MakerGear Forum

It's been more than a year since we ran our indiegogo campaign to develop our 3d metal clay printer, the Mini Metal Maker. We've been able to develop it into essentially two different forms: One is a DIY version that includes 3d build files for the non-hardware-store parts, and the other is a professional quality metal machine.

Metal clay is still a bit of an unknown thing in the world of 3d printing. There are a couple groups in the UK that are working with it, and some groups in the US making pneumatic extruder heads. They tend toward making single-path pottery type shapes with line sizes in the mm in diameter. Ours uses a stepper gear motor & screw to push clay from a pre-filled syringe & the resolution is right up there with many current FDM plastic printers. Using the a 22 ga. extruder nozzle, we make .25mm dia lines. Objects printed are then cleaned and touched up like you would any metal clay jewelry and then fired in a kiln. The object does shrink a bit, between 8 and 15%. We are going to launch with Bronze, Copper, and a 'white copper' clay that looks silver.

Yes, it's intended for jewelry and crafty ornamental stuff at this point. What the heck, DIY jewelry is a $2.3 billion slice of the US crafting industry, so we're betting that it's a valuable niche.
The main thing is making the printer easy to use. This involves making content creation aka 3d modeling more accessible, and making the printer's software easy. So far, we've been able to make the machine auto-leveling & auto height-finding. More to come.

Our site: http://www.minimetalmaker.com

Feedback appreciated & I will gladly answer or clarify anything.
-David

Have you guys thought about making a universal extruder that could mount onto the M2? The X axis is a very easy mechanism to use, like a 20x50mm bolt pattern with M3 hardware.

Very neat stuff. Thoughts / questions:

1) What's the target market for this kind of thing? Are you going for the Etsy jewelry maker crowd? You mention it replacing lost-wax casting, but frankly that's kind of a poor comparison. That's like saying a M2 replaces injection molding; one is great for one or two-off runs, whereas the other is intended for mass production. Maybe you mean it improves over lost wax because you don't lose your original?

2) The kiln thing is kind of a hidden expense IMHO. Just looking online, you can get a very entry level looking electric kiln for about 600 bucks, but brands like olympic and paragon are over $1000 quickly. But that's not all - you probably need to run new electrical service because trying to hit 1550F on a 120V line would require obscene amperage draw, so you'd need a 208 or 240 line. Assuming the electrical run isn't huge and/or annoying to do, you'd be talking probably another 300-500 to run the service, so probably budgeting $2000 just for the kiln itself would be safe. Once again, back to the target audience question... Maybe for starters offer some links for potential newcomers of suggested kilns to purchase? Maybe sell them yourself?

3) What insta said - the M2 frame / chassis is very easy to work with, and would get you plenty of build area - probably more than you'd need. However I can see why you probably designed the current extruder like you did - unlike filament-based extrusion, you have to load the entire cartridge of clay in one shot and probably push a plunger down to push the clay out the nozzle, yeah? You could probably still have the plunging mechanism be stationary and have the clay run through a PTFE tube to get to the extruder - similar to the bowden system the Ultimakers use. This would allow you to run larger tubes, and keep them stationary, thus shrinking the print head design and making it more lightweight.

4) Is it accurate enough to lay PCB traces? Kiln finishing still would ruin the PCB, but it's something I'm always looking out for. Given the numbers you spec on the site, it sound accurate enough!

5) You're going to run into the same issue Makerbot did with their Cupcake and Thing-o-matic chassis: the X/Y chassis you have there is going to limit how big a build area you can work with, and how fast you can move it around, since you've got this giant print head cantilevered over an object that is moving around which will limit how quickly you can extrude and get good layer adhesion, especially with smaller parts that will probably in general have flimsy adhesion to the build surface.

6) Your FAQ lists an Arduino Duo as the brains. Did you mean an Arduino Due? If so, hooray! Way to get off the 2560 Atmel chipset! If not, WTH is a Duo?

Looks pretty neat otherwise. I have friends who would probably be interested.

How much post-processing work went into that gear set? It looks incredible compared to some of the other prints. Not that your other samples are crap, but those gears are an order of magnitude cleaner.