Hands On With MakerBot's 3D-Printed Wood

angry tapir writes: 3D printing has lost a bit of its novelty value, but new printing materials that MakerBot plans to release will soon make it a lot more interesting again. MakerBot is one of the best-known makers of desktop 3D printers, and at CES this week it announced that late this year its products will be able to print objects using composite materials that combine plastic with wood, metal or stone.

Comments

Laywood

[gringer]

3D printing with wood? Oh, a bit like Laywood then.

The other composites are something I'm less familiar with, but I know that shapeways already has alumide as a printable medium.

Re:Laywood

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Not necessarily. The motives are more about appearance and cost than any sort of heroic material properties; but using 'wood flour' as a filler to modify the appearance (and cheaply bulk out) polymers is old and common. Given that the stuff is basically just sawdust with quality control it isn't terribly pricey and it has proven adequate to the job over decades of use.

Not very glamorous; and if Makerbot is selling this sort of filament as a 'premium' option compared to ordinary dyed stuff they are probably playing you for a sucker; but a perfectly sensible adoption of an established practice.

Re:Laywood

[laird]

I've uses laywood, bronzefill, etc., and in general the structural element is the PLA, and the material mixed into it really just affect the appearance or other properties (magnetism, surface texture, etc.). But since it's the PLA that is what bonds it all together, you aren't really "printing with metal" the way you are with an SLS printer - you are "printing with PLA, with metal powder mixed in".

For example, with laywood, the resulting print really does feel and look like wood. And bronzefill is very heavy and soft/flexible, which is a lot like bronze. There's also a material with iron in it, so it sticks to magnets, etc.

So if you're interested in structural strength, not appearance or feel, these materials won't help you. Instead, look at Taulman's filament (for example) which have really amazing structural properties.

The real questiion

[jellomizer]

Will it have properties of the material. If I printed a 3d pan. Will it melt? Will it have magnetic qualities? Will it be strong enough to do the tasks. Or will it just look like wood, stone and metal but suffer from the same drawbacks that plastic has.

Re:The real questiion

[Rei]

The abrasion resistance is not "quite a bit better", and you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's a plastic and it behaves like a plastic; the aluminum particles are not interconnected into a mesh or anything. When you scratch it, you're scratching the plastic, the suspended aluminum particles just come with. Electricity trying to flow through it still has to flow through lots of plastic. Which means that its resistivity is still in the plastic range, certainly higher than less effective but still insulating materials like glass.

Think "sandy-looking plastic", and you'll understand alumide. Sorry, I know you want something that's like metal, but this is not it. If you want metal, you need to print out of metal - say, laser sintering, or printing a mould for lost wax casting. Not printing a plastic that has some dust mixed in. *Maybe* you could get more metallic properties if the metal in the plastic was in the form of whiskers rather than dust. Maybe.

Oh, hey, here's a better analogy for you for what alumide is like: paint. Polymer-based paints are, basically, plastic containing various dusts. Among the types of dust in paints can include metals, especially if they're trying to make the paint have a more textured or sparkly look to it. Aluminum dust is for example a common additive to car paint.

So if you think you can make the interconnects on a PCB out of car paint, go for it.