Open-Source SLS 3D Printer: Project OpenFuse 

FREAKING AMAZING

Awesome man! I will stop by the discord in the coming days.

I'm so happy to stumble across this. My husband is a chocolatier and we got into 3D printing several years ago to design our own chocolate moulds. I've become fairly well versed in FDM and SLA so I guess SLS was an inevitable next-step. I always did enjoy doing sugar work.

Nice work Luke. You are going to get the collaboration you are looking for and this project is going to grow. In 5 years I'm going be telling people that I was here, at this point: Luke Cunningham looking up from his laptop notes, realizing the potential of what and he was starting.......... and he was smiling. I am strapped in for the ride young man. I wish you all the best. Thank you.

That looks amazing, looking forward to seeing the community build on this

I hope this blows up, because it blew my mind

I just became aware of this via twitter, amazing work!

That's some legit work there! Keep up the good work!

That’s amazing looking forward to the BOM or even the kit.

Awesome work Luke! Looks fantastic, keep it up.

This has a bright future. I reckon one day SLS printers will be as common as FFF.

Very excited to see your work on this! Certainly going to be building one in the future

Wow this is awesome. And the fact that its open source its really valuable. Thanks man!

Great job young man, keep us posted...

This is really cool. Can't wait for you to release updates about this project. I would be interested in buying a kit if you were to produce them.

Great job! with these method its easy to recycle failed prints

Nice work done here. Looking forward for your update.

Very cool! I was playing around with sintering silicon carbide on my fiber laser, and starting to CAD out the design for a proper SLS system (feed/print pistons, recoater, etc). But one of my viewers mentioned your channel and this looks much better! Looking forward to hacking on this design, looks like you've done a great job. Out of curiosity, is the recoater a blade-style, or roller?

Woah, i was about to say that you should contact 3D Printing Nerd, but as i see, he was already here.

So you're telling me I can print my own trefoil knot sugar coffee thingies with that? That's amazing...

As for kits, this would be very Kickstarter-able. I think people would want the stainless steel option at least for food-safety purposes, but when I look at it I think of dissolvable material for mold-making. Well done, keep it up! Looks fantastic. :)

The diamond lattice out of sugar makes it look like it's made out of voxels in 2005 :p

Looks amazing!!! Have you done any prints on pla powder yet, or have you kept to table sugar? Also, the production quality of your videos just keeps going up! Great job man 👌

Excellent. Excited to see what you're able to do with it. Make me want to buy one from you Luke. lol.

"Just scratched the surface"... opportunity to say "just fused the first few layers" missed! Just messin, great stuff man, subscribed.

i love it, especially the fact the you are sharing your knowledge. i am sorry that i can't support you more than a like and sub, and good wish. keep up the good work, and please share the knowledge.

Well done!

So cool, great project!

Great Project! Will follow

This is awesome!! You probably have a very decent brother!!!

Super excitied about this!! was thinking about buying a fuse1 but feel like giving this a try first. Wish the video went into more details how everything works

So sweet project! =)

very big R& D effort, congrats! I like to know more about how you determined to use a Co2 laser, which is a great choice but is there a big difference to diode lasers? maybe in what materials work for this system.

Interesting printer Thanks for sharing👍😀

Amazing man! Your the pioneer...

This is a super exciting project. I'm looking forward to see how it develops. There was a very similar SLS printer called the Candyfab which printed in sugar. If you haven't seen it, you may want to check it out for ideas. Thanks and good luck!

This is sick! I’m thinking of experimenting to see if instead of a laser, you could use an acetone nozzle to bond abs dust. Just a thought right now!

1:56 it looks interesting

Great results so far!! I'll be following for sure! Id love to adapt a powder box to my fiber laser

Definitely interested in seeing more of this for sure. I was very close to buying an SLS machine when I got my DLP machine. Will be great if this can be a truly affordable way to print with standard kinds of SLS materials :)

Basically we have a core XY K40 Laser with a scraper? I absolutely love it. I take it the hardest part would be that scraper that has to deposit another (EXTREMELY FINE) layer of material. Even on the old 100k usd powder machines I never understood how it never messed up a layer by not making sure the material was actually spread out.

Nice video amazing work. Plus you kinda look like micheal reeves with the hair and glasses but I’m probably wrong

Did you ever get around to making a toolchanger for the SKGO? Could be cool to make a toolchanger for this printer too. Maybe change to a liquid jet tool (inkjet or other). Although, I guess you could just incorporate that directly into the main print head since both tools should be non contact.

That is amazing machine you have over there!!! Did you try with finer material? It seams that the quality problems you have , is material problem!

Hi, Luke! I like your project! Especially the approach (sugar!) and the attention to safety! Luke, what do you think about the conception of pre-heating a material? You know the benefits, I'm sure. Heating chambers aren't easy probably but as I've seen it in Sintertac (?) SLS printer, I must ask this. :) P.S. oh, yeah... I've listened to the "UV lights" part. But then what's about a full heated chamber? BTW, do you make thermal simulations for your project?

This is really exciting, I could see it being a really neat way to make 3D foods. How food safe is it/could it be? Also where is the discord channel, I can't find it. (I haven't finished the video yet, I'm still watching, sorry if you answer this at some point)

Very nice, just sent a donation your way, will get on board the Patreon too, I'd like to attempt a build in January.

Keen to get involved and start buying major parts & starting to build at least some components. Even if you dont have a complete BOM yet, are you able to release partial BOM so that I can start sourcing and building now ???

So where are you at on the fully assembled or kit based packages? I want one! Maybe this wouldn’t be too difficult: Metal powder (not specialized, but common industrial variety) mixed with a binder powder (maybe wax, or even sugar). The printed piece could then be fired in a furnace to burn off the binder material and fuse the metal powder. Prior to printing, the model would need to be scaled up in order to compensate for shrinkage from binder material loss and fusing of metal powder during firing. The required scaling could be predicted from an initial small test piece, for any given metal/binder mixture, while furnace temperatures and firing times would be based on the types of metal and binder used. A possible problem might be ash mixed into the finished metal piece. Actually, I suspect that may not really even be an issue… If it is though, then I’m sure it could be addressed with the right binder material and/or a pressurized furnace. Some metals would require very high temps for this to work. Some metals though, such as aluminum, would not have prohibitive furnace temp requirements. So buying or building a furnace for those lower temp metals would not be too expensive or difficult, and just aluminum would open up so much potential. While higher temp metals would probably require a fairly expensive pressure furnace, which would still probably leave the printer/furnace combo proved far less than pretty much any other metal 3D printer available.

This looks awesome. I would suggest powered sugar for future tests

Certainly be interested in a kit, along the lines of the seckit-go. Interested to see how caster-sugar would go.

This is fantastic Luke. Have you tried castor sugar? Would be interesting to see a really detailed print with super fine grains. Cheers, JAYTEE

good job. great

Amazing man, have you tried powered sugar?

I'd be curious to see the results when using a much finer powdered sugar instead of the larger granules of regular white sugar. Would love a reasonably priced kit, but would want to make sure it actually produced quality prints first which you can't tell based on the regular sugar prints.

Incredible work! Have you posted this on reddit yet? This is amazing

Have you tried printing in powered sugar? If you put the sugar you have into a blender or food processor is easy to make large volumes of it.

I have no idea about 3D printing but this looks amazing & hella impressive. Could you use sand and make glass with this method?

Really cool! Do you think by adding "the perfect" ratio of powdered sugar to "the perfect" ratio of the course sugar you're using now could result in a smoother finished part?

I saw this exact machine on "Jurassic Park 1". Back then they told it still on prototype. But dude now is 2023. Is Corona time machined world?😛

On the note of simplicity this esentially a CO2 Laser Table, with a Powder Bed Setup Below. "Complex" but nothing more complex than one of those SUPER common K40 Laser Tables I would think.

Sorry to ask the most obvious question but, why are you using a x/y axis to move around the laser and not a set of galvos to make it a scanning laser?

It would be awesome to see this machine working with grounded sugar.

Try icing sugar used to make icing for cakes it literally comes as a fine powder

Amazing work! What of laser diodes? 🇨🇦

3d printed candy, lets go

Maybe you should show your brother next time!! I bet he is very decent!!

Excelent! so next step is just using a stronger laser, making it airtight, fill it with inert gas and you have a metal printer? awesome. BTW have you tried using finer sugar? there is powder sugar readily availible at supermarkets at least in my country.

Could you please tell me that how did you program the laser engraver for the layer by layer printing, I mean how and where did you Slice the model?

Once in a while youtube recomendations actualy works 😁. Dont have experience in this but wouldn't it be able to print wax models for lost wax casting?

would you get a better result with powder sugar? I'd be curious to see that. subbed.

What if you use printer toner as material? It's like 8 microns grain and made of PP and easy to melt even with diode laser

Hey Luke, First of all great work buddy. It's a really, really remarkable project. However I tried to acces to your website but i couldn't access it. Would you be able to help?

Wow I am amazed!! I bet your brother( if you have one) is very decent!!

Where did you buy the 10w co2 tube? Only find attractive offers down to about 40w.

Have you tried using powdered sugar, should have the same properties as normal sugar but with a finer grain size

Awesome stuff man! I would love to discuss some SLS ideas with you. How can I contact you?

Recycling prints with this is probably gonna be very easy. Just powderize failed prints or simple pieces that already served their purpose and are no longer needed!

Hi, first time I'm seeing this project. The website is down :( Is the project still going?

I like to see metal be used as a print material on this printer

Like all of your work I have seen this is amazing, a new level of amazing even! CNCKitchen done that salt video not too long ago, not sure if salt would work with this or if you have seen the video. He was looking for a cheaper finer salt, and someone in the comments mentioned a possible candidate, might be something to check out.

Guys I'm confused, can you use a laser cutter of 5 W for sintering??? Please could you help me with this?

Have you tried sand as a material to make glass parts?

Have you considered another laser type? CO2 lasers have a very bad beam shape. You need rather expensive optical stuff to shape the beam for fine and good quality prints. Sinterit Lisa (pro) uses a 808nm 5W IR-Laser. You can shape the beam with an amorphous prism pair. Only downside is, you can only print dark materials otherwise you will encounter absorption issue's . Also consider a heater chamber an heated powder bed. When you heat the material a few degrees below the glass transition temperature you can print faster and don't need a lot of laser power. You will need good temperature control.

i wonder that it can print with sugar and can carbonize sugar. so can it print carbon parts?

But where is the project now?

Why not try powder sugar?

Have you tried powdered sugar?

I make custom made foot orthotics. I was looking at purchasing a farm of sinterit and sintratec models, but the build volume was so small. Just didn't make sense. I need to nest about 18 pairs in at once, so I need about 30x30x30cm. So I looked at the ProdWays Promaker P1000X, but they quoted me $300K and a material powder cost of about $50 a pair, which was pushing my peak budget. Give all the advances occurring in SLS right now, including young scrappy kids like yourself, I'm considering just sitting back 2 years and see what happens next. Any reason why you are not testing prints in powdered plastic polymers?

glass sugar? can this improove the resolution, because it is a most fine grain size ?

Sahara sand would be interesting

I was wondering, did you abandon the 40$ 3D printer project that you talked about working and improving upon and posting the build videos? I personally wanted to make it and the lack of info about it is kinda annoying so any updates on it ever?

What is the status of this in 2024? I've come across things I need to "print" on SLS however I don't have £30k :( Would love to make a small one like this!

Tried powdered sugar?

If you're looking for guys to collaborate then may try to join Open Source Ecology and try to get some feedback from them

I have some zprinters 310 plus and depowdering station I bought and need to upgrade firmware not finding many options can you help?

You Could use powderedsugar

Is there a crowdfunding campaign for your project?

where can i get the kit? :)

That is the reason parents should always help kids to reach their dreams. Do you know what he will be able to do? Could be the next elon musk. ALWAYS support your kids. Financially (expensive hobbies) and mentally.