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100x Faster, 10x Cheaper: 3D Metal Printing Is About To Go Mainstream (newatlas.com)
Big Hairy Ian shares an article from New Atlas: Desktop Metal -- remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that's so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it's going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes... Plenty of design studios and even home users run desktop printers, but the only affordable printing materials are cheap ABS plastics. And at the other end of the market, while organizations like NASA and Boeing are getting valuable use out of laser-melted metal printing, it's a very slow and expensive process that doesn't seem to scale well.
But a very exciting company out of Massachusetts, headed by some of the guys who came up with the idea of additive manufacture in the first place, believes it's got the technology and the machinery to boost 3D printing into the big time, for real. Desktop Metal is an engineering-driven startup whose founders include several MIT professors, and Emanuel Sachs, who has patents in 3D printing dating back to the dawn of the field in 1989. The company has raised a ton of money in the last few months, including some US$115 million in a recent Series D round that brings total equity investments up over US$210 million. That money has come from big players, too, including Google Ventures... And if Desktop Metal delivers on its promises -- that it can make reliable metal printing up to 100 times faster, with 10 times cheaper initial costs and 20 times cheaper materials costs than existing laser technologies, using a much wider range of alloys -- these machines might be the tipping point for large scale 3D manufacturing.
But a very exciting company out of Massachusetts, headed by some of the guys who came up with the idea of additive manufacture in the first place, believes it's got the technology and the machinery to boost 3D printing into the big time, for real. Desktop Metal is an engineering-driven startup whose founders include several MIT professors, and Emanuel Sachs, who has patents in 3D printing dating back to the dawn of the field in 1989. The company has raised a ton of money in the last few months, including some US$115 million in a recent Series D round that brings total equity investments up over US$210 million. That money has come from big players, too, including Google Ventures... And if Desktop Metal delivers on its promises -- that it can make reliable metal printing up to 100 times faster, with 10 times cheaper initial costs and 20 times cheaper materials costs than existing laser technologies, using a much wider range of alloys -- these machines might be the tipping point for large scale 3D manufacturing.
What the subject says
I see things like this written: The company has raised a ton of money in the last few months, including some US$115 million in a recent Series D round that brings total equity investments up over US$210 million.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Translated: "Step right up, folks, and buy some stock! You want to be a part of this miracle company that's going to change everything forever! We're buzzword compliant and going to revolutionize the world, just like every other company that's come before us! How are we different? We managed to get through the outsourced overseas /. BS filter with our astroturf advertisement! So, step right up and have a swig of tonic!"
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Cool, another 3-D metal printing company that can advertise on slashdot.
They use regular, low-cost, easily available MIM powders.
This press release is overstating the toughness of the things this can produce. You won't be making transmission parts or turbofan blades that will last very long if at all.
At first I was skeptical of the claim but after reading the article it appears they're actually producing a system. The inclusion of Emanuel Sachs lends credibility also. Shouldn't be a long wait, part of the system ships in a few months the second part next year.
Can it make a cup of Earl Grey?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
an equivalent laser system will run you more than US$1 million
so... $100K?
The entire integrated system and associated software retails for US$120,000
Oh, marketing mathematics, eh?
Call me when you get it down to $10K.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Office freindly sintering furnace? I don't think our ES&H would approve it.
Almost no one prints ABS anymore. Its only good property is heat tolerance. PLA is the most popular for things where strength isn't needed. Outside of that there us nylon, petg, polycarbonate, etc....
Now this incredible advancement will be joined with the many upcoming improvements in battery technology and the no less fabulous breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence and create a car that prints itself when you need it, and then takes a while to decide that you really don't need to go where you wanted to go.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
This is a normal 3d printer, with filament that is heavily laden with metal, so they probably use a nozzle that is tougher (like carbide or sapphire).... the magic is the metal gets sintered after a bath to remove most of the plastic. Enterprising folks could probably use a different extruder on their existing 3d printers, and get similar results.
I have no problem believing this thing works, as there is nothing really revolutionary happening.
But we've already changed the game so much! We're already in the post-Luddite 3D printed future?
Anyone who would want to perform such additive manufacturing of metals via an open source means now has patents against doing so in the most commercially expedient fashion without a new table of equipment.
Hopefully however this will lead to someone working on laser sintering techniques that can be used at home. Honestly the only things holding it back are the vacuum pumps and the high wattage lasers at pricepoints a consumer could afford. The latter should be available soon thanks to the US military's fielded and soon to be mass produced anti-missile laser battery (since I imagine it is just dozens of high wattage laser diodes firing down fiber optic cables to some form of beam focus/merging unit in order to reach the cost per shot they are claiming.)
Vacuum pumps are already available from china for 100-150 USD, for evacuating air conditioning systems. A consumer grade vacuum sealed sinter setup would take some work, but given that people already build Farnsworth Fusors in their garage, which require at least that level of vacuum sealing to function, the only real issues to home metal additive manufacturing techniques are time to sufficient vacuum, sufficient laser capacity, and whatever bed mechanism is needed to keep new material available closely enough to be adhered to previously sintered material.
. . . when some legislator realizes this could be used to print "ghost guns". And then demands limits on what can be printed on them. ..
...because at 120000 USD everyone and their mum will have one. No, two!
This Australian startup has a new additive metal process that is 1000x faster, and 100x cheaper!
Seriously - and it's working today, not still in development. No filament, no lasers - they have a six-axis arm holding the part over a nozzle that blasts it with high-speed metal particles that stick to the part. Sounds crude, and it looks crude, but a quick bake to sinter it and a run through the CnC mill to finish it, and the completed result is as good as any slow laser-sintered part (which will also require milling).
They figured that since existing additive metal processes still require a final milling step to smooth out the surfaces, it takes just as much time to mill off a few hundred microns as a couple dozen, so you might as well go quick & dirty for the additive stage - same result, and much faster overall.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
IF I gain 40 pounds of muscle and win the lottery tomorrow, I MIGHT have a shot at banging Megan Fox, too.
" It's not die-cast idiot. It's sintered. "
Sintered idiots are provably tougher. Jeff Sessions is an example.
First: blatant advertisement which makes me a sad panda.
Second: Their technology is nothing new or revolutionary and not fit for actually useful parts either.
The whole things is, in the end, still just pressure less sintering with less binding material than other 3D printers.
Problem: Sintered parts are not very robust. They might make paperweights with that technique but never, lets say, tubine engine blades.
It is quite unfortunate as a suitable technology already exists but is still rather obscure: LENS (laser engineered net shaping) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Because of the beam pressure, the parts are as robust as if they were forged.
Unfortunately there is not all that much literature on this topic, but I did find one pdf article:
http://www.sandia.gov/mst/pdf/...
I have seen several 3d metal printed items and they all seemed to be of little use outside of some niche applications. Think bottle cap openers that can't even open a bottle without breaking. The technology is totally oversold. The limiting issues are 1) too much porosity in the powder bed fusion method although the wire feed methods are better, no able to heat treat or wrought during fab for grain size crystal structure, etc... The powder bed methods also appear to be pretty wasteful.
Say you want a steel metal part, with a hard martensite exterior, maybe with a carbide case, and a tough ductile austenitic core, and an alumina washer for insulation, no way you could 3d print anything like that. The SS part would require heat treatments (heat up and cool down times important) and maybe cold work, and the alumina would require heating to ~1700C to fully densify it.
So "it" was already cheap, and now it's ten times cheaper? What does that even mean? How about "one tenth the cost of CNC milling the part" or "one tenth the cost of lost wax casting" or ... something that actually means something?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Can't any competent metalworker with normal equipment make a gun if they so desire? I'm not a metalworker, but I've seen footage of a place in some small Asian country where they create knockoff guns from simple patterns for cheap.
TFS Summarized: It's a cool company!! Ppl are investing! If it works, it's gonna be big! Real big, I tell ya.
Sadly, the "if" part is almost a direct quote.
Seriously, editors, would it have killed you translate/shrink this to: Startup promises metal printing 100X faster for 1/10 the printer price and 1/20th the materials price ?
10000X cheaper THAN WHAT???
100000000X faster THAN WHAT????
What absolute frakking rubbish.
...
early adopters should note that you do not want the powder in your lungs.
I also should mention there's a bit of a fire hazard with metal powder but it's not that hard to work around. The main thing is don't get it or the fumes from that burning plastic inside you.
we need cheap open source metal printers not 1/4-1/2 million dollar slaveware.
Don't tell me what to do.
Not sure where you're getting your info, but you'd better read some more before posting on glasses/crystals. Metal with a lot of grain boundaries is not glass-like at all, it's polycrystalline. Glasses are amorphous, they have no long-range crystalline order and therefore no grain boundaries. Also metallic glass is a real thing and compared to normal metals it is more resistant to corrosion, resistant to wear, and very tough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I worked at a company that used this sintering process. We molded the pre-sintered parts, while this company is 3D printing them. A few issues to overcome:
1. Shrinkage. Sure, you can say that the software will take care of this, but here is LOTS of trial and error to getting the original shape just right to allow for the shrinkage
2. Droop. When sintering (near melting point), the parts will tend to drop because, well, they are near melting. We mostly dealt with smaller parts due to this issue, but you can support them. The article mentions the supports, but where do they come from? We custom made ours out of ceramics to withstand the heat.
3. Removal of binders: We ran our parts through a separate chemical bath to remove some of the binder agents before sintering. This isn't mentioned anywhere in the article, so I'm curious if this will cause issues.
4. Post process machining: Some of our parts required machining for holes and other critical points on the part. How will this machining be done? Most of our either used a CNC machine with custom made jigs, or by hand, also with custom made jigs. Since these are prototypes, and ours were production parts, this might not be as critical an issue.
This isn't a really a new process, and there are lots of known issues with it.