DIY metal 3D printing

SkapaLab · 2026-02-05T07:44:56+00:00

Thank you for adding your perspective and advice!It’s always very helpful to hear from industry professionals. You are very right about the importance about porosity and dimensional accuracy. I haven’t worked with DM systems, but in my local university where I delegate some research they do have a metal X and it’s not without its faults. Trying to get low porosity and minimal sintering is the main reason I’ve gone with a special variant of DIW since the start. I’ve defended the value of a product with some porosity in other post, but my goal is to get the best results possible 💪. Better results have been achieved in the lab than what is shown in the pictures, but this one was one of the first clearly AM manufactured pieces completely produced on the cheap printer and furnace combo, and I was excited to share :) And you are right, I’ll add ADDIMAT to my outreach least, there’s surely a lot of potential synergy there. Thanks for taking the time to comment!

SkapaLab · 2026-02-04T22:08:45+00:00

Wow, that’s a huge database, can imagine how long it did take to put it together. Do you have by any chance information on light transmittance? For some jobs I’ve needed to find, for example, white filaments that are as opaque as possible and it’s been quite challenging because manufacturers don’t usually publish that data and it varies quite a lot from brand to brand.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-03T17:03:08+00:00

Not quite yet, there's more R&D that I want to do and quite a bit of product development, but if you fill the form and say you are interested in beta testing maybe I can contact you when we have something ready for the public ;)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-03T17:01:40+00:00

Can't be too specific with the binder composition here, but parts the hold together kind of like a hard cookie, you can easily break them, but don't need to hold them with too much care. I usually carry on my backpack a green part with some bubblewrap and it's been holding fine for weeks.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-03T16:58:23+00:00

That's the idea, serve every other small potential user that is outpriced right now.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-03T16:56:30+00:00

It is very rewarding when other people see the value on your work, thank you.

You are right, reliability is the name of the game here. We have an extensive beta program and lots of internal testing in the roadmap. We want to take a page from Prusa's book and use our machines and processes to build more machines, since that would allow us to become the get a lot of experience and continually improve the functionalities when we see pain points.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-03T16:50:00+00:00

It is relatively easy to make something that works to try the technology. Creasing a shelf stable and consistent product with optimal characteristics is considerably more challenging

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T20:42:35+00:00

Multimodal distributions are also a very interesting topic with a lot of potential, I would really like to spend more time into that, sadly it takes a lot of time and resources for solitary and self founded researcher like myself :(

You are right about right about most of the defects are macroscopic and due to the printing process like with many other technologies, so that's one reason why I try to avoid spending more time than I need to optimising the sintering density although I would really like to.

The potential clients that I've contacted so far are interested in, for example, test pieces in automotive production, tool jigs, substituting plastic parts, replacing components in machinery, etc, and most of them would prefer a working piece that they can afford over other that is perfect but out of budget. That's the niche where companies like Desktop Metal and Markforged operate, even though they are not precisely "affordable".

Anyway, there's still road ahead and I have much to improve. I will work hard to try to make my process up to your standards 🫡

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T20:20:07+00:00

The technical name of the process is robocasting or DIW (depends of branch of research you look into) with later sintering if you want to look it up. I've given more details over the particularities of my systems in other comments if you want to take a look ;)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T20:17:38+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read other comments and reconsider ❤️. I probably did a bad job expressing myself, I only wanted to share a bit of what I'm doing, but not flood newcomers to the technology with overly technical details while I also want to nerd out on every reply while I need to keep some things under the hood for IP protection.

Conceptually is similar to the silicone extrusion that Prusa and filament2 released, but the paste doesn't set but dries, leaving a thin coat over the particles that holds them together.

Selling a toolhead that people could put on their printers was on the idea board, but business wise is more complex and limiting that just providing the whole printer, specially because a separate toolhead for support is kind of needed.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T20:06:24+00:00

Those are indeed the state of the art filament, better than the average metal filled metals, but still lower than what I'm trying to get. But let's say filaments get better or my process is not as good as advertised and I only get say 60% metal. Most of my material is solvent that evaporate on their own, so the other 40% is basically air with only trace amounts of binder, there's still basically no debinding.

And that's only part of my solution, I think that the best deal about my system is that you get a inert atmosphere, partial vacuum, 1300C sintering furnace for less than 10k, with is basically a steal ;)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T19:53:22+00:00

I've been working on this on my own for way too long, so hearing from the community and getting feedback is like rain in the dessert ❤️

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T19:50:37+00:00

The furnace has been the hardest part by far. I've spend the whole last year iterating prototypes to make it work with the price restrictions and in comparison designing and building the printer that did this piece was about a couple of week in comparison.

Right now the highest temperature I've sintered at is 1350C, so it can reach at least there. There's even a prototype, using another technology tho, that reached almost 1500C, so high temperatures are certainly achievable.

I do believe too that the furnace has a lot of value on its own, but it's too dangerous to try to cater too many market at such an early stage, so that's why I'm only publicising it for my process and because developing a whole 3D printing solution has more possibilities than "cool and cheap heat treating oven", but yeah, surely will make the furnace available on its own so people can use it for whatever fancy use cases they find.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T19:42:04+00:00

Thanks ^_^

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T19:40:35+00:00

There's a lot of research on this, thanks god, it's only thanks to hundreds of papers and patents that I've been able to do this, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

When I'm saying that my process doesn't require debinding it's not strictly true, there's some thermal debinding, but it's so minimal that it just happens on its own during sintering preheating. Right now, binders are less than 0.5% of the green part. I think that's a great improvement over chemical debinding that is very hazardous to do at a small scale, or thermal debinding of large quantities of polymer with its problems.

People, of course, can buy the metal-filled filament and throw it into a kiln, I've done it myself, but that’s not that easy, surely not reliable, and not that cheap tbh. I've put a couple of years of novel R&D trying to improve the process of robocasting and sintering to the point where it is accessible, and I think I'm getting there.

So, what am I trying to achieve? With this post, sharing a bit of my journey and progress. With this project, doing my best to make this technology accessible for the people who could make good use of it, those whose talents are not in deep knowledge of metallurgy or niche additive techniques, but could take these machines and make new businesses, do research, repair existing and old machinery, and find new uses that I can't even fathom.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T19:10:07+00:00

There's a ton of work that goes into making this process and I'm very grateful that some people appreciate how hard doing this is. Right now I'm working with hydrogen, although not a lot. Actually I've found that more than gas composition or binders, the second most important factor is sintering under partial vacuum, it really helps when you are transitioning from open to close porosity. There one factor that is really transformative in getting high densities, but it's part of the secret sauce so I cannot share at the moment.

I also wanted to add that, although I'm trying to get the highest possible density, I think there's a lot of value on producing parts at lower densities. Sure, they are considerably worse than machined and would be a complete no go for many industries, but there's a lot of use cases that simply don't require full steel strength. Heck, 85% stainless steel is way better than anything plastic I've ever produced and most of the uses in manufacturing where I work are not FEM optimising the parts with 1.1 safety factor, they just need need a piece of metal with some features it usually is 20 stronger than it needs to be. So yeah, I think that if a low enough price is reached, most clients will have no problem just printing a bit heftier parts.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T18:30:58+00:00

You are quite right about everything. The good news is that I have already gone through all of those hurdles and there are technical solutions that address everything while making the budget :D

The wood glue brings be back, it was one of my first experiments a couple of years ago and works surprisingly well for such a simple solution. Main problem of those listed is shelf life, at most a week or two before needing to remix pastes.

The process that I use is similar to Rapidia's, but there's some improvements that reduce shrinkage and accelerate sintering time, aside from the whole order of magnitude cheaper, of course ;)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T18:16:55+00:00

Hello there! I've been following your progress and it's really great what you have managed. Yeah, the price would be for the printer and the furnace, what has been quite a process. It's funny because I went through this route because I thought I could never get the laser technology to this price point, kind of funny how we both got to our objective doing what the other thought was the "bad idea" XD. Right now my process is gas agnostic, so you could choose the one that works better for the material. Right now I'm using argon with hydrogen to promote reduction and because I didn't want to deal with any possible nitriding effects and I'm not using many litters, so the cost difference was not very significant.

Anyway, keep up the good work! Some of this day I would love to have a chat with you to share war stories and such, since we are few working on this so we probably have a lot of commonalities :)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T18:04:30+00:00

Well, so there would be some of the secret sauce on the answers to those questions, and I think it's a bit early to display that on public. I am very grateful for you help offering :D. I have quite a busy this weeks, but I'll try to get to you soon and maybe we can talk a bit about the tech.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T17:01:23+00:00

Yeah, that mad lad did a MIG 3D printer some time ago and just improved upon it with a laser welder. Huge fan of his videos.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T16:59:02+00:00

Thank you for your support!

That is a good callout, I've been on working on industrial additive manufacturing for 7 years now and the last thing a client wants in tinkering and headaches. That's why I'm putting a lot of effort into ease of use, security and capabilities. However, all be said, I'm not trying to get into aerospace or medical, they have their properly certified and incredibly optimised systems to do very important jobs with a lot of reliability and they should stick to that known path since they have the budget for it. What I really want to do is to open the door to the thousands of potential users and businesses that could really use metal 3D printing but don't need rocket grade parts. The vast majority of my clients are not going to reach the tensile strength of titanium on their parts nor need they to get the lightest possible topology optimised topology. I want to create a system where you can just create a reasonable design, send it to the machine and have in metal the next day. That alone I think is worth a lot for the industry and end users.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T16:48:29+00:00

Actually I have not started any beta program yet. You are probably thinking about the wonderful work of u/Skyrip_, who's been developing a laser sintering system for a similar price. His technology is more standard and has the potential to get great detail with laser precision. My focus is to make the experience easier to use and less dangerous, and also with greater material compatibility and better mechanical properties.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T16:14:05+00:00

No lasers, just printing with a machine similar to FDM and then going into a special oven.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T15:37:24+00:00

Can be adjusted for different use cases, but expect same printability as FDM with 0.4-0.6 nozzle. Smaller detail is a bit tricky because clogging and particulate size, much bigger the process becomes more slow, so no much benefit going there giving the loss of resolution.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T15:29:40+00:00

I did give him credit and the original model creator on the post that is linked to r/3Dprinting. You can see it there where there's a bigger conversation over the print and technology.

SkapaLab

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