Electrical Discharge Machining DIY Attachment for Your 3D Printer

ArduinoVersusEvil developed a DIY EDM attachment for a standard DIY 3d printer. EDM is described as:

Electrical discharge machining (EDM), sometimes colloquially also referred to as spark machining, spark eroding, burning, die sinking, wire burning or wire erosion, is a manufacturing process whereby a desired shape is obtained using electrical discharges (sparks). 

Material is removed from the workpiece by a series of rapidly recurring current discharges between two electrodes, separated by a dielectric liquid and subject to an electric voltage. One of the electrodes is called the tool-electrode, or simply the "tool" or "electrode", while the other is called the workpiece-electrode, or "workpiece".

It opens the whole new are of metal machining on a regular small desktop 3d printer.The developer has not yet released the plans but there are many DIY EDM solutions around that could be customized. Google is your friend :-)

Here are videos of EDM attachment in action and some rough results:







RepRapWiki has a great compilation with several DIY projects and detailed description of key concepts:

http://reprap.org/wiki/Electrical_Discharge_Machining

Wikipedia article with technology overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_discharge_machining

Source article with more details about this project:

http://makezine.com/2015/06/18/vaporize-metal-3d-printer-mod/

Standard EDM toolhead

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