[HH] open source metal 3d printer

[Bill Bogstad]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Greg London <email at greglondon.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.treehugger.com/gadgets/scientists-build-open-source-3d-metal-printer.html

Stories about this have popped all over the place in the last week or
so.   Unfortunately, I have
had relatively little luck finding detailed descriptions or pictures
of what the device has printed.
By following links from that web page though I did find a pre-print of
the original research paper:

Gerald C. Anzalone, Chenlong Zhang, Bas Wijnen, Paul G. Sanders and
Joshua M. Pearce, “Low-Cost Open-Source 3-D Metal Printing” IEEE
Access (in press). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2013.2293018

at acadamia.edu (sign up for a free account to get access to the
pre-print).   The paper has a single picture of a metal sprocket wheel
(attached below) which clearly shows just how crude their current
prints are.  The paper discusses many methods to improve the
quality/feature resolution or switch to alternative metals all of
which sound plausible.   Based on what they have done so far though, I
would characterize this as of purely research interest at this time.
Build one if you want to tinker with/improve a 3d metal printer.   Not
because you want to print something for actual use or even aesthetic
purposes.

Bill Bogstad
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