www.3ders.org

Oct. 30, 2014

Metal printing has developed further in the past 10 years, and more and more investors and analyst have shown interests in metal 3D printing. 3D printing for direct metal part manufacturing could lead to cost saving and better performing components. Unfortunately, the price of commercial metal 3D printers are so expensive and it remained out of reach of most people.

One startup, Huntsville, Alabama based Weld3D wants to make 3D metal printing affordable. Weld3D, a team of aerospace engineers started development of their idea and process about a year ago. "Weld3D all started out with a couple curious aerospace engineers working in the garage on the nights and weekends." Paul from Weld3D told us.

"We were frustrated with the lack of parts and process development that people were showing and knew we had more information to offer on our builds. That is when we seriously started working on Weld3D and getting some of our information out there."

The original intent was just to see if we could achieve low cost metal printing." Paul said. "We follow the industry trends and are aware of all the high end metal printing work being completed; we are also aware of the researchers and startups showing some of their developments."

The starup has been working on development of a process that produces basic and complex parts from metal (Model to Metal), and have printed dozen of parts in metal.

"It still has some minor tweaks, but overall we have been able to make complex parts and geometries in an evening (for most builds)." Paul told us. "We recently completed some mechanical property testing of our process and will release those results soon. We are using an arc welder, but have notebooks full of ideas for other related processes."

They plan to use capital raised from the initial products to fund some of their more advanced ideas that all involved low cost 3D printing with metal.

"Initially, we are looking to get our process out to market to adapt to existing personal CNC machines. This will reduce the barriers and cost to entry." Paul said. "We continue our development process with different alloys ...so our customers will have access to reliable parameters using the Weld3D process. We are also currently in talks with some suppliers about building custom machines for a complete plug and play system."

The team is stil working on the details so there is no price data available yet. But the company assures us that they will be of great value to hobbyist and commercial customers.

Weld3D is currently looking for commercial and university partnerships as well as software partners. Over the coming months they will be releasing more data of the process, photos, and products so people can make their own metal 3D prints. Stay tuned, we'll keep you updated as soon as we learn more about it.

Posted in 3D Printers

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