Hasta La Ideas

Earlier this week, when I posted a video about 3D-printed bike parts, I was simply too excited about the prospect of digitally fabricating dropouts to concern myself with the technology behind the collaboration between Charge Bikes and EADS. Commenter Modul called me out on my lack of due diligence, piquing my interest in a process known as DMLS, short for Direct Metal Laser Sintering. Had I done my research, I might have dug up commenter Lori Hobson’s mention of “DMLS, a process for METAL, even titanium!!!”… in response to a 2008 (!) post on rapid prototyping. (Just a friendly reminder that we welcome and value constructive comments from our readers!)

It turns out that Hobson, at the time, was at product development consultancy MindTribe, and she’d recently learned about the process herself. Frankly, her lengthy March 2008 blog post is a pitch-perfect introduction to the process, and I’d recommend it for anyone who needs a primer.

Which brings us to 3T RPD, who provided the images in Hobson’s post (reproduced here). The UK-based additive manufacturing outfit that has been the country’s largest SLS (plastic 3D printing) provider for over a decade. They recognized the potential of DMLS early on and are currently the major provider of metal AM since their first foray into DMLS in 2007. Their site has further details on DMLS for prospective clients, including a quasi-archaelogical video, as well as case studies.

As 3T RPD notes, the EOS M270/280 is more or less the industry standard for DMLS machines… at least to the extent that they’ve made their way stateside. We’d direct U.S. clients to SoCal’s Forecast3D or Illinois-based GPI Prototype to get their metals directly laser-sintered. For those of you who prefer a bit of faux-drama for your edification, the latter produced a “Super Cheesy but Funny Video on Direct Metal Laser Sintering for Rapid Prototype and Additive Manufacturing”:

Indeed, a more recent (and recommended) survey of 3D Metal Printing indicates that:

According to several reports, it is clear that European design and manufacturing firms are more advanced at both creating and utilizing additive technologies than their US counterparts (especially in the medical and dental arenas). And firms such as Boeing, Airbus, and even NASA are already using systems from the likes of EOS and Arcam.

Where Munich-based EOS specializes in DMLS, Sweden’s Arcam is the current leader in Electron Beam Melting, or EBM, which is explained more or less in full in the informative CGI above. For reference, an in-depth comparison of the two processes can be found here, and Arcam has done well to post a comprehensive company profile on YouTube. Unfortunately, videos of actual EBMing are, well, kinda trippy to say the least: it’s hard to tell what, exactly, is going on amid the roving sci-fi lasers and crazy disco shimmering. Take a look:

(Another clip juxtaposes factual stills with the mesmerizing, if largely incomprehensible, EBM footage.)

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3D printing has been heading into uncharted territory of late, what with a recent recent, as-yet-unresolved IP debate. Yet while the DIY/consumer-oriented 3D printers are typically designed to extrude thermoplastics such as ABS, I (for one) didn’t realize that 3D printing can also be used to make metal parts in a similar fashion. One commercially available process, electron beam melting (EBM to those in the know), has been around for upwards of a decade and its major applications include medical implants and aerospace engineering.

Alternately, as commenter Modul notes, metal objects can also be digitally fabricated in what is known as Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), which allows for a higher level of detail but requires postprocess thermal treatment, which is not necessary with EBM (a detail comparison of the two processes can be found European Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS) recently collaborated with Charge Bikes (no acronym necessary) of Bristol, UK, on fabricating titanium dropouts for some of their cyclocross frames.

Andy Hawkins of EADS Innovation Works notes that “the key benefit of this technology [is that] we’re able to manufacture components with a much higher degree of complexity. Features that were totally impossible with conventional machining, for instance, are now possible.”

Additionally (or is that additively?), 3D-printing is substantially less wasteful than traditional subtractive methods, in which a block of material is milled or machined down to the final product: the excess powder (at 2:09 in the video below) can be reused.

Watch and learn:

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Two-year-old Emma was born with anthrogryposis (AMC), a rare congenital disease that affects muscle strength. At a family conference, Emma’s mother learned about the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX), an assistive device made of hinged metal bars and resistance bands that enables people with underdeveloped arms to play and feed themselves.

Tariq Rahman and Whitney Sample of the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children had created an early prototype of the WREX, that worked for children as young as six. But the device was attached to a wheelchair and some children with AMC, including Emma, had use of their legs. The early version of the WREX was just too large and heavy for a child of Emma’s size.

Rahman and Sample found that, with the use of 3D printers, they were able to create a lightweight and flexible working prosthetic for Emma, that is customizable with easily replicated broken parts. The custom exoskeletons are printed in ABS plastic and attached to a plastic vest. Because of the ease of manufacturing, the exoskeleton can grow with the child which makes 3D printing especially exciting for those working in pediatric care.

Currently, fifteen children now use a custom 3D printed WREX device. Watch the full video of Emma’s story after the jump.

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Emmanuel Gilloz, a self-described “designer-geek-idealist” has invented the FoldaRap, a foldable version of the open-source RepRap 3D printer. While it’s more of a fold flat 3D printer, as it requires assembly rather than simply unfurling like an ironing board, it’s an impressive and creative direction for 3D printers to take. It’s not difficult to image being able to carry one of these with some raw plastic to a developing country or impoverished area, hooking it up to a generator, and printing out whatever’s needed locally.

France-based Gilloz spent over 500 hours developing the FoldaRap, and acknowledges the benefits of open-source:

Fortunately I could build upon the shoulders of others. To perpetuate that virtuous circle I also redistributed everything, since the very beginning, under the same open-source license. I also wanted to include a detailed BOM (Bill of Materials), a thing that I wish I could have seen more often in other projects.

…I designed the FoldaRap to be as easy as possible to build : you need few tools, and there is no distance to check during the assembly thanks to the push-fit strategy, making it easier to build than the previous models. While today it take a week to construct a classic RepRap and print something correct, the FoldaRap can be built in a day or two. With a kit well made we may even lower that time to few hours.

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Ok, so it’s actually just a combination of a wall-sized CNC-routed halftone and a climbing wall—a scaled-down scalable surface, but it’s a noteworthy DIY project nonetheless. For $200 and “not more than a day” of savoir-faire, 3-axis routing and elbow-grease designer Christoph Schindler (half of Zurich-based “furniture architecture” firm Schindler Salmeró) built the “Fitz Roy Climbing Wall” as a birthday gift for his son.

We used a 2500 x 1250 x 15 mm plywood-board and painted it. The hole pattern for the image and the holes for the climbing holds were drilled with an old CNC 3-axis-router. Although the pattern looks complex, there was no scripting involved and everything was prepared with standard software tools.

For those of you who have said resources, Schindler’s provided detailed instructions of the entire process:

First we selected a nice image, in our case we decided for an image of Fitz Roy in Patagonia. Then we created a surface with the “heightfield from image”-operation in Rhino, choosing a height of 3mm (see below). The milling is done with “Plunge Roughing,” a standard CAM operation. In Plunge Roughing, the tool makes a series of plunges to remove cylindrical plugs of material. To get our pattern, we chose for an usual large distance of the plunges. The selected tool is a 6 mm-Ballnose-Tool. To use the radius of the ballnose for different hole diameters, the height difference of the surface equals the radius of the tool (this is were the 3mm come from). If the paint is applied before milling, the holes and the white background contrast sharply.

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