sintering

What are the comparative advantages of Direct Metal Laser Sintering vs the more traditional CNC Milling?

Since 3d sintering used metal powder it may be possible to do special alloys as well.

What's up with the abundance of cheap extrusion printers, while (almost) no consumer-grade SLS (selective laser sintering) machines are available?

After close examination of the metal, they'd discover it was a sintering process, because sintered metal has a recognizable structure.

Eventually, somebody is going to get low-cost laser sintering of metal powder figured out.

Most definitely for larger pieces, but it isn't suited for precision welding applications, or complex structures as selective laser sintering would be.

I can weld (quite well), I've built 3d models for laser sintering, I've assembled carbon fiber body panels.

Laser based 3d printers (largely Selective laser sintering and stereolithography) also tend to be far, far more expensive than FDM (extruder based) machines.

Some Direct metal laser sintering processes [1] use an argon flood already!

Of course with an infrequently-used 3D metal sintering printer, it becomes much more practical to deploy a phase converter for just the printer's gasifier.

And sure, if you want to build ten thousand wrenches a day, casting is obviously always going to be much cheaper than laser sintering.

With enough money, laser sintering might have happened in the 1970s.

Well in the building case, you use grains called "bricks", stick them together not by sintering but with mortar, but you still build an arbitrarily-shaped (within the limits of what will stay up) structure from a uniform store of material.

A laser of 20-100 Watt is enough for Selected Laser Sintering.

They're printed in inconel using Direct Metal Laser Sintering.

> they're printed in inconel using Direct Metal Laser Sintering.