How much is the sintering furnace to fuse the part after its printed?
Pretty reasonable at 10k for debind and sinter:
" Complete processing packages start at under $10,000.
After 3 years of development with partners and customers in Aerospace, Petroleum, Injection Molding, Dentistry, Education and Nuclear Energy, The Virtual Foundry is now shipping turn-key debinding and sintering systems that let any size shop create pure metal in your existing plastics 3D lab, or set up a new metal lab at, by far, the lowest price point to date."
Might sound like a lot, but furnaces that can do steel aren’t cheap
Paragonweb.com has been doing kilns for years. The requirements stated they only need a kiln that do 1400 degrees C. to sinter the metals. With Paragon, you can custom design a kiln with a digital controller for between $1400-$2000 on their web site. Just need to add a Vacuum pump, $500-$1000.
http://Paragonweb.com
this is the most shitty article about this topic i’ve ever seen.
it’s pure PR, no information.
How does the system works?
What is the system besides Filamet?
how much it costs?
@MidnightVisions I didn’t come across any furnaces that could reach 1400C on their website? The issue is to get above 1300C you need to use more expensive heating elements which raises the cost significantly.
@Christian_Schulz they’ve been around for a while now. They started with bronze and copper which can sinter in atmosphere at lower temperatures. They recently started making steel and stainless which requires an inert gas and/or hydrogen and sinters at higher temperatures. I believe the article mentions 10k for the system which is sinter and debinder
The issue they have is their media is incredibly brittle. It either breaks in shipment or breaks just sitting around waiting for use.
A problem with the concept of 3D printing with metal is the metal is encapsulated in a carrier material, and that carrier material needs to be removed after printing because it’s a contaminate. In metallurgy, the process of removing contaminates from metal is done through fluxing, reheating and hammering. This process uses sintering, which only melts the metal, and its weaker carrier material. It creates a weak blended mix material. It’s only as strong as the carrier material is when fused.
For example, you may have printed with a titanium filament, but if the carrier material is cookie dough, you will have a crunchy burnt cookie dough with titanium in its mix as the final product. The cookie dough will burn at the temperature needed to melt titanium, and stay as contaminates in-between the titanium particles.
Well that’s not true. The binders are formulated to vaporize entirely without carbonic residue. There is some porosity, but Metal Injection Molding is the same principle and has been in use for 30 years for making parts of near 99.9% density
@MidnightVisions valid concern, although the goal is a binder that 100% burns off cleanly. You can hit pretty high purity / low porosity with good process controls. Like >99% solid metal. Not good enough for aerospace, but pretty good.
99% is plenty good for aerospace, but they have very controlled metrology and usually do X-ray scans of parts to check for microfractures. Traditional DMLS doesn’t get much better density and it’s a common aerospace manufacturing technique.
@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make ok, not good enough for oil & gas then 
we can’t even use castings, it’s basically forgings or nothing.
Failing this, the home 3D SLA process has been used to create negative and positive master forms which can be silicon coated, then used for precision casting of the final metal. Hobby R/C jet engines have all been made using traditional casting methods, the only difference is how the forms are made.
I mean… DMLS and EBM work for just about anything if you’ve got $$&. I like the concept here for the potential price point but I think you need a lot of volume to justify this versus hiring out metal prints to a service bureau.
@Ryan_Carlyle really? I swore most of the process and valving equipment I used to work on were castings. Depends on the pressures and materials most likely.
@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make Yeah, under 5k psi or so it’s all castings. Up at 15-20k psi we’re doing all forgings. Couldn’t tell you offhand where the crossover point is. I’m sure it’s in an API spec somewhere.
I know DARPA has been working on characterizing 3d printed metal properties, and we have a few vendors printing stuff like hydraulic manifolds and functional widgets, but it’s slow going until there’s more data and history on fatigue, acid attack, H2S resistance, etc. The grain structure of printed metal is completely weird, and pretty sensitive to printer settings, so it’s not a simple thing to do. And we don’t have the drivers for weight reduction or complex geometry that you might get in a rocket motor or turbine blade where other industries are doing production part printing now.