Monday, January 23, 2006

 

High Temperature Materials

By high I mean 200 - 350 oC. A couple of weeks ago I blogged a request for materials that are easy to work with and that would allow RepRap to have some parts that are reasonably refractory. Forrest has been looking around, and has come up with some interesting sites:

http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1458

http://www.mkt-intl.com/ceramics/machinable.html

and

http://www.cotronics.com/vo/cotr/pdf/onepg700.pdf

The last is about castable materials, and of course RepRap should be able to make moulds with no problem at all.

Comments:
I spoke with Barry at Cotronics a little while ago. He said that for making casts and doing lost wax games their 750 castable ceramic product at about US$75 for a 10 lb sack is their biggest seller. He strongly recommended that you also buy their 20 minute videotape on how to make cases for another $15.

As for an alternative for the PTFE rod I got less immediately useful advice. The problem we have is that there is a relatively short length of the brass extruder barrel that is actually screwed into the PTFE rod. That means, as best as I can see, that we are depending on a very strong mechanical connection to help us keep the length of that barrel down. All of the approaches that Barry suggested, viz, ceramic insulating tape, insulating putty, and etc... seemed to depend on there being a much longer piece of brass barrel than the present design has to connect with the insulating material.
 
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