14 DAY TRIAL // Brandon Fosdick is an Aerospace Engineer with significant knowledge of engineering and programming. He also happens to be someone who could use the help of a selective laser sintering 3D printer, but can't afford one. So he made one himself.
Some of you may say that he should be able to buy one of the new ones, which cost as little as $4,000 / €3,160, and they would have a point.
However, that wasn't the case a few months ago, when he started work on his project. Also, while some SLS printers cost that little, others ship for over a hundred grand, and others can be priced at over one million dollars / euro.
We don't know what Fosdick's printer will sell for, if it's ever turned into a commercial product, but we're pretty sure it won't be nearly as much.
The new SLS 3D printer
Bereft of a name, the newcomer doesn't have the ability to handle metal powders, at least not yet, but it can make things from polyester powder, the same type from which coatings are made for bumpers, bike frames and other such things.
Selective Laser Sintering works by melting that powder, basically. A layer of powder is spread over the build plate and the laser moves over it, melting and binding the powder according to the model of the object you're building. Then another layer of powder is added and the process repeats.
It's like FDM printing (fused deposition modeling), only instead of a nozzle extruding superheated filament, the material is already in the build chamber and the laser melts it where it sits.
Interestingly enough, Fosdick's printer doesn't produce harmful fumes or smells, because of the very polyester powder he uses. While the powder itself does have a distinctive smell, printing doesn't produce fumes or other smells while the printing process is happening.
It remains to be seen how other materials are handled in the future. The powder used for now has a pretty low melting point, and is also not toxic, but others, especially metals, will not be as accommodating.
Future plans
The engineer wants to create a system based on a galvanometer, an electromechanical actuator that produces a rotary deflection of some type of pointer in response to electric current flowing through its coil in a magnetic field. Basically, it's an instrument that detects electric current.
For now, though, he's using a normal system involving a gantry (moves the laser to trace a printed portion of a powder layer) and common 800nm laser diodes you can find mostly everywhere.
