Is it possible to 3D print advanced ceramics and metals on a desktop Bambu Lab 3D printer?
Apparently so. A LinkedIn post by Guillaume de Calan, CEO of Nanoe, shows pictures of this taking place.
What’s going on here? Don’t those printers only print polymer filaments? Well, not exactly. There is a small set of material manufacturers that produce composite filaments made from polymer and metal or ceramic dust. The idea is to print them normally, then subject the prints to thermal post-processing to eliminate the polymer and sinter the other bits together. It does work, and we are currently testing one vendor’s process — stay tuned.
But Nanoe is a bit different. They produce very high-quality ceramic filaments for industrial use. The question was, could these be printed on a stock Bambu Lab 3D printer?
Indeed, they can. De Calan explains:
“After resisting for a while, because we wanted to stay faithful to our current partners, we’ve finally started testing Bambu Lab 3D printers with our Zetamix ceramic and metal filaments. And I must admit I’m impressed…
The amount of engineering, clever design, and instrumentation choices in these printers is just crazy. And the result is that we started printing perfect parts on day one, even with our notoriously difficult-to-print Epsilon line of filaments for RF.”
It seems that the Bambu Lab equipment is sufficiently precise to allow printing of these unusual materials.
That’s probably bad news for specialty ceramic 3D printers, which are tremendously more expensive than a plain old Bambu Lab machine you can pick up around the corner.
This is quite interesting because it shows how the increasingly powerful desktop FFF technology is slowly eating up other more expensive 3D print processes.
The consolidation continues.
