3D Printing Group

It's possible to FDM print a stainless steel part. But it requires special processing after. The filament is called Ultrafuse from BASF. It's out of my price range. But interesting none the less.

Has anyone tried printing with a pseudo (brass or copper) filament and polishing the result with 1000 grade or finer sanding disks? result may rival the real thing.

I am not into high prices so I am looking to use regular welding wire, extremely cheap, to print with.

may rival, but it is not the real thing, I am not into benchyes here, but into actually fully functional parts.

OK, others may be interested in display objects.

Another Thing I've successfully done (for display and casual use!) is to use gold leaf and a polyurethane spray. I did 4 "Gold" goblets this way.

What is being printed is stainless steel filled plastic. The shrinkage during the sintering process is abour 40%, the amount of plastic. The atmosphere in the furnace was an inert gas. Further the typical binder is copper. We had a firm in Rockford Illinois that made tooling to mold thousand of parts out of plastic. For long life dies and very complex items they chose this process, before 3D printers.

I intend to use regular welding wire for MIG machines instead. No post processing needed for up to micron tolerance is my aim.

> they are plastic bonded metal powders, in the end your object is still plastic bonded

While hobbyist "metal fill" filaments are like that, some companies do make solutions that don't work this way. While the filament is still a metal powder in a plastic substrate, there are extra steps to debind and sinter the printed part, so you end up with solid metal. I'm not sure I would like to make an engine block this way but you could absolutely build all the rest of your lawnmower, including the blades and the drivetrain.

It's still early days for this technology. If you look at what's available now, customers complain that the tolerances aren't great and the extra processing is awkward. I think we can expect huge advances in this area in the next couple of years. It's hugely more affordable than laser sintering or laser melting based technologies so there's plenty of reason for companies to invest in improving this method.

I was informing the person that said they print stainless steel that it was not what your interested in.

What temperature does your welding wire melt at?

depending on the material, between 700 Celsius for various Aluminum alloys and up to 2000 Celsius for various steel alloys and ferrous metals.

I cannot fathom a way to print Tungsten yet, the problem is that I need Tungsten and High temperature Ceramics for the heat block, nozzle and cooling neck hence no way I can use them to print above 2000 Celsius, and that limits my range, but even so, it is more than amazing the things you can print once you are not limited anymore to polymers.

On the other hand I must eliminate oxygen from the printing cube, either the cheap way (fill the cube with an inert gas like Argon) or the expensive way, totally vacuumed autoclave printing cube area (but this require outer space grade component that would not pop under vacuum).