Plater printers are one of the older forms of 3D printing. They also
take the "printing" part of 3D printing the most literally: the
machine is a 1-axis inkjet head on a two axis gantry that prints like
a normal inkjet but spraying water or binder into a powder bed, rather
than ink onto a page.
Most of the core patents around that kind of printer have now expired,
so open source people are gradually working to make it cheap. The
technology suffered a licensing problem similar to what was discussed
earlier: Z Corporation got an exclusive license for the technology
from MIT, so there wasn't much pressure for them to make a cheaper
machine until it was too late and FDM destroyed them. They then got
bought out, and are now just a minor product line.
On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 3 Oct 2016, Uwe Klein wrote:
Doing low temp melting plastic or wax 3D printing to produce lost-wax
style casting parts appears to be a popular use case for 3d printing.
There are also (I'm told) expensive specialty 3D printers that can print
molding sand or plaster -- virtual lost-wax casting!
Henry
