There are many services printing metal parts. Shapeways has been doing it since 2009. There are several workable processes. [1][2] This new machine competes with the ExOne Innovent.[3] That uses a single-step process (no oven needed) but is slower.
Desktop Metal's big claim is that they can lay down "up to" 8200 cm³/hr of metal. The "up to" weasel words are a problem. They're vague about the layer thickness. 3D printing has a basic trade-off between speed and precision. Most of the commercial vendors go for high enough precision that you can make working parts. Desktop Metal doesn't offer many pictures of their finished parts, but I did find one.[4] That looks like it was made with layers of about 0.5mm. The furnace step provides some surface smoothing. That's not bad for casting.
It's nice, but it's not clear that it's 100x, or even 10x, better than the competition.
To be clear here, the ExOne machine does require sintering as a post-process.
The way I see it, Desktop Metal's main innovation is their furnace technology. Furnaces are typically large, expensive, industrial machines that cannot be operated in an office environment. Having a compact, easy to use furnace is a BIG deal. They also combine classic convection sintering with microwave sintering technology. Microwave sintering is a fairly recent technology (developed ~2 decades ago by folks at Penn State) that has a gigantic amount of promise (volumetric heating, finer metal microstructure, and more energy-efficient). MW sintering has seen fairly
limited adoption in the industrial space so I am happy that DM is pushing this technology further.
The are pursuing two major technologies, an extrusion-based process (Studio system) and an inkjet-based process (Production system). I have seen parts from their Studio system and, from what I have seen, they are highly functional (comparable to casted parts).
Whether $1 billion is the right valuation is a question for the VCs and the market to answer. But, in my opinion, they are developing a very compelling set of technologies (if they end up working as advertised).
Any furnace capable of sintering metal parts is unsuitable for office deployment and will at a minimum need a fume hood and a way to vent the (very dangerous) fumes in a safe way. Typically that means you'll be operating machinery like this in an industrial setting.
That and desktop sized muffle furnaces have been around for half a century and can be purchased for under $1,000. I see a 12.7 x 10.8 x 15.2 cm one in my company's catalog for $870 so I don't consider this a huge breakthrough.
One advantage of microwave sintering over older methods (like muffle furnaces) is more even heating because energy is deposited throughout the volume of the part, not just at the surface.
Reduced thermal gradients -> more predictable post-sinter part dimensions and more uniform mechanical properties. Those are yield enhancers that could give significantly better production economics.
I think many of Shapeways metal offerings are castings from prints in wax, e.g. "For Silver, the minimum supported wall is determined by our ability to successfully print your product in wax and then cast it in a plaster mold. Walls that are too thin will break in the mold-making process." [1]
Shapeways offers several different processes. The lost-wax stuff is for jewelry, so you can make hollow objects in expensive metals. Laser sintering is used for working parts. There's also MarkForged [1], which has their own process for 3D printing carbon fiber and metal with a sub $100K machine. It's kind of slow, but they're selling it to make dies for injection molding.
It would be pretty exciting to duplicate keys (especially proprietary and "do not duplicate" institutional keys) from the privacy of home. Might even hasten the end of the mechanical lock as a security device.
Sure, you can do that now with Shapeways or a crooked locksmith, but it would be fun to do independently.
It's certainly possible, but this kind of reminds me of discussions here on HN and elsewhere about way that the 3D printing of guns can create a crisis for gun control regimes. People in discussion threads reasonably pointed out that it's been possible to manufacture guns in home workshops for hundreds of years and that, for some kinds of weapons, it's not even toward the high end of challenging metalworking projects, and that indeed many people regularly do it either as a hobby or profession without 3D printing or even without CNC of any kind.
But this is kind of shocking for software-oriented people who might think that "manufacturing" "hardware" is a super-tough black art that can only be done by professionals in factories. And indeed that's pretty much my intuition as a software person who hasn't done woodworking since middle school shop class and never learned any of the other manufacturing skills that humanity has been working on for the last while. (Reading Bunnie's new book about manufacturing in China has been fascinating for me, because it's like "oh yeah, so all of these objects just come from people doing different tasks to fabricate them"!)
So people said about gun manufacturing that there was this funny intuition that 3D printing somehow allows people to casually manufacture complex objects at home which they otherwise simply couldn't do. But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects. So we may tend to exaggerate the impact by thinking that other methods represent a huge, hard barrier while 3D printing represents true "push-button manufacturing". Neither side of this intuition is necessarily the reality.
For the problem of duplicating proprietary keys, it seems like anyone could already do this at home without especially expensive equipment and without especially extensive training. I remember reading a Mickey Mouse cartoon from many decades ago where a key was supposed to be duplicated from a negative impression taken in some clay (or something), and this was presented as a basic skill of a generalist mechanic!
On the other hand, maybe this intuition is partly right if some significant population of would-be home gunsmiths or key-copiers is intimidated enough by hardware and manufacturing that they're sort of waiting around for the pushbutton solution.
Edit: looks like other people in this thread have said this a lot more concisely. :-)
> But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects.
That's actually a substantial barrier. People are lazy, and pressing 'print' on some design fed into a cornucopia machine (of which a 3D printer is a rudimentary fore-runner) substantially lowers that barrier. It requires no special knowledge beyond the feeding of raw materials into hoppers.
That's a lot less than what would be required to safely turn on a lathe, let alone making something with it.
the thing is that there are laws about some of these sorts of things, they applied before 3D printing came along, and they usually apply to 3D printing too.
I help run a Makerspace, a couple of times a year I get a teenage boy (and it is always a boy) come thru the door wanting to print a gun .... after I've given him the lecture about how stupidly dangerous that is, I then remind him that a) here in NZ hand guns are illegal, and b) he would still need to be police vetted and obtain a firearms license - the law doesn't change because you used a 3D printer
Keys are pretty easy even with "under the kitchen sink" home materials, even easier with a little alginate powder for the mold and craft-store quality binary epoxy to cast. It's not going to do much good with mid/high sec locks that utilize floating pin keys, but then neither would the 3d printed route.
The point of these proprietary institutional key systems is that you can't. The blank is patented, and the authorized manufacturer will only sell it to authorized representatives of an institution which has a contract to use that key system. It will further guarantee that only one institution gets to use that system per geographical region.
It's "security through the inordinate difficulty of acquiring an object with a particular shape." Cheap 3D printing of metal might put an end to that strategy.
There is an image processing script, that will take a picture of the key and deduce the key number, or bitting code, or "key cut code", which is an expression of the heights for each pin. [1] [2]
Then you can plug that bitting code into a script which will generate an STL model for the key. [3]
I did this, except I measured the key with calibers and back-calculated the key number. I printed the key on a cheap Prusa I3 in ABS, it was not impressive in terms of resolution or strength, but it did work in my house. I carefully tested it because I thought it might break off in the lock, and it felt weak, but worked -- definitely good enough for a single covert access, or even use as an emergency backup key to hide somewhere.
No fancy metal printer needed, and you could write a script to pull pictures of keys out of twitter or whatever and automate the process.
i'd start by plugging "key blank" into your favorite search engine. if that fails you horribly, you can buy brass all over the internet: http://www.onlinemetals.com/https://www.metalsdepot.com/ mcmaster-carr, or amazon. i suggest a pair of calipers, too.
I have a key that claims "copyright" and "do not copy". I've always assumed the copyright claim was bogus, on the grounds that functional items like keys aren't within the scope of copyright law.
I figured that "do not copy" label was for the key cutting people to see and deter them from copying it. But I'm not sure if anyone really follows those labels.
I get my keys cut at a convenience store down the street. Key cutting is not exactly a sophisticated service market run by specialists. So I doubt there is much stringent ethical procedures or industry reputations to lean on.
I'm not sure if anyone really follows those labels.
You're probably right.
When people's security needs are great enough to justify paying $150+ per lock, high-end locks offer:
(a) Patented keys that the manufacturer only sells to authorized distributors (who are contractually obligated not to cut keys without a key duplication card)
(b) have complex designs that can't be cut on standard key-cutting machines and
(c) have special 'key control' pins that mean different locksmiths get incompatible locks and key blanks.
Needless to say, a sufficiently good 3D scanner & printer (or indeed a sufficiently patient person with a file and a pair of calipers) could bypass these protections.
Several years ago, I lived in an apartment with "do not copy" keys. I took one to the hardware store and they refused to copy it, so I took it home, ground out the words with a Dremel, filled the gap in with solder and polished it flat. Same store happily copied it.
If you're important enough you can get the lock makers to make you your own custom blank that they don't sell to anyone else.
I ran into this at college when trying to issue a bunch of keys to club members.
"Laser cut" keys have a second set of teeth inside one of the low spots in the blank that normal machines can't copy. Luckily, the locks that have the bar to fit the inner teeth are expensive and only important things get them so the hardest part of copying the key was convincing the guy at the hardware store that I just needed copies with the same profile and not the inner teeth.
Institutions can buy key systems where the blanks are patented, and only sold by authorized dealers to authorized buyers as part of the institutional contract. This makes it very hard to come by usable blanks. Your average locksmith won't have them.
It's a piece of metal. Even if the locksmith doesn't have the blank you can simply make your own on a copying mill. It will take a while because you'll need a fine bit to make a usable key and the registration when you flip it has to be perfect but this is absolutely doable.
The blanks that locksmiths have are an optimization in time and cost, usually not in technology, they are there so you can walk out with your new key in 5 minutes and at $10 rather than an hour or two and $200. The trick is that the blank has all the lengthwise grooves pre-cut and the copying grinder then merely has to slot the blank to the required depth and cut off any excess. This is so that some $7 / hour person can make your keys and not a trained machinist with a very expensive piece of gear.
Keys with tricks in them (magnets, embedded RFID chips, bearings, springs and so on) are a lot harder to copy than keys that are simply steel.
It'd work for a few times, at least. In the 90s, BMW gave out plastic wallet-sized cards with flip-out emergency keys with at least some of their cars. Not super durable for repeated use, but handy to have. Looks like something similar continued into the 2000s for a while, at least: http://www.bimmerboard.com/members/q/original/BMW%20Transpon...
Desktop Metal's big claim is that they can lay down "up to" 8200 cm³/hr of metal. The "up to" weasel words are a problem. They're vague about the layer thickness. 3D printing has a basic trade-off between speed and precision. Most of the commercial vendors go for high enough precision that you can make working parts. Desktop Metal doesn't offer many pictures of their finished parts, but I did find one.[4] That looks like it was made with layers of about 0.5mm. The furnace step provides some surface smoothing. That's not bad for casting.
It's nice, but it's not clear that it's 100x, or even 10x, better than the competition.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfdO4p4SFc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vsaSzrhvcw [3] http://www.exone.com/Systems/Research-Education-Printers/Inn... [4] https://embedwistia-a.akamaihd.net/deliveries/5c8aec78d82aa1...