Anyone remember Markforged’s Metal One carbon fibre 3D printer? Turns out the company was onto something — it’s just come out with a new model, the Metal X, which uses Atomic Diffusion Additive Manufacturing (ADAM) to pump out metal components.
As TechCrunch’s John Biggs writes, Markforged is still perfecting titanium, aluminium and tool steel, but it fully supports stainless steel and “volumes up to 1000 a year”, according to founder Greg Mark.
The company is also using the Metal X for its own experiment, of sorts:
The team at Markforged is actually rebuilding a motorcycle from scratch using the machine and have already begin with a few non-structural parts. The plan is to offer the product not as a way to build final products but to create projects and molds for cast and injection molded items.
What’s that? How much does it cost? Not cheap, as you’d expect. $US99,000 ($135,810), which is slightly more expensive than your run-of-the-mill MakiBox. Still, it’s chump change for the target industries — aeronautic and automotive — and will likely save oodles for its owners in the long run.
[YouTube, via TechCrunch]