iron powder extruder

Hi everyone. i am a fan of reprap proyect. but i dont have the money to build one here the customs here are more expensive than the good that you are importing.
i been working in a model of extruder that can work with iron powder (ultra fine grained ) melting with magnetic field. i have a little testing model working but i am interested if somebode in Uruguay has a reprap to test my little metal extruder.
The deployment is in early alpha and i am still making the electronic controller to make the depositation of melted metal secure and equal every pass.
Soon i will put schematics and pictures.
Greetings
MARTIN

Hi Martin,

fabbing with molten iron won't work properly - the fluid iron has not enough viscosity to form traces, so you can only pour it into forms.

Better use selective lasersintering with iron powder ... but either way you have to work in an inert atmosphere, e.g. argon ...

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Viktor
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yes the viscosity at the "red-white" temp is extremely unstable ...i was trying to make a system of "auto-adjust"using the fluctuation of magnetic field in the ferrite core pass.
but yes viscosity is a bitch. :-)

Martin

What_Tooling_Do_You_Have?

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

I think if you go this far - meaning heating with induction and powder extrusion you should attempt to make it usable for copper as well.
It isn't that far you basically only have to make the frequency of the induction coil adjustable as well.

Induction heating works with theoretically any material iron is just the easiest to do because you get the benefit of magnetic hysteresis in addition to the eddy currents. The only practical limitation are non-conductive materials. (That goes for directly heating them)

I think the main part would be the function generator/power supply. But once this has been done you could even make your own nozzle using ceramic printing and a induction heated mini-furnace to finish it.