colorFabb MetaFill Bronze Filament.  It's PLA with bronze particles mixed in.

colorFabb MetaFill Bronze Filament. It’s PLA with bronze particles mixed in. It also polishes quite well apparently.
http://i.imgur.com/KXLRwTH.jpg

I can think of so many cool things to print with this. But, why was the first one I thought of the “pooping gnome”?

The thing I thought of, primarily, was what would happen if you burnt out the PLA? Would you get a piece in its “green state”?

I’ve always enjoyed a nice shiny bronze ass.

Really? Nobody has shouted “Kiss my shiny metal ass!” yet??

Bender would have been a good 1st print but this one isn’t bad…

I think this could be killer for steampunk type prints… I wonder if they will do brass as well?

I love this - we are now basically talking about Metal Injection Moulding… which is somewhat exciting!

@ThantiK , I suppose this would depend on the percentage of brass to polymer - for MIM, the ratio of metal to binder is usually around 60:40… I’m not sure what colorFabb are using, but I can’t imagine it is anywhere near that high.

Where did you get this? it’s not even listed on their site.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140512-colorfabb-beta-testing-new-pla-bronze-bamboofill-filament-for-3d-printers.html says it’s “PLA/PHA based compound mixed with 80% fine bronze powder”.

I have a hard time believing that’s 80% bronze, 20% PLA/PHA. By mass, possibly, but not by volume. Or is the “80%” referring to the purity of the bronze powder before it was mixed?

I don’t find the 80/20 thing to be so incredible. Many mixtures need very little liquid to be fluid… Think about how much water is needed to make a concrete mixture - it’s not very much, really.

Mostly I’m interested to see if this could be baked in a kiln to remove the plastic. I would assume this to fail dramatically as the PLA would burn before the bronze particles bonded, but it would be a fun experiment. :slight_smile:

@Matthew_Satterlee Water is a lot less viscous then melted PLA, You get away with very little water to get a moderately viscous cement mixture, you won’t see PLA flow like a river, that is why the 80-20 mixture would be hard to believe.

@Camerin_hahn … Are we talking by mass or volume here? Bronze is something like 6 or 7 times the density of PLA, so you would need a fair amount of mass to get enough of it.

@Matthew_Satterlee unknown, I was just commenting that the concrete example is quite different then the plastic example.

Bronze is harder than brass, right? I wonder what this stuff will do to nozzles after some extensive use…

Just ordered a spool. Looking forward to seeing how it works!