Materials of Today and Tomorrow!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Youknowwho4eva, Jul 21, 2016.

  1. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    Hey Shapies, we love all the work you guys have been doing. Keep up the great work! I was wondering, of all of your greatest works. Which is your favorite material to work worth, and why? What makes it work best for your designs? And if you could choose another material to work with, what would it be?

    Personally, I like playing with Full Color Sandstone. It works great with my 3D scans, and the addition of coating has really made them pop! It's probably far from possible, but I'd like to print in Marble. Or at least something with the look and feel of Marble. Then I could print 3D scans of busts that would look like Presidential!
    Scans of me in FCS and coated FCS
    us guys smaller.jpg
    Bust of me in ABS
    me bust.jpg
     
  2. I'm extremely excited so see what can be done with carbon filled FDM materials. Maybe their great strength to weight ratio will redeem this category of printers
     
  3. To print something that looks like marble I'd make a hull in plastic and then spray coat it in Krylon Marbelizing Spray or similar. Maybe infill the hull with sand to give it a similar weight.
     
  4. NoahLI
    NoahLI Well-Known Member
    Strong/Flexible... because well, incredibly flexible, relatively low cost, holds good detail, prototype design can easily be shifted to fit other materials.

    for future I'd like to see unglazed ceramic, bisque ware. Technically not a new material but still... SW glaze is just too thick for anything with moderate to high detail.

    Re: Color sandstone, what do you use to keep the colors from fading?
     
    Last edited: Jul 23, 2016
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  5. Daphne
    Daphne Well-Known Member
    I love silver for final products and raw brass as prototype material. Silver is the best since it doesn't leave any stains on the skin, it's detailed and soft enough to do stone setting with (unlike steel that's too brittle). Raw brass is more affordable and has the same guidelines and productions steps, yet is not meant for long skin contact. Besides I prefer the color of silver.

    My ideal material would be a cheap, detailed silver/steel colored metal that is suited for stone setting and can have interlocking parts. A polished aluminium with lower minimal wire thickness for example.
     
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  6. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Strong&flexible for delicate yet relatively sturdy models, FCS for the built-in color. Would love to see (a) a full color plastic that does not have the brittleness and the structural weakness ("sandcastle rule") of FCS - sadly the famed hp multijet printer appears to be useful for production of press releases only, at least so far - and (b) a metal material and process similar in result to brass/bronze but with the versatility that strong&flexible offers, i.e. layered support material instead of added struts. (I know b is probably not physically possible, but one can always dream)
     
  7. bgeorgakas
    bgeorgakas Well-Known Member
    What types of products would you make with carbon filled FDM materials?
     
  8. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    I'll have to look into that krylon spray. I was thinking of just a texture for coated FCS.

    So you'd wan't plain porcelain, and not to glaze it yourself? Interesting!
    I've used sanding lacquer for items, and the new coated FCS protects from fading.

    Maybe a dual material printer, that does like wax and plaster (or whatever the molding material is?) then the additional plaster is packed around it. You'd still need some connection, or at least it's own stilt for casting it.
     
  9. NoahLI
    NoahLI Well-Known Member
    yeah, return of chia pets. I'm gonna try etching the glazing off, probably won't work but what the hey.
     
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  10. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    I have some ceramic pieces glazed by a neighbor in the 70's. Apparently there was a thing back then to paint plaster or raw ceramic pieces, or to glaze the ceramics yourself and bake them in an oven in your garage. Anyway, those pieces have the most excellent glazing. It's thin and that means it shows tremendous details that might be in the ceramic surface. It's very different from the thick and globby glazing I've seen on many Shapeways porcelain items. The bottoms of these pieces are also glazed, save for some small puncture points in the glaze caused by small pointy supports. I'm not sure if this is a hobby I would want to tackle but being able to do multicolor glazing would be a big advantage.
     
  11. he6agon
    he6agon Well-Known Member
    Frosted Ultra Detail/Frosted Extreme Detail. It's the only material that can achieve the fine details and thin layers my models require. I also appreciate the fact that the dimensions I specify for my parts are executed faithfully and the parts come back to me at the size I expect.

    I like the look of HDA and the fact that it seems more flexible and durable than FUD/FXD, but I don't like the distortion and warping I've had with it. Most of the parts I've ordered in HDA have been rejected, so I've just gone with FUD or FXD in those cases.

    If there were some hybrid of the two classes of materials that had the best characteristics of both - smooth surfaces and durability of HDA along with the dimensional accuracy and crisp, thin properties of FUD/FXD - I'd be all over it.
     
  12. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    One of my big hobbies over the decades has been electrostatics. I love designing and building electrostatic generators and motors and all kinds of stuff related to electrostatics in general. It'd be cool if Shapeways offered a conductive plastic! Wouldn't even need to be very conductive at all in my case, just slightly conductive. Although, I know LOTS of people would love to have a plastic with enough conductivity to do electronics projects.

    One simple way of possibly implementing such would be to find a conductive coating that could be applied in a way similar to Shapeways' dyed polyamide. I know there are conductive inks that have already been developed. So, can one dip a polyamide part in conductive ink to obtain a conductive coating?
     
  13. MrNibbles
    MrNibbles Well-Known Member
    How conductive? Conductivity for static protection is pretty standard for both internal plastic additives or spray type coatings, at least in the non 3D printing world. Getting something that can handle useful currents to power things like LEDs probably needs a selective metal plating or etching approach, probably similar to how they make some flex circuitry. There are also thick film inks for flex circuitry but those are normally silk screened which works best with exposed and mostly flat surfaces but they probably also need a bake out to cure so the plastic would need to handle the temperature excursions.

    But what if you had some highly conductive ink additive that could be used with something like the full color sandstone process? The color is only in the top mm or so of the print and you could easily run signal traces. If you had higher resistivity options you could also print resistors into the surface. Kind of cool if you could build such circuitry on non-flat surfaces or hidden inside curved surfaces. One problem is always how to make electrical connections to such delicate materials without destroying them. It's less of a problem for low current applications, worse for higher current applications.
     
  14. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    I suspect polished aluminium jewelry would still feel "wrong" due to its lightness - like wearing the pull tab from a soda can. That would leave you with such nice alternatives as cadmium.
     
  15. NoahLI
    NoahLI Well-Known Member
    Pb free pewter?
     
  16. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Clever, I didn't think of trying to implement the full color sandstone process. This is an extremely viable proposition I think. Off the top of my head most of the inks that are jettable that I can think of are proprietary and have just recently been invented. It's worth looking into though I feel. I have never looked into it, but I will since it's a really good idea that, with the proper ink, could easily be implemented.

    As for making connections, I'm thinking spring contacts, similar to the spring contacts in an electronics breadboard.

    As for electrostatics, just about anything one can think of would work since at high voltage almost anything is a conductor.
     
  17. Daphne
    Daphne Well-Known Member
    You do have a point there, but I like light materials for earrings.
     
  18. Bobbiethejean
    Bobbiethejean Well-Known Member
    I'm still holding out for a low cost, high-detail, full color, material with a nice finish. I realize that's probably a longggggg way off but I can dream. For now, I'm tepidly happy to settle for FCS.
     
  19. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Looks like conductive inks for inkjet are readily available, here are two suppliers I found that can work with plastic, as in no high temperature sintering necessary.


    It would be fun to try this out on an old Zcorp machine. Problem though would be the springiness of the material. It would work, but the spring contacts would need to be a lot larger that if it could be made in polyamide.

    In regard to polyamide, I can envision a method where electronics circuits could be made solely by dipping parts in a conductive ink, like the inks above. Imagine an ordinary PCB with the components not solder in place yet. Now, take all the copper foil traces and extrude them into 3D and get rid of the board. So, all you have is the traces in 3D. Notice that some of the traces are floating there solely on their own, while other traces are connected to other traces and they are supported by all of the other traces. So, connect all of the traces together into one conglomeration so it can be printed, handled and dipped in conductive ink. Now, after it's been printed and dipped we'll need a nonconducting framework to plug it into because we need to cut all of our support traces and the framework will hold everything together. This framework would be printed from ordinary WSF or any of the dyed colors of such. The components would be held in place by the aforementioned breadboard style spring connectors.

    I cannot see how this wouldn't work. I'll make a 3D model of this when I get some time, too busy right now.
     
  20. NoahLI
    NoahLI Well-Known Member
    Speaking of full color prints... what does LAIKA use?


    Edit: ZPrinter 650 for Paranorman... ProJet CJP 660Pro for Boxtrolls... not sure what for Kubo...
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2016