Nature Science

RADICAL DESIGN WITH LIQUID METAL

For many thousands of years, we’ve been fascinated with metal technology -- captivated by gold since 6000 BC. But now some of the latest advances in metal technology are making dramatic life changes, with positive impacts on our health care, the health of our planet, and our abilities to produce beautiful artworks.

Photo: Courtesy of Fast Company.

What if you could print a beautiful necklace or pair of earrings? Suddenly intricacies become easier. Complexity falls away. You can turn an idea into something wearable in practically no time. And if you are a talented jewelry designer, like Jacqueline Leib, you can create incredible complex metal designs without access to a foundry. How? With 3D metal printing.

Photo: Jacqueline Leib.

Leib creates metal jewelry, in flowing organically shapes that were never before possible to achieve using traditional metalsmithing techniques.

Photo: Courtesy of Meeting Proceedings.

While 3D printing has been around for decades, it is only recently gaining popularity among designers outside of heavy industry, and only very recently capable of printing metal. 3D printing is an additive manufacturing process, adding materials to create shapes based on digital models. It is distinctly different from most other processes, which remove material by cutting or drilling to create desired shapes.

Photo: Courtesy of Young British Jewellers.

The first working 3D printer was created in 1984 by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corp. The worldwide market for 3D printers and services topped $2.2 billion in 2012 and continues to grow, now that the price and size of the printing machines have dramatically shrunken.

Photo: Courtesy of Berry Review.

Artistic applications for 3D printing began to catch some buzz In 2005, starting in academic journals and has been gaining traction ever since. Famed designer aficionado, Murray Moss, curated a 3D printing show at the Victoria & Albert Museum for the 2011 London Design Festival, called Industrial Revolution 2.0: How the Material World will Newly Materialize.

Photo: Courtesy of 3D Gold Printing.

The 3D metal printer works by reading a design from an .stl file and lays down successive layers of liquid, powder, sheet material to build the model from a series of cross sections, which correspond to the virtual cross sections from the CAD model. As with 2D printing, resolution is measured in dots per inch (DPI), but in this case, it also considers the thickness of each layer of dots. Layers can be as thin as 16 µm. The particles (3D dots) are around 50 to 100 µm in diameter. 3D metal printers currently make up just 2 percent of the 3D printer installation base.

Photo: Courtesy of Romanoff.

Because the technology is so precise, designers, like Leib, can finally realize incredible levels of intricacy, producing shapes that are extremely difficult to achieve through traditional jewelry making methods. Leib was originally inspired by the remarkable shapes 3D printers had produced for the aerospace industry.

Photo: Courtesy of Digital Communities.

Leib was trained in graphic design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She went on to design television and movie sets. Her design tools at the time were mainly a simple pencil and a notebook, yet her drawings were quite detailed and complex.

Leib initially worked with resin, a light-weight, pliant material to create a series of delicate, black body tattoo-like adornments. Then she expanded to work with silver, which then enabled her to include stones, pearls and gems.

Leib uses swirling free-flowing strands of metal linked together to create her beautiful shapes. However 3D metal printing can also simplify the process of making very basic pieces of jewelry. It can also add interesting twists. For instance, Solidscape, a jewelry maker in the Netherlands, creates rings in which you can store loved one’s ashes.

Photo: Joshua Harker.

Artists, like Chicaco-based Joshua Harker, uses 3D printing to create his mind-blowing sculpture, including ground-breaking bronze pieces, based on the radical concept of metal tangles, and magnificent filligrees,like his incredibly delicate skulls . Watch his TED talk “Sex Tech & Rock’n'Roll” to see how his technique evolved.

Video: Courtesy of TEDxTalks.

Harker is pushing this new medium to more extreme boundaries, creating forms that were never before imagined.

Photo: Joshua Harker. Sublimation Erotique.

Harker creates many of his sculptures, such as his delicate Sublimation Erotique, by first printing his designs in polymer, then casting them in bronze.

Photo: Courtesy of Joshua Harker. Delicated Ingress Bronze.

Not only is 3D metal printing enabling design breakthroughs, but its low upfront manufacturing costs are allowing a whole new crop of designers enter the picture. No longer limited to just a few skilled artisans trained in traditional handcrafting techniques, 3D metal printing can let any artist with a beautiful idea, turn out gorgeous works.

We can’t wait to see the exponential results of their imaginations realized by the ongoing evolutions of this new technology.

Read about Beautiful Metal all this week, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact, including Shiny New Delicate & Heavy Metal.