A 17 year old video gamer, entrepreneur, high school senior and maker still has tackled something that the entire world would like to get its hands on: a desktop based metal 3D printer.
Not satisfied with co-founding and running Coolmath3.org, a flash game review website, Sagar Govani decided he would use the website’s revenues to undertake an open source project. He chose to modify a RepRap 3D printer’s extruder to be able to use it to melt a metal alloy composed of 95.8% tin, 4% copper and 0.2% silver.
Sagar calculated that the filament – which is basically tin-based soldering wire – would melt at 235°C, a temperature supported by certain desktop plastic 3D printers. Also it would stick to copper but not to stainless steel so the 1mm nozzle for the hot end would be made of stainless steel while the print bed would be a scratched up copper sheet.
Last May, Sagar bought the plastic RepRap extruder: he designed each part in CAD to get it CNC’d out of stainless steel. The first trials resulted in parts that were too brittle, so Sagar devised a system that would integrate another nozzle to deposit liquid flux after each layer, helping the solder to “cling” by removing oxide buildup, while a fan would blow dry ice vapour onto the piece to cool it properly.
All in all the final version of the system would cost about 1000 dollars to build and be the same size as most desktop RepRaps.
The entire process is being documented on Hackday Projects, a hardware hacking website.
