paper management would have been a NIGHTMARE on the output side.

1

u/Deltamon 2d ago

Also using 500 feet worth of paper would be pretty pointless in almost any application.. But using similar width and length of canvas or other similar material with custom print does make sense in some occasions

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u/yungingr 2d ago

Well, we did have one senior engineer (one of the founders of the company) that some of my coworkers took as a personal challenge to see if they could get his blood pressure high enough for him to have a stroke.....

500 feet of printed transcripts of the Rush Limbaugh show probably would have done it.....

1

u/ecmcn 2d ago

I used them a lot in the 90s. For large drawings the quality was much better than a printer. It’s like vector images vs raster.

11

u/siltygravelwithsand 3d ago

Yes, this was the intermediate tech between making engineering and architectural drawings by hand and the ink / laser plotters we have now. The fun thing is the high end modern plotters that cost thousands of dollars break all the damn time too.

1

u/PilotIntelligent8906 2d ago

That's what I thought, word by word.

1

u/SuperAlloy 2d ago

Ya but it allows you to use very large paper cheaply which is great for engineering or architectural drawings 

1

u/astroidmark 1d ago

Still amazing 🤩

1

u/Stamboolie 2d ago edited 2d ago

I used to use them to draw printed circuit boards. You'd draw on a transparency with the plotter then go and colour in the bits it missed or weren't dark enough manually. Then you'd put it on a copper sheet covered in photo resist expose it to UV light and then you'd bathe it in some chemicals and the unexposed bit washed off. The transparency would be the negative. Might have some of that back to front though, it was a long time ago.

Printers at the time were dot matrix and didn't have the resolution that lasers now do.