3D Laser Metal Printer

Thought some of you may find this interesting! I tried posting a GIF but it was too large. :slight_smile:

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if you paste the links it should auto-embed:

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That is is very cool!

Huh! Air-sintering…same process as the Form2’s but without the resin hassle.

Neat! :relaxed:

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That’s amazing. Very hypnotizing to watch that video.

You can only imagine the amount of modeling and experimentation they had to do to get feed rates and laser intensity matched. (I played around with this a little bit with UV-curing resin and quickly gave it up as beyond my abiilty to juggle multiple variables.)

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It does seem like you should be able to do this with UV resin. Test of concept should be pretty easily done with minimal resin being forced out of a UV shielding needle point, into a very high intensity UV light source/laser. If it doesn’t work at that point then there is something fundamentally flawed in the approach.

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btdt. A couple of issues (at least) arise. First, you need either a UV-free area directly outside your aperture or else some kind of really good nonstick aperture, or else you will weld the initial drop onto the needle point. Or you need to tune the feed rate and resin curing speed so that the resin gets “far enough” from the needle before it starts to harden. (Also a function of the intensity and wavelength of the UV light.) Second, the UV resin for 3D printing also has really strong UV absorption (so that you only zap the surface layer), and as a result you get little tubes whose outside is cured but with liquid resin inside that pops out somewhere else.

I’m sure you could get other resins that wouldn’t do that, and you could modify the resin viscosity to it wouldn’t sag immediately coming out of the needle, and so forth. Just not a spare-time project.

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Wow they get that process down and it could take the place of CNC machining. Very interesting.
No starting with a big block and cutting away 75+% of it. No or less waste.

Ah, I was neglecting bonding to the needle ><

That stuff OLO is using may work, since it can harden with less total light. But even with that I imagine the penetration issue would be a struggle to overcome.

Hrm.

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Ah! That gif is so close to seamless… Just needs to be a little bit longer or something.

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Hahaha yeah! The outer entity seems to make 1.5 orbits around the center piece during the animation. I bet if it was cut after one it would look a lot cooler. If I have time when I get home I’ll see if I can cut it

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Ah, it’s the 3Doodler, but with silver sintering instead of plastic melting/hardening. Brilliant.

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