Has anyone ever tryed printing in solder I need to print some parts for

Has anyone ever tryed printing in solder

I need to print some parts for a helicon double layer thruster in collage and I am wondering if anyone has ever tryed printing with solder or tried printing circuits

Solder has the wrong melting properties for printing.

Oh well thats a bit crappy haha any suggestions for antenna material

Several metals are laser-sinterable, but extrusion-based printing is really only good for thermoplastics (and a few related materials that behave like thermoplastics). Several of these materials can be used for investment casting to produce metal parts, though.

https://plus.google.com/104012815742569035024/posts/3KiNY5GvjZq

Not sure how that would work as an antena, but it reminds me of that paintable antenna stuff that is infused with nano-capacitors. You should be able to put those in a printable material.

The thing with solder as well, is that it has rosin core flux, which is acidic. Any metal based nozzle that isn’t nickel plated will basically be eroded away and cease to work after a short while.

Oh thanks for the help everyone and ill look into the antenna paint stuff thanks alot

For paintable materials, see http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html

A DIY conductive glue: http://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Conductive-Glue-and-Glue-a-Circuit/

Most recently in the RepRap world, composite filaments including both carbon and metallic components seem promising: http://blog.reprap.org/2013/02/conducting-plastic-experiments.html
https://github.com/reprappro/Engineering/

@Whosa_whatsis “Solder has the wrong melting properties for printing.” is not an engineer sentence, maybe for a lawyer or a business owner, but not for an engineer … so instead of looking for other alternatives maybe we could discuss if it is really impossible printing solder :slight_smile:
What about using something similar to the “chocolate extruder” of RichRap having the melted material??

@Alberto_Valero_Gomez you are completely wrong. It is an engineer sentence. Engineers know when to use the proper materials, and solder is not the proper material. It doesn’t have a glass transition temperature, it has a melting temperature, which makes it unsuitable for extrusion.

yes, I heard the same for chocolate :slight_smile: anyway, I, for sure, know less than you guys :slight_smile: but what I know is that all innovation was deemed impossible before doing it. Maybe instead of engineer I should have said inventor

It’s properties do not make solid-fluid-solid thermal extrusion to fuse it to an existing layer of the same material practical. Is that better?

@Alberto_Valero_Gomez I’d suggest taking the time to look into the research that has already gone into this before arguing it. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22464622/A%20History%20of%20RepRap%20Development.pdf

ctrl+f solder - many people have tried. Many people have failed. So unless you have some domain of knowledge that could contribute to this field, it’s not exactly polite to tell someone they are incorrect about something you yourself have never tried or obviously even researched for that matter.

Simply saying “anything is possible”, does not make something economical or worth the effort.

Yes @Whosa_whatsis . That convinces me :slight_smile: sorry, I did not intend to offend, I was just provoking a little bit the discussion on the topic because I was interested on it and wanted to be sure that it was really impossible.

If you are doing a flat layout, you could a frostruder with solder paste then flow it afterward. It would be easier to just etch a board though.