Printing dentures

[www.youtube.com]

Has anyone thought of refining the precision of the 3D printing to the point when dentures can be printed very chaply?
Sounds like a great philanthropic mission.

I would set my goal that if I find all the appropriate materials tools to design a cheap 3D printer that will give the right surface finish, I will work on printing dentures with non-toxic plastics.

There are many places in the world where people eat refined sugar and lose their teeth but cannot afford dentures.

... this is common with UV-printing - comercial UV-resin printers have resolutions down to 50 microns, in some of our OS development groups we're achieving accuracies down to 10 microns: [forums.reprap.org]

Until end of the year I'll try to make more progress with SLS - then the material range is from plastic to metal with resolutions down to 10 microns and not only dentures, but complete crowns can be 'printed' at home with the right equipment

---

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

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

Modern dentures are held in place by locks that get implanted into patient's gums after all teeth are out?
This would be a problem.

Are you working on DIY SRS or commercial SRS?
I feel like the material delivery system is going to be the most consuming part.

Would it be possible to use several lasers that would point into one spot on the powder surface, causing heat from many angles?
It makes sense since less energy will be reflected back into space and cheaper, less calibrated lasers can be used while some feedback system with an infrared camera can watch the spot where things get hot and can tell lasers to rearrange to change the shape of the hot spot...

There will also be less convection distortion due to hot air raising...

I wish that I could try those things at home...

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2013 12:49PM by Tarakan.

... I'm developing at home in my free time tools and applications around laser material processing -- so it's a sort of 'DIY'

In July I'm restarting some of this as 'fulltime'-job again for developing comercial 'lowcost' laserdiode modules and some applications with them ...

And yes, you can focus more laserdiodes on the same spot - did some development and adjusting for a ringfocus-laser, where 80 IR-laserdiodes with 20Watts each were adjusted to hit the same spot, which was then summed up do 1600Watts ... enough for cutting and welding steel

---

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

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

If you are going to have a business, hire me as a janitor...

Would it be possible to ionize the media with lasers and let a beam of electrons that will follow the channel do the work?
What chemical mediums with high resistance can be ionized by lasers well enough to conduct electricity.

I have my own little experiment-based design idea if this is possible. Here is the experiment: [technosyndicate.wordpress.com]
Look at the part where I burned a sheet of paper with graphite artwork. Little particles can be fused using the same approach if there is not enough oxygen to cause combustion.

I feel like if this technology could be allowed to develop we would have sci-fi molecular assemblers and replicators that could join any compounds or materials together.

I would like to know if there is a medium better than distilled water or air that the ionization channeling can be accomplished in.
Lipids will break down (like motor oil), over time.

... you'll need very high energy densities to ionize air or any gas - I've done this with Q-switched NdYAG-lasers with powers of 30Watts CW / 2kW pulsed and 3Watts CW / 500mJ pulsed ... not achieavable with my 25Watt IR-diodelasers or the 50Watt-fiberlaser, even with his superb spot of 5 microns!

Have a pulsing N2-TAE-laser with ultrashort UV-pulses with 200ps duration time and around 300kW pulse-power - could be enough when focussed, will test this when I'll have gas support for N2 ...

---

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

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

Were there any experiments that would use a beam of electrons for this purpose?
If a vacuum flask is filled with metal powder and an electron beam moves across the surface, would there be a significant increase in temperature in the are where the electron beam hits the powdered material?

VDX Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ... I'm developing at home in my free time tools
> and applications around laser material processing
> -- so it's a sort of 'DIY'
>
> In July I'm restarting some of this as
> 'fulltime'-job again for developing comercial
> 'lowcost' laserdiode modules and some applications
> with them ...
>
> And yes, you can focus more laserdiodes on the
> same spot - did some development and adjusting for
> a ringfocus-laser, where 80 IR-laserdiodes with
> 20Watts each were adjusted to hit the same spot,
> which was then summed up do 1600Watts ... enough
> for cutting and welding steel

I am very curious if anyone had ever tried to use cathode ray beams or some other concentrated energy to fuse little particles together.
Lasers seem to hold the status quo but I am curious if there was anything else attempted.
Vladimir T.

Yes, it has been done commercially. Search with the term EBM or Electron Beam Melting to find more info:

[en.wikipedia.org]

also there's a section of this forum dedicated to an EBM design:
[forums.reprap.org]

have fun!
Robin.