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Entries in metal (13)

Tuesday

Jul272010

Shapeways Goes For Gold. And Bronze.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 |

It's not exactly the Olympics, but Shapeways can now print in Gold and Bronze finishes thanks to their most recent announcement. They've added more finishings one can select for stainless steel prints. In addition to the existing Gold Plate Matte finish, you can now choose from:

Gold Plated Glossy (on the left above)
Antique Bronze Glossy (third from the left)
Antique Bronze Matte (on the right)

All we need now is for Shapeways to prepare a Silver Glossy finish and we can print out our own complete set of Olympic Medals!

Via Shapeways

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Thursday

Mar112010

Alumide Examples

Thursday, March 11, 2010 |

Joris of Shapeways posted a video showing off several sample 3D prints using Shapeway's new Alumide material. The semi-metallic material, while less strong than other build materials offered, seems to convey quite a different character to the printed objects. They no longer look and feel like "plain old plastic".

The video includes several truly amazing items, including mechanical objects: a gearbox with embedded ball bearings and a working ferris wheel!

They're asking clients to print more Alumide to enable them to maintain it as a permanent material offering, as today it's merely a temporary experiment.

Via Shapeways

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Thursday

Mar042010

ProMetal's Experience

Thursday, March 4, 2010 |

ProMetal is an innovative manufacturing company that uses advanced techniques such as additive manufacturing to get an edge. In a wide-ranging interview and analysis, RapidToday profiles ProMetal and their recent challenges:

Identifying the right sales channels to meet the market
Enabling customized versions of products
Keeping consumer costs low

It seems that selling 3D items to consumers is not straightforward.

Meanwhile, it turns out that ProMetal is developing ways to print glass items with 3D printing. We've written about this before, but according to RapidToday, "none appear to be as far along as ProMetal, which has been working on the process for over a year." Check out the glass vase above (hand glazed).

Finally, ProMetal is developing their own 3D printer, the M-Print, intended to be released this year. The M-Print is intended for low-cost metal 3D printing, including iron and bronze and should be far less expensive than high-end competitors who focus on specialized materials or processes.

Via RapidToday

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Two Metallic Announcements

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 |

In recent days two announcements regarding 3D metal printing have emerged: Shapeways announced a new material and Materialise released new software optimized for metal additive manufacturing.

Firsrt, Materialise released the "Magics Metal SG" software package that should make life a little bit easier for 3D designers:

Magics Metal SG provides metal AM professionals with a comprehensive build support generation toolbox. This enables build supports to be fully customized and optimized for almost any part geometry. Magics Metal SG contains two new styles of robust build support structures and a range of build support editing tools, all developed specifically for metal AM.

The Shapeways material is "Alumide", which is not totally metal, but it provides a means to produce a metallicish surface:

Alumide is White, Strong & Flexible with Aluminum dust mixed in. It is made with the Selective Laser Sintering process. The material has a higher heat resistance than regular plastics. Its melting temperature is above 172 Celsius.. The surface is smoother than White, Strong & Flexible and is a matte grey with speckles of shiny aluminum dust thrown in.

This new material should enable designers to produce metal-like objects at far lower cost than using full metal. Just don't put the object in your dishwasher!

Via Shapeways and Materialise

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Saturday

Jan022010

Making an Artist's Living by 3D Printing

Saturday, January 2, 2010 |

There's a wonderful article by 3D printing artist Bathsheba Grossman over at Say Something, where she describes her journey from student to world-renowned 3D artist. And the best part: She's now making a living from selling 3D printed art.

But it isn't easy. She spent ten years after completing school to build up the skills in various disciplines (art, mathematics, CAD, etc.) and the experience to build up an art business that today serves as her main source of revenue. We've written of her work several times in the past. Her strategy is direct marketing:

I haven't made much inroad into the traditional art world, but then showing in galleries is not a focus for me. I made a conscious decision about ten years ago to work directly for the viewer – you – rather than try to get the attention of cultural gatekeepers.

What has been the result of her efforts? More than just a job, apparently:

My work has appeared in the New York Times, the London Times and Der Spiegel, as well as Wired, Discover and Make magazines. One of my lamps was in TIME Magazine's 100 most influential designs of 2007. My sculptures have appeared in two hit TV shows, Second Life, and a Japanese videogame commercial. John Conway and Douglas Hofstadter used pictures of them in recent books. They've been shown in Italy, Spain, Korea, New York and Cleveland. An irony-free Wikipedia entry for me was started in 2004. And this site moved over a quarter million dollars of art in 2007, which isn't bad considering I wrote the whole thing by hand, with web skills dating from about 1996.

You can see more of Bathsheba's amazing work at her website.

Via Say Something

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Thursday

Dec032009

Sciaky's EBF3

Thursday, December 3, 2009 |

Following on from our previous posts on the promising EBF3 technique (Electron Beam FreeForm Fabrication), we bumped into a video showing a commercial implementation from Sciaky. The video shows the build process as well as highlighting the key benefits:

Drastically reduce material costs
Dramatically shorten lead times
Slash machining time
Save over costly forgings or castings
eliminate wait time for dies, moulds and billets

The resulting object looks a little rough, but the normal approach is to follow up with some serious machining time to complete the object. According to the video, the part above was printed with Titanium Wire source material over a period of 56 hours. It's to be followed with approximately 60 hours of machining. The total 116 hours is lower than using traditional manufacturing techniques.

The Sciaky printer also accepts powder material as well as wire fed, and can print an amazing 15-40 pounds of material per hour sustained, with even higher burst rates. It can even alter the chemistry or alloy during printing.

We're adding Titanium Wire to our weekly shopping list right now!

Via YouTube and Sciaky (Hat tip to Kerry)

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Printing Steel. At Home!

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 |

There's an interesting discussion underway at the RepRap forums, where the idea of Direct Metal Laser Sintering is being pondered. DMLS involves laser-heating metal (or other material) powder, layer by layer, slowly building up a solid object. This is pretty similar to how many 3D printers work, but the interesting bit is that these guys are contemplating designing a system that could do this at home:

In other words, it's a laser cutter with a powder bed. This should be hackable by combining an off-the-shelf laser cutter with Fab@home or even CandyFab technology. From there it's all about finding the right settings.

and:

It may be necessary to work under a nitrogen or carbon dioxide atmosphere, as steel powder is highly flammable under the right conditions

So it's not quite as easy as it sounds, but we may soon see a MakerBot-like device that prints wrenches and hammers. Where's our fire extinguisher again?

Via Open Manufacturing and RepRap Forums (Hat tip to Micah)

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Tuesday

Nov242009

Glossy 3D Printing?

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 |

New developments are afoot in color sheen printing. Recently researchers at Adobe Systems and Dartmouth college managed to create an inkjet printer capable of producing reflective surfaces in a variety of colors.

Their color thermal printer is "versatile enough to print many metallic inks and foils as well as standard inks."

One issue they've encountered is a way to capture reflectivity information from objects, which would then be fed back into the printer for reproduction. How do you easily measure and capture reflectivity information?

But here's the part that interested us:

The goal is to combine the technique with 3D printing to create 3D objects that look more realistic

Imagine metallic-appearing surfaces on non-metallic objects. Or printing a MakerBot coin that actually looks like a coin. Or printing real coins. Well, perhaps not.

Via NewScientist

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