madesolid
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Posts posted by madesolid
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Give it a try! From my experience the alloys in the low melting point metals tend to form a coating of oxidation on their surface that makes depositing and bonding the next molten layer difficult or impossible without a flux or printing under inert atmosphere. Most of the low melting point alloys in use today tend to also be quite brittle. Conductive circuit traces, always in fashion, would be a good use case here. If you do happen to run some experiments, post pics!
cheers,
~lance
Why not Low Melting Temperature Metal Alloy Printing?
in Materials & profiles
Posted
For the metal powder/binder compositions. Jewelry metal 'clay' is what this brings to mind immediately. Yes, in fact, what you're proposing with the powdered metal filament+binder, is in line with powder metallurgy techniques used today.
A combination of brass powder and PVA binder worked well for us, we made sheets of the stuff for LOM style printing. Benefits of using PVA is that you can really load up the metal powder and as the water evaporates you get a very dense material. PVA smells horrible when burning the binder out, but it's cheap, environmentally benign, and readily available.