Stupid idea.... Interested in seeing if someone else has done it.

So i've been looking at conductive filament for a bit and I think it's kinda cool; i worry that in some situations it might not be ideal, so i continued to look at more traditional stuff.

Then I realized, solder is sold in long filaments... and there's a range of types and melting temperatures... which falls in line with ABS melt ranges quite nicely.

So... solder, being readily available, has to have made it near or into someone's hot end. I mean, Even if it's just a nightmare story about soldering their thermistor to their hot end for "Better heat transfer", there's gotta be someone that has a story.

Are you considering printing solder? Haven't tried that, but I can think of a few potential stumbling points there: contamination (think of the smoke that comes off when you hit the solder with heat - that can't be good in the enclosed space within a hot-end); and heat transfer up the solder (its very conductive, so keeping the upstream filament cool would require one hell of a heat-break.

I have a print going right now and couldn't get the solder to melt by pressing it onto the hot-end (at 215°C). I've heard of people melting their thermistor joints before - no bueno. Thus all the talk of using crimps.

While there are no bad ideas, I think a conductive paste is a better choice and a combo printer that prints plastic and conductive traces at the same time has just been shown at CES. [www.youtube.com]

This guy had decent results printing basic shapes with solder: Metal Printing on a Lulzbot.

As far as fumes go, I can see how that might be a problem, but people who do allot of printing in ABS tend to have their printer in a ventillated area because it occasionally produces some nasty stuff.

Heat conduction is a problem, but an all metal hot end might help with that. I have some ideas on this though. it's a little tangent to this discussion, but ceramics, glass, and especially composites of glass and ceramics have better properties. Crayola air-dry and glass capillary tubing is cheap for experiments too. (and maybe some plaster bits...)

With regards to the solder not melting, it might be a higher temperature solder. Soldering irons are kinda all meant to heat up to be about 350-400 degrees celsius, which makes them significantly hotter then the melt temperature of most solder alloys and hotter then the hot ends on our 3d printers.

The Wikipedia Solder page has a table towards the bottom that lists different alloys and their associated melt temperatures.

I was sorta thinking that you'd want to match the solder to the melt temperature of your plastic, so if you are printing PLA, you'd want something that melted around the same temperature to keep everything consistent.

Solder paste isn't a bad idea. Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with solder paste as I am with regular solder. It seems like it doesn't have the ruggedness or the uniformity of regular solder though. If a paste-struder was bowden-esque that might be something of an elegant solutions. Hafta think on some of that.

Anyway....

printing solder has been done.

Main issue is that molten metals dissolve other metals

In particular liquid solder will dissolve brass and copper nozzels. stainless steel doesnt have this issue (or so Ive been told)

Note that most solder is flux-core, I think this is a lot of the fumes. So, if you could get solid-metal solder that would probably be less fumey.

Another problem I can see is that solder doesn't flow as well as plastic -- the combination of heat conduction and wetting might make it want to blob up instead of spreading into a layer. You still might be able to do really thick (~2mm) layers, though.


EDIT: Here's an idea! Mix ground-up PLA and solder and run them through a filament extruder. Print the piece and then burn out the PLA, leaving a sort of sponge of solder, then wick in some other sort of metal. This might even work with non-solder metals like aluminum.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2015 11:17PM by epicepee.