THE LASER THING :: RepRap Laser sintering

A little bit more than 2 years ago, I started with designing a RepRap laser sintering machine. At my daily work, I’m involved in designing and building laser welding machines for another purpose, so I thought it must be possible to build a laser sintering machine for the RepRap community.

I started from scratch und designed a mechanical system, where the optical system is driven, like you can find it in laser cutting systems.
After I started co-founding the FabLab Winti, the project got delayed and I didn’t found time to invest into the development of the laser sintering machine.
The design is not yet public, but I want to make it open source. Because there are still a lot of little things to develop and I’ll continue as soon as I find time. It is one of my side projects, where I put in some spare time.

It has a working area of Ø100mm x 100mm.

The electronics are a normal RAMPS 1.4, some Pololu Motordrivers, Nema 17 Motors … all you can find on a normal RepRap FFF-Printer.

 

I tried to keep the system as low cost as possible. It consists right now of a 1.5W Laser diode and some optics from Thor Labs.
The system is as big, that it can be upgraded to a 10W CO2-Laser.

As software I used a tweaked version of Marlin Firmware, Slic3r with a special profile and a self written post processing software. To controll the printer I used Repetierhost.

 

For more information, see the YouTube video or contact me in the Comment-Section.

If you want to support this project and give me a little bit of freedom to work on it, you can do it with the donate button on the right side.