I still use hammers and anvils all the time.
I used them to straighten a motor housing for an electric vehicle just a couple of nights ago :).
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Yikes! I hope you wear a mask. Metal fume fever is not a pretty way to go out.
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I never said they weren’t still useful 
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According to the video, their breakthrough is a powder that can (they claim) be used to laser weld any metal alloy without sacrificing lattice alignment in the resulting crystal. Granted it isn’t going to topple the welding and riveting industry, but it is a pretty neat accomplishment. Most revolutions are built incrementally, one small advancement at a time by dedicated teams. The classic eureka moment is something of a rarity in real science.
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Being able to fuse these alloys in this way and maintain the desired properties is a technical achievement. It remains to be seen whether it will be effective in broad commercial applications. You could have made the same criticism about a breakthrough in automobile transmissions when they were all hand built. This kind of research and development is absolutely “good engineering,” which is not necessarily aimed at cost and production targets. I did not see any extravagant claims about it being ready for mass production of anything. This is a necessary, but not sufficient step in that direction, solving a problem that has been the subject of much study and research.
I agree completely. I was more pushing back against the idea that this article claims things that it does not.
Also agree most completely, but I would say that not all increments are equal, or move in the same direction.
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Seeing that now reading back. My mistake.
I will note that the video uses the word breakthrough, which is foremost a marketing word that gets bandied about to impress investors and grant underwriters.
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Nice 
Do you have end-result photo?
I’ve got to try this with 3D printed lost wax molds, there are even special FDM filaments for that.
Actually the blades for wood have quite good geometry for aluminum (and vice versa), i bet that just a drop of oil on the blade would stop clogging - at least for reciprocating saws it does wonders.
And for high speed cutting I use compressed air cooling with food-grade glycerol mist, it’s cheap, non-toxic and works really well.
Without proper cooling the cutter can become clogged and melt aluminum instead of cutting it - this happened the first time I was trying to mill aluminum (2017-T6 alloy):
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Does anyone know of a real mass produced product made with 3-D printing of any sort?
Depends on what you mean by “mass-produced.”
RocketLab is coming up on the second test launch of their “Electron” small-sat launcher, which uses 9 Rutherford engines in its first stage and one in its second, for a total of ten per rocket. RocketLab is planning a high launch cadence, at least one per week, so once they’re up to speed, they should be building and launching at least 500 Rutherford engines per year, which is about as ‘mass-produced’ as rocketry gets.
Rutherford is the first oxygen/hydrocarbon engine to use 3D printing for all primary components including its engine chamber, injector, pumps and main propellant valves. Using this process, Rocket Lab’s engineers have created complex, yet lightweight, structures previously unattainable through traditional techniques, reducing the build time from months to days and increasing affordability.
All the major components for an engine can be 3-D printed in less that 24 hours. Compared to traditional build methods, this is revolutionary.
There is no way they could maintain that launch cadence at their proposed prices using traditional engine-building methods. Regeneratively-cooled rocket engines are inherently difficult and expensive to fabricate, and 3-D printing can definitely make them faster and cheaper to build, while making them stronger and more reliable as well.
3-D printing is making tremendous inroads in aerospace, especially in the LESS-than-absurdly-expensive NON-military applications like the Electron launcher.
There are plenty of complex structures that can be 3-D printed faster and more cheaply than they can be conventionally machined. This particular advance considerably broadens that range.
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“Not mass production” parts still add up to addressable markets in the tens of billions at minimum. About a quarter to a third of that is molds and tooling too - with substantial impact on the cost and flexibility of conventional manufacturing methods.
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Yup, full face mask, and note that it’s outdoors. The proper bronze foundry I’ve been planning to build Real Soon Now for about a decade includes a power drafted fume hood I scrounged from DuPont.
I don’t currently have an end-result photo and I’m kind of in a production rush right now making hats for a wedding (don’t ask). But I’ll put something in the craft threads eventually - stay tuned!
Lost wax is a lot harder than open face molds like I did. You want to buy some commercial oilsand or get some bentonite and make greensand, knock together a proper flask with cope and drag.
I made three sand casts (with overly wet, unsifted, unmullered construction sand, not proper greensand) and one plaster cast (which cracked, despite being heated to 450°F first (and also burst into flame but that was actually expected because it had a wood top plate and fill pipe)). Three of the castings came out useable but I ruined one of those on the table saw through sloppy measuring. 
I only need one good one anyway. The porch has one full post with a structurally required base missing and two half posts that could do with matching half bases for aesthetic purposes.
Well, I’d prefer not to sling oil all over the shop, the aluminum dust is bad enough. I do electronics in that room! The blades clean pretty easily with a small screwdriver, and that particular blade was already headed for scrap anyway.
The notable thing about cutting aluminum on a table saw is that it’s REALLY LOUD and the aluminum gets finger-scorchingly hot very quickly. Aluminum doesn’t show heat so it’s potentially more dangerous than hot steel. But frankly everything about this venture was absurdly dangerous in abstract; like most physical work, it was only safe because I made it happen safely.
Sounds more like brazing than welding.
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This is kinda-sorta mass production, but of the very high end “military” type where the product is so high priced it makes the method effective.
I don’t count moldmaking as mass production, the 3d print job I had done was a model to pull a mold from to produce it in carbon composite. Various CNC and 3d methods have revolutionized modelmaking (putting armies of modelmakers out of business) but the additive methods do not fulfill the ubiquitous “faster cheaper mass production” claims that have been out there since the 1st ABS machine was going to make injection molding obsolete.
And they’re probably not going to! But that doesn’t mean they aren’t vastly more impactful than other similarly overhyped technologies. The areas that really matter are just a little less sexy.
I do a LOT of cutting 6061 on various shop saws, use either beeswax or WD40 as a lubricant and you won’t clog the teeth. Also, people tend to think you need fine toothed blades for AL, nope. I use 6tpi on my band saw. Have you tried casting using the lost styrofoam method?
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I was about to say, “how does this stack up to a mill?” but the picture in the article is something that would pretty clearly be impossible to mill.
So, you take “could launch the future of automotive and aircraft parts” as an extravagant claim of it being ready for mass production? To me, it’s quite far from that, just an optimistic take on what could happen in the future. Whatever you have to read in to support your straw man, I suppose.
The alloys are the same, but the bonds between them are much weaker as opposed to extruded or forged. In other words, its not the same material.
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I usually have a 3tpi blade on the bandsaw because I harvest my own wood; it was expensive and I didn’t want to dull it on aluminum. Thanks for the tips, though! I will probably use the info in the future.
No, I probably will go straight to lost wax when I finally get my bronze foundry done. The stuff I want to cast will benefit from a high level of detail.
For these pieces I made a wooden form, then I cut open some bags of sand (that I was already using as part of the same project) and struck them off with a level, then hammered the form in with a small sledge. Just a straight open face mold after I pulled the form out, with gravity providing the level top - but since the aluminum shrinks A LOT I have to mill the tops flat anyway.
The crucible’s just a regular old steel coffee can. I kept it glowing hot until it burned through and started leaking and that’s when I poured. You know, like, the burrito’s done when it explodes in the microwave?
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You may not believe it, but aluminum actually dulls blades less than wood! When I was less lazy I used to keep separate blades and change them for whatever I was cutting. There’s something about wood fiber, even a tailor will tell you never to use their good scissors on paper. I’ve been ruining my blade dicing peach branches for the gravity fed smoker.
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You know, I hadn’t really thought about it until you said it, but I’m dead certain White Oak, Locust and Osage Orange will dull your blades faster than raw aluminum will. And while I haven’t cut peach, judging by the plum and apple wood I’ve cut fruitwood can be pretty tough on blades too.
Fruitwood, preferably apple, was used for the teeth on big gristmill gearing. Wood teeth in cast iron frames, so that if a big log scored a direct hit on the trash rack and punched through to stop the wheel or turbine, the multi-ton mill stones would just strip the teeth instead of turning the entire gear train into smoking scrap in a fraction of a second. learning that tidbit of historical info led me to appreciate the extreme robustness of fruitwood!
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