One of the biggest lessons in developing a desktop LPBF metal printer is that your hardware is only as good as the raw materials you feed it. Lately, I’ve been focusing on improving the surface finish and overall reliability of our prints.

We have officially opened our Kickstarter Pre-Launch page. This is your first chance to follow the project and ensure you are notified the moment we go live in Q1 2026.

Lately I have been working on the printer settings for Inconel 718. I can happily report that it prints very well on the system.Measurements from tensile tests show that the material achieves a tensile strength of 900-950 N/mm2 when printing every layer at 0.05.When printing the infill every 0.1mm layers and the walls at the normal 0.05mm layers it achieves a tensile strength of 850-900N/mm2.The mayor advantage of the 0.1mm layer infill is that depending on the geometry it prints up to 40% faster.in the video shown the astronaut weighing about 200 gram took only 5 hours, the chess piece at 200 gram took 6 hours. this would be 7 and 9 hours with everything at 0.05mm layers.

The 4th and 5th beta systems have been delivered and are now also actively used. I have learned a lot from building, integrating and testing these machines and the feedback from the 5 beta customers is very helpful. I'm also preparing the design of the next batch of machines with all the things that were found in these systems. So far only minor things have been found and most of them are related to diagnostics and production.

Today the first beta system has been delivered in Breda the Netherlands. The installation went without much trouble and the test print performed as expected. In about another month the other 4 beta systems will be delivered.

With the partial success of printing copper I found that Bronze with a much lower heat conductivity could be very interesting. After doing some simple tests I found that bronze is actually very easy to process. The energy absorption seems to be very similar to copper but the reduced conductivity makes this easier to print than stainless steel. I have been using a bronze with 85% copper and 15% tin, the nice thing is that this powder is also less expensive than stainless steel.

I have been doing the first tests with copper powder. From the first test it is clear that it is possible to print copper with the blue 30 watt laser.

Since the new year I have been experimenting with aluminium powder and I can now conclude that this material cannot be processed by this system. Compared to conventional LPBF printers the blue laser diode should have almost 3x more efficiency than the infrared lasers that are used. Unfortionately there is also another factor at play since the aluminium has a very high thermal conductivity. I believe the problem lies in the absolute power of the laser spot, the blue laser has a relatively large spot size of 0.15*0.18mm. Compared with other systems that generally have a spot size of <0.1mm the watt/mm2 is about 3x lower. This causes the powder to only loosely bond and because of the large thermal conductivity of the build plate the powder does not fuse correctly to the build plate. I believe the system will have to go into the 100watt power range with the same spot size as now to be able to print aluminium.