Anyone got any ideas how much titanium dmls costs?
I’m interested in getting a few protoparts made but it’s hard to find any information on costs. Just for arguments sake if I wanted to make something of similar size and complexity to a lugged bottom bracket shell, how much might I expect to pay roughly? Just want to know where it’s worth pursuing.

http://i.materialise.com/materials/titanium
http://gpiprototype.com/main-pages/quote-request.html

Sorry no ball-park figure, but i’ve had much smaller parts 3d printed out of metal, and extrapolating to a BB shell would put it in the quite a few hundreds of pounds range.

One other thing, you probably also won’t get the dimensional stability for things such as bearing surfaces, so factor in some post machining if you need any precision.

400 sheckels per kilo

however to make a stronger one you could take some solid 6/4 bar, bore it out, weld it together and have cheaper lighter stronger, **** me thats a first?

Raw material costs are well into the several hundred pounds a kg if i remember rightly, just as a starting point

Ti powder is around €150 a kilo at the moment, but it’s not simply to do with raw material. It’s more to do with the number of required layers (time to print) along with footprint in the chamber. Complexity is also largely irrelevant so long as it can be supported sufficiently.

Based on previous assessment, I’d say approximately £150-£225.

we just looked into buying a metal printer (outside of an R&D or a uni environment) and the EOS cost per unit at this time is 400 sheckels based on 4 year ownership ,print hours available, rent machine cost of ownership operator, servicing failed builds etc, they are bloody expensive things to own and to be honest a loss leader

that nearly 10 times the cost of a component machined from solid billet on a 5 axis machine you could recover the costs in under a year

even if metalysis reduce the cost of ti powder to their supposed 50 bucks a kilo its not looking awesome this year for everyones holy grail

We’re running 5 metallic platforms at the moment in a split between RnD and production.

The figure I provided is accurate and accounts for machine hours, gas usage (surprisingly high), depreciation, material, maintenance, machine turnaround etc.

Have a chat with the guys from Raceware Direct, this is their bag!