3D Printing News Unpeeled: 3D Printed Golf Clubs, an India Made SLS Printer, MIT Liquid Metal and a Vietnamese Trauma Implant

After Cobra’s King putters, the firm now has a line of 8 clubs that use MJF binder jet. The Agera and others have different sized insets and cost $349.

The IndoMake INSS 500 by STPL3D is India´s first Made in India powder bed fusion system. It has a 100W Co2 laser and weighs two tonnes with a build volume of 500 x 500 x 500 mm. Many more companies will be sure to develop one in a time of economic nationalism, uncertainty and defense jitters. 

In Vietnam a custom titanium implant for trauma was designed and inplanted at Vinmec International General Hospital replacing part of the pelvis and part of the femur. For now the implant was made in Germany, but given demand and the capabilities of the country, future implants will probably be done there, perhaps with local machines. 

MIT researchers Skylar Tibbits, Zain Karsan, Kimball Kaiser and Jared Laucks have developed a Liquid Metal printing technique that to me seems a lot like the Grob, Valcun and Xerox technologies for 3D Printing aluminum. You can read more about it here but generally apart from printing into glass beads there is little new here. 

 

•  liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of small glass beads. 
• Hardening Au 
• Potentially cheap rival to processes like Meltio 
• Au is in demand and difficult to make wih other 3D printing processes
• Low resolution, low cost
• Repair, near net shape, mill down
• Or cheap parts 
• Skylar Tibbits, Zain Karsan, Kimball Kaiser, Jared Laucks
• , batman. Universe names 
• aluminum billet deposited electric furnace,  coils inside the furnace heat the metal to 700 degrees Celsius,
• held at a high temperature in a graphite crucible, 
• material is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle into a print bed along a preset path onto 100-micron glass beads glass beads 
• Seems a lot like Valcun to me or the other liquid metal 3D printing from Xerox or GROB 
• Unique its not

 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58977341414fb5309fc954e6/t/65aee0cdbd9c1e50b009b2b7/1705959629800/ACADIA+23+Proceedings_LMP.pdf