I have a pair of printers, one is a standard linear layout and the other is a delta type, each has it's own quirks and uses where it excels. Having parts done via Shapeways really doesn't make financial sense unless you plan to make a LOT of them and sell for a profit, otherwise you'll find the cost of a few pieces of seemingly trivial parts can get really expensive, they have to pay for those $350,000 machines somehow.
My first printer is Solidoodle 3, about $825 delivered to my door. Assembled and "ready to print" although the quality of the prints was no where near what I consider good. A lot of redesign and upgrading later it produces top quality prints time after time and the best thing is they are all dimensionally stable with 100% repeatability, something that was sorely lacking in the original. I can print a half dozen of the same object sequentially or all together if there's room on the build platform and they won't vary more than .1 mm between them.
I've already done a few quads in ABS for my own amusement as well as I'm starting to take requests for design and prototype work from local clients.
This is the finished version of my first attempt at a full frame, love it for low and slow FPV flight...
This is a Hoverthings Flip frame with a lot of 3D printed upgrades to turn it into a sub-400mm FPV quad, all of the orange bits are my design and printed on the SD3...
The SD3 printing out some motor mounts for tubular arms...
Now here's the catch to owning and using one, if you have no experience doing design and no ability to use CAD programs, you'll have a very steep learning curve above and beyond learning enough about the printer itself to be able to produce consistent results. From the day I did my first print on the SD to the point I had it dialed in enough to consider it useful was roughly 2 months. To get to the point of being able to produce consistent high quality prints time after time without having to baby sit the machine while it was running was probably another two months of upgrading and refining the printer itself.
The little delta I just built was without a doubt the most complex and at time frustrating electro mechanical device I've ever worked on, everything, and I do mean everything on it has to be 100% right for it to work, 110% for it to produce good quality prints! It was an interesting experience to build it up from nothing more than a pile of hardware and several rolls of ABS filament that I turned into the necessary frame pieces from open source STL files posted on the 'net. This is the one I just finished, don't attempt this as a first adventure into 3D printing unless you're really comfortable working with calibration measurements down to the .1 mm level and have a solid working knowledge of Arduino processor firmware customization, compiling, and uploading.
http://richrap.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/3dr-reprap-delta-printer-part-1-release.html
Ken
