Anyone have any thoughts or additional information on this?
Originally shared by TDB Gryffyn
So here’s an interesting thought… I was wondering about metal casting after making molds possibly with a 3D printer, so I was looking up a few metals that I knew were commonly used for casting on the low end of things and when I looked up pewter, I see that it has a melting point between 170-230C… which is right around the range of temperatures for typical plastic filament based 3D printers.
I only found one example, but apparently it’s possible… not sure the hoops you have to jump through though… to 3D print with pewter instead of plastic filament.
I put in my thoughts on it. Maybe aluminum foil or sandpaper grit side up for a print surface. Keep the temperature as low as possible for the hotend. Keep the heated bed turned off. Use a cooling fan on the print bed.
That is all I can think of. I do not know what the results will be. I wish whoever is working with it luck and safe printing.
I was more interested in thoughts on using pewter in general, not specifically about what’s best to print onto with pewter. I see pewter wire that might be used as filament, if you could feed it in well… but it looks like it’s about $50/lb. Is pewter wire what you’d use instead of filament?
Another of way of indirectly printing metals, after a fashion is using a conventional plastic print in combination with investment casting (lost wax casting).
Yeah… that’s what I was investigating when I found this (as I mentioned in the OP). But I’m intrigued by the idea that pewter seems to melt around the same temperature as the plastic filament we tend to use.
Might depend on the temperature… lower temperature might get it to the syrup stage rather than the water stage. No idea how quickly pewter goes from solid to liquid or if there’s a wide temperature range in between.
And yeah, you’re not going to want to do anything big with it…and really, lost wax is probably a better, more detailed way to go about doing it, but the ability to metal print with a regular 3D printer is an interesting idea. Cost is a different hurdle to deal with.
Metals have much higher thermal conductivity and heat capacity, so they take much more energy to raise the temp, and much of the heat is being lost to the rest of the filament. Once it leaves the nozzle, it takes much longer to cool. Perhaps the bed should be the face of a heat sink
Very good point. I completely neglected the whole thermal conductivity issue. Definitely makes a big difference. The wire would act like one big long heat sink fin (sort of)
No idea how quickly pewter goes from solid to liquid or if there’s a wide temperature range in between.