Shane publicó el sábado un post en atg sobre el proceso de fabricación y me parece enormemente interesante. Copio y pego del hilo de ATG:
I have some time right now so I figured I'd share a bit more detail of how this works.
Printer
The printer itself is like a big vending machine. Inside it is a build area with the footprint around the size of a laptop. Internal to the printer are also several regular CNC endmills arranged in parallel above the build volume.
Material
The printer uses the same metal powder used for MIM. Since batches vary minutely in mechanical properties, each batch of powder is first tested and then the printers are calibrated to adjust for the specific traits of that batch of powder to ensure consistent builds across powder batches. The powder itself is basically like sand with specific grain size.
Printing
Note: These are layman's terms. Everything here is tightly controlled and extremely specific, but I'll use loose terms for simplicity.
First, we lay down a layer of metal powder, the thickness of which depends on the part and also on the particular area of the part. Areas with curves or tight details need a higher number of thin layers. Straight areas can get away with fewer slightly thicker layers. Then the powder layer gets sprayed down with a binding agent that keeps it firm (like adding water to sand for a sandcastle).
Now that the layer is bound and rigid, the CNC endmills come down and machine the outline of the part. This is like a router sort of. Imagine making a pyramid by stacking ever-smaller squares cut from plywood. Since the layer isn't sintered, it's really easy and quick to machine. When the layer has been cut, we repeat the process. Another layer of powder, spray it with binding agent, CNC the shape. Repeat hundreds of times until the parts have been built fully.
Now the build volume is completely full of that bound powder and dozens of parts. It's one big solid hunk that we call the cake. The cake is rigid and solid, but brittle. The cake gets removed for processing. Then cake is broken apart by hand (this will be automated eventually) and the parts are removed.
Sintering
At this stage, the parts are brittle and oversized. This is what we call a green part and it's basically the same stage that MIM parts are in when they come out of the mold. Rather than molding, we just build the parts directly. The green parts can be snapped in half with your hands.
The green parts are then sintered (heated in a super-hot furnace). This causes the binding agent to drop out and the metal powder fuses together creating solid metal with about 99% the density of billet steel. The part also shrinks. Controlling this shrinking is the most difficult part of the process because shrinkage is not uniform. The safety bar portion shrinks a bit differently than the main body of the base plate and maybe it shrinks differently in the x-axis than it does in the y. So all those little features have to be oversized in very specific ways so that when it shrinks you wind up where you want to be. Otherwise you get warping.
Post operations
It's basically impossible to 100% nail down that shrinking for the kind of precision we need on shave-critical surfaces. So we tidy things up by CNC machining those critical areas to make sure that all the shaving geometry is perfect and tightly toleranced. This ensures perfectly flat blade clamping and perfect exposure/gap.
There are also a lot of QC checkpoints on the way that I won't really get into. Some are automated or semi-automated and some are more traditional. Plus final finishing.
And also the handle, post, and stand are CNC machined elsewhere and then finished so there's traditional CNC work going on in the background.
Básicamente es un híbrido de MIM con dos procesos CNC: uno anterior y otro posterior a la sinterización en las superficies críticas para el afeitado, con una densidad del 99% respecto a un bloque de acero.
Ya veremos si cumplen lo que prometen, porque a nivel técnico es bastante impresionante; entre eso, el precio y la posibilidad de elegir 10 bases, puede ser una maquinilla interesante.
