If anyone else watched the demo the other day, you probably noticed the slide where the Form team showed off metal plating as a finish option. They referred to the parts being electroplated, but after a few days of frantic research, it seems more likely that it was actually an electroless nickel finish.
I’m VERY interested in this finish option, as it will potentially meet a number of my needs, and I’ve got requests out to a dozen outfits to see if they can do this kind of finishing, but I’m hoping someone might have a lead on where/how the Form team got their parts plated, or if anyone has played with this before and can reccomend a solution.
I’m looking to get reliable and consistant plating at a low or moderate cost per part.
I’ve got an email into the support address as well, but again, any thoughts or insight will be greatly appreciated!
The Nickel plating and some talk (but no images) about flexible resin (which I think we’d heard about anyway) were the highlights for me. It was mostly a walk-through on using PreForm and how that workflow translates into the print and finish process. Basically an annotated version of the main page video. Nothing MAJORLY new (other than the nickel), but I found it very useful in bridging the few foggy-bits I still had in terms of what the soup to nuts workflow will be.
Well, if you find a good place to do it let me know. I had been thinking of casting some metal parts for a few projects but now that it’s been brought up… the metal finish idea sounds like a good alternative option.
over here in the UK there’s a process called Metalisation. I’ve used it a lot in the past for gold and silver finishes on wood or plastic items. Google brings up a few leads under metalisation.
For those wondering, the company that did the plating for us is called RePliForm, based in Maryland (http://www.repliforminc.com/contact.htm). We’re actually planning a blog post on the subject in the next few days, but I couldn’t resist chiming in here.
You should certainly be in touch. They’ve been enormously helpful and are excited about working with Form 1 owners. They have a ton of experience doing plating for additive manufacturing. It’s a pretty extraordinary process and can make parts an order of magnitude stronger and more durable.
They’re getting .stl’s as soon as I can get to my machine
This finishing option is blowing doors open for me that I have been trying to work around for a year or more. Thank you so much for your awesome R&D and sharing that knowledge.
Just get those Form1’s shipping so I can get mine and go to town on this
There’s paints that contain high amounts of copper or silver in solution that can be used as a base for electroplating. http://www.caswellplating.com has pretty much everything you need to DIY most plating options. I’m not sure about all the processes, but some of them do require solution processes that get pretty warm which might affect FORM1 parts. Experimentation likely necessary.
