Small-scale production of the "food" a 3D-printer "eats"

3D-printing is all about smart small-scale production units. But how to small-scale produce the powder that goes inside a 3D-printer including mining, crushing, grinding and mineral-processing ? Will it be possible to do this all-in-one small-scale or is the best achievable to do this job still a battery of rather large machines ?

Any ideas or examples of what has already been achieved in this field ?

... as long as high quality powders are available for cheap in big quantities, I won't start to make it on my own

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

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@VDX

The goal here is not going for cheap but finding ways for small-scale production with a high level of independency.

Something I found was :

Machinery Automation and Robotic solutions for the Mining Industry

But those machines still look far too big to me.

A machine like the HPC-30 is somewhat smaller, but is still far bigger than an ordinary 3D-printer.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2013 04:03AM by CrazyIdea.

... for brittle materials you can simple add some big steel balls in a rotating bucket - this is called 'ball mill' or 'pebble mill'

Elastic materials, as plastics or resins should be deep-freezed, so they went brittle too.

Solving ABS in Acetone and precipitate it with slowly adding citric acid is a simple methode for making ABS dust.

Or melt a plastic and squirt it with high speed on a fast rotating disk, so it will spray and cool down to micro-spheres ... then sieve/selct the microspheres for size ...

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]