I think Shapeways does alloy 3D printing. I don’t exactly know how it works, but I think you do the design and they publish and print the part and keep a chunk of the sale price. I use them every time I think to myself that there must be someone who has made a part using 3D printing. Aero bar risers for example.

Home/prosumer metal printing is pretty rare compared to plastics.

Protolabs does great DMLS work.

---

Eliot
blog thing - strava thing

AFAIK, no one does 6061. If you can live with some weird alloys they’re out there. Out of curiousity, why not 6/4 since that’s much more common?

you can’t print T6...

But apart from that nitpick, how about wax printing/investment casting/lost-PLA an aluminium part?

What’s the part?

Could it be done on a 5 axis CNC Mill?
Shouldn't be hard to find one of those.

Check out 3dhubs.com. They do 3d printing, CNC (probably what you'll need), and injection molding.

---

Strava

As a warning, it won't be cheap. At all.

No one is going to have personal access to metal printing unless it's their business. Lots of places will do one offs. You do the CAD and they run it. Probably best to make it in plastic first. Not cheap, but... I researched this about 6 months ago, and there was a lot of buzz around a new process and machinery that was quite a bit cheaper. Google.

Also, you want Ti not Al. You can't print just any alloy you want.

Why do you need that material specifically? You can probably get the performance you need from some of the reinforced plastics out there. Those would be materials that someone on this forum might be able to print.

For work I’ve always found CNC to be significantly less expensive than 3D printing for small part runs , 1-5 parts.

It takes longer to get the parts but if speed isn’t your need I would look into CNC

Truth. If you want alloy printed, hire a shop like shapeways.

I have the Prusa i3 BTW. Probably best hobby 3D printer, and of course only plastic.

I contacted a poster's suggestion & they can print in that material they said. Here is the part (the middle curved bolted on part that has threaded holes for water bottle with a Garmin mount on the end). However, it looks like it would just be easier to order a new BTA. Zipp doesn't sell that one notched/bolted on part that broke...which is odd, my bike shop has seen a couple of them broken.

6061 maybe. But T6 refers to the heat treatment process. You can’t “print” heat treatment. But you could do it afterwards. That was my nitpick :)

I wouldn’t print that. The metal printing alone would probably be about $500 for a 1-off, plus finishing machining, upfront CAD time etc. You might be able to CNC it but it would still be expensive. I’d just bodge something to a standard Garmin Mount myself ...

One screw holding those parts together seems very undercooked.

Out of curiosity, what part broke?

I work for a university 3D printing lab, so I do, but its absolutely not cheap. Even if you go to shapeways or 3d hubs, or i.materialise, who have the best metal printing setup, 3d printing metals is really only reserved for things that are unrealistic to machine or has some definite advantages. Also, most of the aluminium 3d printed at this point is aluminium with high silicon content, not really that great for structural applications.

You *can* 3d print 6061 aluminium, but almost no one does it commercially because it is difficult to do and requires specific materials science know how. Its very much still in the research phase.

The cheapest metal 3d printers out there are running around $100k usd, and those dont particularly have the nost fantastic results. Does it have to be metal? There are very strong engineering plastics out there that should meet your needs and will cost less.


My advice would be to CNC it. You wont have to have it look exactly the same but you could probably cnc something that performs exactly the same for 1/3 the cost.