Selective Laser Sintering (SLS)

Snapmaker 2.0 Product Feedback
1

Hello there,

why is this feature missing on the snapmaker? It has a more or less powerfull laser and is meant to do 3D printing. So it should be not too much efford to add a feature to make the snapmaker able to sinter.

If you don’t know it: It is a way to 3D print a object from some kind of powder by melting it together with a laser. This powder is evenly distributed and after one layer of melting, another thin layer of powder is added, melted, and so on. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering

Advantages are the much finer structures that can be printed, no moving of the printed object and absolutely no need for support structures. This is also the state of the art 3D print method used in the industry.

It would be a great innovation, if this feature could be brought to the snapmaker, that is even featuring a laser :slight_smile:

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2

It would be a cool addition. I think it would be slow, typically SLS printers have a laser that can be scanned very quickly not like the Snapmaker would have to do it with moving the whole laser module in xyz space. If they created a new laser module that does the scanning from the module then it could be much quicker. Then the xyz movements could be used to distribute the powder in some fashion. You would be limited in what materials you could do that with. Many if not most of the SLS printers have a sealed and controlled atmosphere in order to keep explosions and fires from happening.

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