Nice. But Cranktown did this 2 years ago, in his garage.
I saw a video about this a few days ago, one thing that’s not addressed is what aluminum alloys this works best with. Some alloys aren’t suitable for casting. And separately you need to flux the molten solution to separate out oxides and make sure there’s no voids or inclusions in the metal object.
That said, this is brilliant and could easily have huge impact in non structural applications or prototyping.
Recently on twitter an e/acc-aligned person posted some techno-optimist propaganda to the effect of “if primitive societies could see our existing technology, rockets, supercomputers, semiconductor fabs etc, they would see us as gods rather than human beings” (paraphrasing).
Someone else leapt in to provide a number of very interesting accounts in which isolated tribes e.g. Inuit, aborigine, etc had actually been taken to marvel at advanced western technology - cars, skyscrapers etc. These were obviously cherry-picked accounts but it was nonetheless thought-provoking and very funny to me to read about these guys being deeply unimpressed with our shit. “You mean you have to feed this mechanical horse with dinosaur bones and you have to work all day to pay for the dinosaur bones? My horse feeds itself” type of stuff.
I love an enthusiastic MIT student project as much as the next man but I think it’s really nice to sometimes view stuff like this through the lens of an ancient master craftsman. I accept that some open-minded farrier from the Middle ages, when shown this contraption, might be impressed, but I also think a decent fraction might be shaking their heads in dismay :)
It seems like there are still a lot of challenges from the physics of printing liquid aluminum. To me this seems like it overcomplicated the task because they chose to print the aluminum, rather than just printing a form that can hold molten aluminum as a traditional casting might. Maybe that is already done though, this is academic work after all and not necessarily done to seek optimal solutions but to scope out future challenges.
I'm a 3D printing enthusiast. I find this to be incredibly interesting.
There was an interesting product at CES that used a gelatinous bed into which resin is injected and cured making it possible to print objects without supports.
Being able to do this with metal opens up a ton of future manufacturing options. It's not quite the same process and it's quite early, but with refinement this could be a very interesting future option for quickly building entire objects in minutes that would normally take hours.
I'm waiting for the time when 3D-printer can print a 3D-printer.
Very clever! But it looks like that this is more like making grooves in glass sand and pouring molten aluminum in the groves than traditional 3D printing! I’d be curious if the characteristics of these parts are akin to cast parts. Also, my understanding is that this is more of a 2.5 D process than a 3D process. I’m. I’m curious as to how this process may scale to a 3 D process! Still cool!
Sciaky is a company in Chicago who's been doing far more impressive work for decades now.[1] They've got a few different additive metal technologies to choose from.
It would be interesting to see about rapid production of one-off molds for sand casting, maybe printing wax and filling with sand, using 3d printing techniques?
I don't know a ton about metal internal structures but I would assume that the properties of the printed product will be lesser than if it was made from extrusion or some other process? I think there's something about crystalline structure and the speed of the transition from liquid to solid. Would love to know someone else's informed guess on this.
kind of remind me of a pistol slide at 0:27... but yeah this isnt 3d printing, it is molding... and I haven't watch the whole video but I don't think they show you how they make the mold.
Good news, by improving system
So like sand-casting, only worse.
Title should read “molten metal”. Liquid metals are a thing, and the title is ambiguous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal
This is exciting but incredibly niche atm. The parts it produces have to be milled and machined afterwards which in some cases could increase the manufacturing time overall. I do like their approach of keeping it hot and printing inside the sand. Much like casting. The nozzle however pushes sand all over the place and is probably pushing it into the path, causing the poorer quality prints. I spent a couple years as a young adult in a metal part manufacturing plant while going to school.
It’s exciting though because I believe we’ll have a time, not too far from now, where a design can be fed to a molten printer to print a base part, transferred to cnc mill for final refining, and then polished and painted for shipping. It won’t cost $10M to create a fabrication facility. It won’t require 25 years of industrial mechanics to build your “plant”. Just get “Bubba the Boiler” metal 3D printer, “Michael the mill” CNC miller, and the cast and crew of smaller tools to buff, polish, powder coat.
I’ll stick to wood and plastic for now. More my “level”.