Madhatter wrote:
Once you go down the road of AM or 3D printing the design possibilities are only restricted by the materials and printing process. It's a whole new level of design and development. I think a lot of the old guard is going to struggle with it, design has been till recently restricted by loss machining capabilities, now we can build and print akin to how it's designed in the 3D software. I hope that material science keeps pushing this forward, AM is really the way to go.
AM certainly has a huge raft of available applications.
The dude building a Honda cylinder head for Nissan L6 engines used 3D printed molds to cast the heads.
I've been thinking that 3D printed metal parts could then go to a machine shop for finish machining on critical surfaces.
My understanding is that rolled metal plate has superior material properties to 3D printed metal, which is closer to cast in terms of material properties.
So by using a piece of rolled aluminum plate as the printing base, one could print a cylinder head with the deck surface having the high strength properties of rolled metal, while the remainder of the cylinder head would be 3D printed with good surface quality and zero core shift.
Send the part for finish machining and have a really awesome cylinder head!
Is there anything going on with this build?