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.
Ben learnt the mechanical craft from scratch in the workshop and then as a technical merchant. He then worked for a few years as a database programmer.
Then he studied mechanical engineering.
And he has completed some CAS trainings in Data Science.
Today he develops special machines for a special machine construction company in Switzerland.
In 2014 he founded the FabLab at Winterthur, Switzerland.
He's main hobbies are his girlfriend, inventing new things, testing new gadgets, the FabLab Winti, 3d-Printing, geocaching, playing floorball, take some photos (www.belichtet.ch) and mountain biking.
