Special filaments let 3D printers for making plastic parts build metal parts

The folks at The Virtual Foundry (TVF) can’t turn water into wine, but they are helping their customers who operate plastic 3D printers turn out metal parts.

Several years ago, the Stoughton, Wis., company developed and started marketing Filamet, a sinterable, high-metal-content 3D printing filament that can be used in any fused deposition modeling printer.

In stock and ready to ship are filaments made from stainless steel, copper, bronze, aluminum, and iron. More than 30 alloys—along with some materials that deviate from metal, such as sand, glass, and ceramics—are available by special order.

According to an article about the company slated to appear on our website and in the next edition of The Additive Report, TVF founder Brad Woods explained what prompted development of Filamet: “A friend bought me a printer and said I had to try it. I figured out how to print a part and decided that to be important in many applications, we needed to print with materials in addition to plastics. That’s what set me off on the quest to find a way to print metal without using heat and working with hardware that was readily available.

“Basically, I look at how much metal we can get into the plastic and still have the printers handle it. Since I started the company, I’ve continually moved the bar up, adding a percentage of metal at a time, identifying that maximum, and then pushing it a little further,” said Woods.

Woods is “passionate” about creating printable materials highly loaded with nonplastic elements, writes the author of the article, Sue Roberts. (The complete article will be posted to our website soon.) His experimentation has led to printable materials and the development of the proprietary equipment that produces the filaments and pellets.

Propeller 3D-printed from stainless steel filament on an FDM printer.