My wife's architecture school has one of the Z Printers. They're basically a starch-like build material and a liquid binder. Change the binder color and you get different parts colors. Horribly hygroscopic unless laquered, and the powder gets everywhere. About 10% of the models break just being extracted from the powder bed and cleaned up.
The actual company doing this, Zcorp, has some very nifty options, however.
[
www.zprinter.com]
Aluminum casting capable binder + powder. Still messy, but very interesting.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2007 10:18PM by SOI Sentinel.