![]() ![]() The laser is melting the titanium powder. “You need quite a bit of powder on hand to print that high.” “Our machines have a build envelope of 250 mm square and as high as 330-340 mm high,” said Woolcock of what equates to a roughly one-foot cube of printing potential. ![]() Table size is often the limitation of what can be printed. We’re also making a variety of other components and parts in titanium.” For our bicycle frames, we bond those lugs together with carbon fibre tubes. “In that time we’re printing what’s effectively the lugs of the bicycle, the bottom bracket, head bracket, seat bracket and dropouts, as well as the seat topper. “We tetris parts in and fill it as much as we can each build,” Woolcock said. Bastion makes effective use of that time by printing multiple parts on a single print bed. In Bastion’s case, those usable parts typically take two full days – 48 hours – to be printed. With each layer, the machine adds more powder until eventually, the pieces are built up into a useable part. (Such oxygen purging is common in more traditional titanium welding methods to ensure consistent results, but the temperature used here means the titanium powder would ignite if not in the presence of an inert gas). That happens at an insanely high temperature – about 1,700 ☌ – and that means an inert gas must be used (argon in this case) to purge the chamber of any oxygen. Each of Bastion’s printers features a single laser that melts the fine layer of titanium powder in place. The process is basically like welding metal, but rather than melting pre-existing metal pieces together, it happens one dust particle at a time. “The metal 3D-printing we do is with titanium, and we run two Renishaw machines that use a laser to melt titanium powder layer by layer,” explained Woolcock of how the parts build up in an additive fashion. ![]() Pieces are rarely printed separately instead Bastion assembles those pieces like a puzzle to gain efficiencies from the printers.
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