LMD: A New, Less Wasteful Metal 3D Printing Technique
Metal 3D printing is currently dominated by powder-based techniques like SLM (Selective Laser Melting). These processes yield incredibly precise parts, but the build times are slow. Furthermore, dealing with the powder increases manufacturing complexity: Whenever the powder is transported, loaded in...
Metal printing at home would be such a game changer. Let's give it 10 years, I'm sure it will eventually reach an affordable price point.
I mean, its just a welder married to a 3D printer that we actually need.
Super cool but $150,000k USD...
Most cheap-o grade filament metal 3d printers are 10k and up, there really is no real hobbyist pricepoint for metal 3d printing. The industrial level metal 3d printers were already at 100k to million per machine. This is obviously targetting things like automotive and aerospace industry, that can easily pay those prices, not consumers. Maybe if we get more Wire DED metal 3d printers the cost might go down, or it won't.
I was hoping this one might have been around 15-20k but was totally wrong. Hopefully someday they'll be cheap enough for the everyday household
I use a 15 year old, quarter million dollar 3d scanner at work. It's on par with what you can get for about 5 to 8k these days.
Haha that's wild. Hopefully that means this printer will be obtainable by the normal person in about 10years
About 15 years ago I looked at 3d printers for an engineering team. Between $20,000 and $50,000 range. The best option was a powder based system. Parts were fragile, print time was slow, clean up was a pain.
One of our customers was using an SLA system...parts were fragile, print time was slow...clean up was a pain.
Now I have a 3d filament printer in my shop that cost me less than $1,000, and doesn't have any of those issues. Of course it's not mounted on a robotic arm.
Hopefully the normal consumer will have cheap access like that to metal printers in 10years or less
Once the price for this comes down, I can really 3D print my own guns.
You can do it now with the plastics, but this will just make it even more durable.
i just want to iterate on my own cylinder heads 😩