I'm pretty sure they are also printing with titanium as well.
The 3D printed header looked nice. I wonder how long it actually takes?
It isnt hugely expensive.
This can be done at home, afterwards it is basically a green body sintered part. You can cook it and cure it so it is fully sintered.
wow, that's like a filament printer.
I know it's been done before with SLS method where it's formed with a laser and layers of powder, but that's much less messy. SLS printed Inconel has been done too.
Shapeways uses binder jetting for steel, and it's several multiples higher than the price of plastic printing. The filament printing is probably cheaper since it looks like it has fewer steps.
Craftcloud is a sendcutsend style service for 3d printing that will do all sorts of metals.
I am designing an intake manifold that will be printed from aluminum.
Toyman! said:I'm pretty sure they are also printing with titanium as well.
Some time ago I saw a video about a titanium 3D printed exhaust manifold, it was pretty neat.
I would question the porosity of a printed manifold?
I would question the porosity of a printed manifold?
In reply to NOHOME :
Look into "Hot Isostatic Press", or HIP. You get an effectively 100% dense part, depending on the metal. Some metals and processes are also getting very dense without needing HIP.
Inconel actually is a decent option when looking at additively manufactured metal parts. With traditional (subtractive) manufacturing, metals like Inconel are expensive to cut, and you remove a lot of that cost. You also don't have much waste, and the inert nature of inconel is nice. Steel and other metals that oxidize readily in powder form need inert atmospheres like nitrogen.
Metals like aluminum are much cheaper with traditional methods, so, unless the geometry just dictates it, printing is not usually a great option.
Mr_Asa said:It isnt hugely expensive.
This can be done at home, afterwards it is basically a green body sintered part. You can cook it and cure it so it is fully sintered.
Documentation on that says sintering is at 1380C with pure argon. What kind of oven do you have at home?!?
cyow5 said:Mr_Asa said:It isnt hugely expensive.
This can be done at home, afterwards it is basically a green body sintered part. You can cook it and cure it so it is fully sintered.
Documentation on that says sintering is at 1380C with pure argon. What kind of oven do you have at home?!?
Every car guy needs to make friends with ceramics people. The right kiln can get that, and the pure argon is possible with a little doing.
That being said, they do offer oven services to sinter it.
For the things I deal with here, I think the Craftcloud model is quite affordable.
For instance I had a Lancia Aurellia exhaust manifold that was broken. The customer located a replacement manifold in Italy, purchased it and had it shipped to the us. It took months, they were probably $1800 into it. We 3d scanned the manifold, cleaned it up in CAD and ran it through CraftClouds instant quote tool and got an $1100 quote for it in stainless. We could have thinned it out in places to make it cheaper but this was quick and dirty work just to see if it was comparable.
I am excited about using them. Just waiting for the right project
In reply to Mr_Asa :
I was making my comment very lightheartedly, haha. More to the point though, I wonder how the cost compares to powder part by the time it is all said and done. Being able to use a desktop printer is neat, but, if you have to send it off anyways to get a usable part, outsourcing from the get-go isn't much different. The filament approach also has a ton of shrinking and only 2/3rds the true material's tensile strength in the print direction. Powder parts are much closer to machined parts in both strength and directionality independence.
I've done maintenance on "additive manufacturing" (3D) machines that use metal powder (Titanium, magnesium, stainless, etc) to produce parts. Medical devices (implants), aerospace, military aircraft, all kinds of applications. There is a supply chamber that's filled with metal powder, a build plate that moves vertically during the build process, the laser beam travels through a fiber optic cable to rotating scanning mirror that is over the build plate. A scraper moves a VERY thin layer of metal powder laterally from the supply chamber over the build plate, then the laser moves around to sinter the powder into a solid. The scraper lays another VERY thin layer of power over that, and the laser does it thing again, layer after layer after layer. The build plate moves down fractions of a millimeter each time to keep the build layer at the precise focal point of the laser beam. A complicated, tall build can take DAYS. Most are just a few hours, though.
The build chamber is pumped down of oxygen, and the internal volume is usually filled with an inert gas during the build process, both to minimize impurities and to prevent..."thermal events" - really fine magnesium powder being sintered by a 400 watt laser tends to not play well with oxygen.
These 2 pieces were created as part of the QC process we did after a maintenance - if you zoom in and look really closely, the tower (just over an inch tall) has an internal spiral staircase, and planetary gearset actually rotates.
We have a couple of cars in our development fleet with 3D printed stainless parts. It's a great way to do actual testing with a metal part at a semi-reasonable price.
This piece is a stainless turbine outlet casting that was sourced through Craftcloud and has been heavily used on the track and the dyno for over a year. We have two of them, actually, and one is currently driving across the country for the third time. You wouldn't want to pay the cost as part of a commercial kit, but for prototyping it's perfect. It has received no machining - you can see we haven't cut the threads for the O2 sensor in the bung near the upper right yet.
This was sand cast from a 3D printed mold. It was too big to print as a single piece, unfortunately. It had to be machined like a normal cast part.
A couple weeks ago I ran across this company that does SS 3D printing fairly cheap, saw someone make a rocket nozzle a bit larger than a tennis ball for $30-something:
Alright! I now have a way to make my fan wheels I've wanted for over 30 years (more like 45). 
Titanium or Aluminum?
GameboyRMH said:A couple weeks ago I ran across this company that does SS 3D printing fairly cheap, saw someone make a rocket nozzle a bit larger than a tennis ball for $30-something:
Those are amazing prices. I usually see 2-3x that.
Paging fidelity101...
I know them from PCBs, but a quick quote on the turbo outlet shows them to be price competitive with Craftcloud. I'll have to confirm what we paid there, but it looks like they're maybe 15% less. It's all about the volume of the actual material, of course.
NOHOME said:I would question the porosity of a printed manifold?
There is a binder and that gets removed and then sintered and its all taken care of (assuming the process is developed correctly).
Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) said:NOHOME said:I would question the porosity of a printed manifold?
There is a binder and that gets removed and then sintered and its all taken care of (assuming the process is developed correctly).
Pressure tested after as well.
Surprisingly printing in metal with consistent porosity is a hard to do but several company do it on purpose for all sorts of weird problems. One I want to say I saw was in a ice cream manufacturing plant for churning and adding inert gas above a heat seal.
Toyman! said:I'm pretty sure they are also printing with titanium as well.
They do. I got some installed last June.
I really really didn't need to see this thread.
Did you know that nobody makes a pair of manifolds to mate Weber IDAs to cathedral port LS heads... yet?
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