how to make stainless steel powder for sls 3d printers?

Hi there,
As you may know, sls 3d printing will be a boom next year or so. I want to learn about the technique to make stainless steel powder for sls 3d printers, because I have a big and cheap stainless steel source that I want to provide to the maker community.I want to discuss with you about solutions for this -making stainless steel powder for sls 3d printers, especially open source and home based solutions.
There are some metal powder suppliers on the internet but do they provide what can be used for 3d printing? Is there any technical requirement of the powder for sls 3d printers?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/23/2013 09:18AM by piron.

I think so, we are certainly on the bleeding edge in terms of open source additive manufacture!! Check out this thread over at Metalbot regarding this...

Home made 1um Alu Powder

Quote
piron
I want to discuss with you about solutions for this -making stainless steel powder for sls 3d printers, especially open source and home based solutions.

Very cool! Something like this would be a awesome indeed! It would need to grind down the metals in consecutive stages... the grinding pads them selves would need to be very abrasive and tough. Some sort of series of sieves would need to be employed also.

It would be a noisy nasty machine, but very much needed.

I have done a lot of enquiry into the metal powders offered on alibaba (mostly titanium) and only a few are suitable (aka pure titanium granules or TI-AL6-V4).

There are still many many tests and experiments that need to be done before we can have a truly clear picture of what technical requirements we optimally need.

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !

... I think, making metal powder should be easier and more uniform with chemical synthesis from a critical solution, where adding another component will either start settling uniform particles and/or initiate a reaction to let floating nano-particles grow to micron sizes ...

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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]

That would be the better option... where can we find more info on this? I will do some research and report back!

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !

Here is a great post regarding this thread... [www.metalbot.org]

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3D Metal Printing and more - visit [www.metalbot.org] !