The End Of Metal Tracks - DIY Metal 3D Printing 

When people ask why I exclusively watch RU-vid instead of other streaming services, videos like these are great examples of why. Very interesting project, instant sub

This is clearly a very excruciating project with all of the debugging and failures. I commend you for sticking with it.

Five years from now we'll be buying an Elegoo or Creality version on Amazon for $169 on Black Friday, lads. All thanks to this clever fellow.

So glad you have kept going with this mate. Well done.

Wow. Open source is a divine gift to humanity. You know why. Thank you. Can't wait.

You're pioneering the metal 3D printing movement dude. You might be the next Josef Prusa.

This is the coolest project i've ever seen. A homemade metal 3d printer... Incredible

I just know that you will nail this bad boy at some point... love this project !!

I thought about pursuing a home brew metal printer a few years ago. It's awesome to have found someone that actually did.

the thick spots at the start and end of metal tracks can be controlled by "skywriting" laser scan strategy in which laser start/stop emitting only when it achieves certain acceleration. However, the work you have done is still amazing and applicable, and truly speaking impossible for 1 man team.

Looking forward to that closed loop control!! This is improving at a wild pace man

WOW! I saw some of your older videos about this project, but hadn't watched any since. I'm super impressed with how far it's come since then! Awesome work

I can't elaborate because I am NDA'd out of my mind. however, love your project and determination. a suggestion and associated considerations. Try enclosing your machine/workspace, and pressurize it with helium. Why? Considerations. 1 - Typical commercial Laser powder bed fusion use argon atmosphere to reduce oxides and improve porosity etc. but 2 - the plume (thermal laser plasma, metal powder interaction) results in denudation in front and around melt pool - to reduce melt powder denudation as laser moves, a pressurized atmosphere is desired to mitigate/reduce plume size hence reducing powder denudation beside laser trace. 3 - argon at 5bar produces plasma due to fibre laser interaction with stainless build plate and plasma increases plume denudation because thermal increase and reflections, helium does not produce this plasma, yet reduces denudation due to increased surrounding pressure, at 5bar you will achieve 99% porosity

This project is so cool , the prospect of consumer metal printing in the future is unbelievable

great progress! 👏😎 wonderful job!

Have you tried pulsating the laser power? Like 70% half power, 30% max power? The idea is to heat up the material without melting it and when, locally, the material is hot enough to fuse with out sputtering you increase laser output to melt that spot and throttle it down fast so it can cool off. Sort of like tig welding.

Kind of a Holy Grail Project ! ...Fusion, and Metal 3DP... Whenever I complain about TS'g my own Tech Pipeline I'll think of You !!! ~Very Inspired !

this guy is amazing, I like that you don't simplify the information and explain things well love it

What an amazing project! This machine you have developed in incredibly impressive! I really hope you keep going with this project and keep developing it further 😁

wow. Truly amazed how much you know about all of this. Looking forward to your next vid...

If you have trouble with droplets at the start and end of tracks due to acceleration, why not separate the acceleration from the start of the track? As in: start moving, get up to speed, and only then turn on the laser. That would decrease the working surface, but might help.

Excellent results so far! Many variables to control and tune.

Hello, I am extremely impressed with your progress. I have done a lot of research and postulating on these systems so I Was thinking maybe I could help or clarify somethings. SLS Printers don't actually melt the material they sinter it. This is better because as you can see the pooling and controlling of the molten materials is quiet an issue. The SLS machine also have heated chambers. The reason for this is so that the exposure to the laser is incredibly short and cause the particles to bond to each other. So I think you have done phenomenal work but that might be the two areas that might be an issue. I really hope you come right :) Another thing, the scraper should be extremely flat material that cannot generate a static charge, perhaps like a gauge plate edge?

We need more people like you with this level of creativity..keep up the good work big guy! 🤟🏽

Just come across your channel, and boy has it been great going through your uploads. Thank you soo much for your incredible work and dedication toward such a fantastic project. Keep up the awesome work👍👍

I've just found this and I've gotta say that it is fascinating! I'm definitely going to be following this project closely.

2:56 if the plastic swipe care still proves too stiff you might try car window wipers for the rain, think about how they just glide over ice not losing anything at all. and because they come from any where they should be cheap and easy to replace.

Great Video...... more of this please❗ The topic of DIY Metal 3D printing is becoming more and more important❗👍

this will be the next revolution in 3d printing because the parts will have real strength

The card recoater is GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!

What a crazy video that took a lot of effort

This is very very impressive. Seriously. You have some skills to be proud of.

8:39 Use a kitchen-blender, used for making smoothies and crushed ice. It makes powder so fine, that you have to keep its lid closed for a while when ready, or a cloud of fine dust will fill the room.

Amazing job👍 As someone who has trouble finishing projects, I am impressed.

Glad to see you not giving up. 👍 As one famously said: Metal matters! ;-)

Massively impressive, man.

I love following your project, thanks for posting

Fascinating! Thank you for posting this video.

Less than 1min in to your video and I love your humourous presentations style!! Slapped that sub button hard

Great, easy to follow video. Your video-making skills has come a long way!

Nice work, I admire your focus and determination.

First time watching your work, and I'm impressed!!

Tnx for this new video. Good progress!

Fantastic work!!! To get thin layers, galvos with mirrors are used for speed at lower power and an inert gas argon chamber preferably under vacuum

Nice work! In 2008 I met a material engineer who designed a metal 3d printer with pretty good results (at least the ones he showed publicly). He did the powder layer spreading method similar to yours, but then used an adhesive sprayed through a hacked inkjet printer cartridge... Once the print was done, he'd sinter the parts in a furnace.

Bro, amazingly thorough and thoughtful. Well done and keep up the good work!

Sorry for my word but holy shit this is amazing

Unbelievable! Fantastic work!

Wow fantastic prototyping

Brings back memories of the early days at Xact Metal. You appear to be working thru these issues similarly to how we did. Keep up the good work. Reach out if you have any questions.

Keep going man your work is impressive. This must have taken a ton of effort.

This is awesome! I'd suggest writing to some companies that make metal powders if you haven't already, I'm sure you can find one that would want to sponsor the development of a diy sls printer, at least with some powder

This is all well and good, but what we all want to see is a benchy!!

amazing work! Just found this channel and definitely subscribed to follow this build!

Fantastic work. You're an early pioneer.

I've watched this way more than 3 times.

This is SO impressive

Awesome progress!

That little puff of smoke at the end of the fiber can be the most disheartening thing in the world. I feel for you! On the plus side….. in my case it’s always uncovered my unknown ability for cursing. You’re really kicking some ass with this. I just found your channel, and It’s really impressive. It really is a new golden age for lasers, photonics, and equipment available to the home workshop DIY crowd! I think that’s wonderful. There are several ways to mitigate the fiber issues and guarantee immediate shut down before thermal runaway. But it might be a bit too finicky in your situation. All of my fiber laser fun is usually done on an optical breadboard, but you’re really fighting in the trenches with all of that quick movement, And unique mounting. Sadly my experience does not stretch that far. So I would be a bit shy to suggest anything. But you’re really on a roll, and this is some of the best photonics/laser stuff I’ve seen on RU-vid in a long time. Marco reps, breaking taps, Les’s lab, and zenodilodon….. they all have some insane and helpful laser content on their channels. I’m sure you’re aware of them but I thought I would leave them here just in case. It’s like heaven on RU-vid these days for REAL laser and photonics content. I never cared much for the balloon popping/burning laser pointer videos, but I love to see the science and stuff like this! Good luck! 👍🤘

Really amazing watching your progress. I have FDM and resin 3d printers, but this is so next level..!!!! 🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼🍀😎

Our physics professor told us about the laser-acceleration issue once. Aparently the trick is to accelerate first and then turn on the laser, then turn it off before decelerating. Maybe a toolpath for lasering a square could look like the weird hastag sign on an apple keyboard? Other than that, the work you do is absolutely amazing, you might very well become the one to make metal 3d printing available to normal people!

wowee great work!

Hat’s off for your hard work sir 😎👍

This is so impressive!

This is incredible! 👏🏻

Nice project man, maybe activating the láser while machine is running or controlling initial power would help you eliminate the start and finish melt accumulation.

That was very interesting! Well done

Fantastic work! Its the first video of yours that I've seen and I already cant wait for more. If you end up trying some other additives to the powder a ball mill should be a very cheap and easy way to improve the mixing. Just be careful and take all precautions that come whith milling fine metals, if your process is good some metals have a tendency to self combust...

Excellent project, just subscribed

very cool! keeep us updated!

This is incredible!

I can't say that I understand half the terms, but I do enjoy trying to follow along :)

Thanks for sharing. You want to accelerate before turning the laser on and turn the laser off before decelerating so that you are always moving at constant velocity while sintering. This should help with those blobs on the ends of the tracks.

Fantastic! Hopefully one day we can build one ourselves.

Regarding the fiber end and how you noted the original connector was open ended, this is likely using an air gapped ferrule. This will mount a cleaved fiber so it has an optical face but will not have any epoxy near the end face. For any high power application this is usually preferred since it reduces the risk of epoxy related thermal damage/thermal runaway. Using a standard connectors thats polished with epoxy mounting the fiber in connector up to the end face runs higher risk of damage.

Really cool project hope you get the results your looking for

Sorry for the interruption....But who else is SICK of seat geek commercials?!!?! Never saw this project before... Cool!

Love the content, keep it coming!

Might I suggest looking at Hitachi CPM White #1 steel. It is an extremely pure steel with sulfur and phosphorus content at .25% or lower. It is just iron and carbon. It is in powder form. It could be one less variable for you to deal with in that the material is very chemically uniform and it could be simpler to calculate how it will respond to heat. Japanese master smiths use it to make blades that can take an edge like no other. I own several Japanese knives. The White #1 blade has an edge that will cut your name in two.

Yew getting there bud. Nice work

how about doing this in a vacuum environment? I think it may help get rid of molten metal getting spit everywhere caused by thermal expansion of air.

There are a few guys that have put together their own CMM using epoxy and sand/granite/special concrete for the base to reduce vibration. Cheap, just need molds. Might be worth establishing your machine and then fiddling with optics, speeds, etc

Great results !

2:47 When u notice, that this guy has never heard of Wall Street... :-)

Great video!

Cheers to you! I use old gift cards everything!

Man, you're a legend!

I would add mass to the machine base. It appears you have a lot of gantry sway going on e which is going to effect your focal point. Another thing to consider is the machine may not be reaching your specified speeds. The distances travelled are shorter than the acceleration the machine is capable of. It would also be best to eliminate any sharp turns the machine has to make. Radii help prevent the machine having to stop and then accelerating on another access. The bigger the radius the longer the machine has time to accelerate the new axis motion up to speed.

Great job

you should try lowering the laser power near the end of the line travel to reduce heat build up and raised blobs. it would be similar to linear advance controlling filament pressure in a nozzle.

great video!

Mini-SLS, nice.

No one I'm aware of in the industry has cracked dimensionally-perfect additively-manufactured metal parts. CNC giants like DMG Mori or Hermle "solved" the problem by sticking additive metal systems inside 5-axis CNC mill-turn machining centers. Folks need to accept that additive manufacturing is much like traditional casting, it'll get you close to the desired shape, but tight tolerances will always require machining.

Hi friend. You might to consider an laminar air flow across the powder bed. Looks like there is significant amount of spatter around ur scanned tracks. Metal vaporises under laser and condense when it hit the cold air. Those metal condensates attenuate your laser beam and by removing them with a laminar air flow, the melt will be much more consistent. The air flow ought to flow into a HEPA filter tho..

just awesome!

This is sooooo sick

1 step closer to hobbyists metal 3D printing!!!

This is awesome. Subscribing

Add a chamber around the burn plate and fill it with argon...most your splatter will go away and your edge will be much finer. A titanium roller barrel instead of wiper blade.

I really hope my other comment posted, unfortunately I seem to have lost it. I'm going to try and sum up what I said. I have experience in working with SLS and DMLS printers, specifically the EOS M290. For wipers, you can google "use cases of different re-coater configurations EOS" for a writeup that goes into detail about the re-coater blades in the EOS M290 DMLS machine. In short, they use a HSS parallelogram shaped blade which is ductile enough when coming in contact with the print, while in other cases a ceramic blade is used. More info on the writeup. For the build environment, we always pumped down the machine and filled it with argon. The build volume is also heated. As someone else mentioned below, you could pulsate the laser, which If I'm remembering correctly is something that is also done on the EOS M290. The EOS M290 also has a large filter cabinet which requires the filters to be replaced when switching materials or on occasion once the flow through them drops below a certain point. I believe the filters could have been capturing spatter which would have been blown into them by the flow of argon which traveled across the build surface. After printing on an EOS machine, the powder should be sieved as well, which I believe is done to remove anything in the stock powder which exceeds the size of the rest of the powder.