Using Indiegogo, one startup team are trying to crowdfund a radical new 3D printer, called the Mini Metal Maker, that allows its users to 3D print metals.
As any construction worker or building manager will know, it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to source metals, and even more so to guarantee that the metals are form a source that you trust in your work. It’s not just those who build who have this concern either, it’s also of relevance to people who create jewellery, wanting to give their trendsetting accessory wearing customers the very best they can in their metal based necklaces and bracelets, but they might often find that it costs quite a bit of money to do so. Now, one team based on Colorado, USA, have set up an Indiegogo page to fund their ‘Mini Metal Maker’, a 3D printer that costs less than $1000.
Plenty of 3D printers have proved useful to creative industries and the Mini Metal Maker perhaps falls into that character. The device, from a Pueblo, Col. team of inventors prints metal clay, which is made up of metal flakes along with a binder and water. How the Mini Metal Maker works is that this metal clay is melted down before sprayed out of a nozzle into a hardened, 3D shape that the user can decide upon. Then, the 3D object created has to be fired in a kiln to remove the binder and the water, leaving the metal behind.
On the product’s Indiegogo crowdfunding page (which has surpassed its $10,000 goal with over a month to go), a Mini Metal Maker that you have to assemble yourself is $750 while an assembled machine plus clay is being offered for $1000. With the low price and the ease of use, especially for jewellery designers and other craftspeople, this could allow an entire industry to make better, perhaps more reliably sourced products.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: gigaom
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