Soooooo, I wonder how much 50 lbs of INFI dust would cost.

Those are a blast to play with. I made a door lock with one, for a company i was interning with. The sad part is though, that those composite materials would be terrible for a knife. The edge would be so brittle you couldn't begin to get it sharp.

~Robert
 
Are you going to be snorting that up your nose or sprinkling it on some soup?
 
robertl said:
Those are a blast to play with. I made a door lock with one, for a company i was interning with. The sad part is though, that those composite materials would be terrible for a knife. The edge would be so brittle you couldn't begin to get it sharp.

~Robert
Click to expand...

Yet...

The tech is brand new, look @ what Jerry did to "regular" steel.. and that's been around a couple of years. Maybe Jerry's grandkids will be ordering INFI powder from the foundry and when they are ready to ship the "Basic Fusion Street Whacker" little Jerry or Jennifer the third will just click print.. :D:D
 
The tech is brand new
Click to expand...

Not quite, I used it in high school. So they've had to be around for at least four years. Now adding colors is new since I've used one, and the strength has been steadily improving as the years go by. But its still a composite material bonded with glue "resin". And it takes quite a while for it to print.

It would make for a very terrible knife, and if you decided to glue INFI together it would also make a terrible knife.

But, if we could find a way to fuse powdered metal together, ie go from powder to actual metal bonding without resin in a way we could 3d print it would revolutionize everything. Car engines, planes, computers, knives, ect.

~Robert
 
still don't know how it can have moving parts just by scanning it.
 
Jerry Busse said:
Matti S.,

Good question! We have explored this very question. Powdered metallurgy can offer some very strong benefits in certain ares of knife performance. However, it is not possible to take the same analysis from a smelted steel and transfer it to a powdered construct and achieve an improvement. Carbide dispersion is very good and can therefore greatly affect the amounts of carbide formers that are included in the mix. If we wanted to achieve the same level of performance as INFI in some areas, the analysis of the PM would look nothing like that of INFI.

Thanks,

Jerry
Click to expand...

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...rom-powder-metallurgy?highlight=powdered infi

The 3d printer is really cool, but it's for fast prototypeing, it's not for buiding finished products. If you took that same tool and used it as a hammer, it would likely be severely damaged. If the printer were to utilize a secondary process for heat treating it would probably result in something very similar to current powder metallurgy sintering, which produces something similar to a metal ceramic, as apposed to the smelted metal that jerry references above. Other metal processes include stir stick plastic deformation where the metal is 'stirred' by a small tool in a small area until it is near it's melting point, and then the tool moves to a new location. The result is an ultrafine grain pattern and possibly a better end product then sintering can produce. But it still isn't what you'd get out of the smelted INFI format.
 
still don't know how it can have moving parts just by scanning it.
Click to expand...

My guess is that its not just the scanner, but the scanner and the table top. If the scanner pumps out radiation at known time intervals, then the table could read what is getting through and what isn't. This allows for a super detailed scan (four microns is RIDICULOUSLY accurate) and then all the machine has to do is print it to a fine degree of accuracy and bam, wrench with movable parts. This kind of 3d printer doesn't use heat, so getting gears that mesh together and move isn't as difficult as it sounds.

~Robert
 
It sounds like you guys have heard about this before but it is really blowing my mind. I feel like the future is here. Finally!
 
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