From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 20:29:28 MST
--- "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:
>
> Well the clever folks up at Berkeley are trying to deliver
> Santa Claus machines without the need for "real" nanotech.
>
> See:
> "Gadget printer" promises industrial revolution
> Duncan Graham-Rowe, Jan 3, 2003
> http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99993238
>
> The interesting thing (at least to me) is that if something
> built this way breaks, there is no way in hell you are going
> to be able to fix it.
>
> Interesting, it means you could run the printer all night
> printing out palm-pilots and then go out the next day
> and use them for skeet practice.
My father gets to play with one of the 3d wax laser prototypers at
Ruger to make parts for firearms that are in development. It currently
takes 10-20 hours for the machine to produce a wax form the size of a
side by side shotgun receiver (2"x3"x6") from an AutoCAD file. This wax
part is then coated by hand with a silicate solution that hardens into
the mold. The wax is melted out and the mold is used to cast the metal
part. He's used it for development of the new Gold Label side by side
shotgun, for the new Ruger golf driver heads, and the Deerfield rifle,
among other things.
This process produces highly accurate parts which require extremely
little machining and finishing work, are far stronger than parts
machined from solid stock metal or stamped, etc.
Needless to say, this is not yet a weekend hobbyists process, though
I'm sure a skilled metallurgist/engineer could do so in their garage.
I came across another interesting process a while back that involved
using retail microwave ovens to melt and refine metals, which I passed
on to Ruger and I suspect from their enthusiastic response that they
may be researching this technology for use on a larger scale.
Their foundry must be kept hot even when not in use, else damage can
result and it takes a week to get it back up to operating temp when
shut down.
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