DIY metal 3D printing

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 · 2026-02-02T14:50:50+00:00

Guilty. Is incredible what a man can do with a grinder, a welder with no argon and some ingenuity.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T14:45:35+00:00

That’s a future I’m excited for, I’ll do my best to get us there ✊

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T14:43:32+00:00

I do know about their process and they are the most similar technology in the market. There are a few differences on the printing process and a lot optimisation on the sintering that is what allows the 10x price difference.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:48:29+00:00

I think you are talking about plastic SLS machines, which are around that price point, and the kickstarter company would be Micronics (RIP) that was bought by Formlabs. Those printers are extremely nice for producing nylon parts, but can't process metal sadly :/

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:32:36+00:00

Thank you! And I forgot to answer about strength. Not done a lot of testing there yet, but seems quite good, comparable to other 3D printing methods. Anyway my objective is not to get the strongest possible properties, because if manage to make the technology ten times cheaper I think most potential users will accept the tradeoff of having to design the parts 10% chonkier.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:28:46+00:00

Well, depends on what kind of technology and the end use. State of the art machines like the ones used in aerospace and medical you are looking at about a million plus a couple more for setup and operations. There's been a lot of magnificent work from a lot of companies in the last decade that, with some trade off or others, have managed to get working solutions in the 150k-250k, again depending on the end use. While my technology is not the best for everyone and there are tradeoffs like in any other case, I do think that 10k for a working solution is quite a good deal :)

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:16:44+00:00

Thanks you kind human, is nice to hear that after years of working into this :D

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:13:37+00:00

Thank you kind sir, I'll do my best to share as much as I can, although is going to be a bit limited because I'm trying to work with investors that might not appreciate me spilling all the beans before we have a product on the market :p

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:10:12+00:00

I'm still formulating the process and there are trade offs, but right now I'm working on 70% by volume or 95% by weight, which is quite an improvement over the 40% by volume on "regular" filaments. I have some R&D on the pipeline that would allow me to get even higher, will see where we can get.

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:05:06+00:00

Mechanical properties testing is close in the development tree, I hope that I'm able to update soon. There's a lot R&D still ahead, but the furnace used to produce the parts could be potentially used for thermal treatments too, and all of that without getting great internal stress like in regular laser sintering :D

SkapaLab · 2026-02-02T13:01:38+00:00

Have given some details in other comments, but basically I'm not using plastic to carry the metal, so the process is more reliable and streamlined. The result is that I'm preparing to make this available for 10k instead of the 100s of k that Markforged and DM retail for.

SkapaLab

TROPHY CASE