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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I saw a video doing something like awhile ago [1], and I thought the idea of using electroplating made sense, but I know absolutely nothing about chemical engineering or material science.

It's interesting to see this idea in action, though with my limited experience with electroplating it seems like it'd be absurdly slow.

[1] https://youtu.be/W1d36wbx_yg

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You're right - electroplating isn't traditionally very fast. Much of the system has been engineered to drive a build speed that's relevant for mass manufacturing while maintaining material properties (think 100-1000x faster than typical electroplating)

Very, very cool. If you can make metal 3D printing viable for consumers I'll be the first in line to buy one (though I realize that's probably quite a ways away).

I managed 1μm/minute when electroplating PCBs at home.

Faster and it grows a sponge of copper (entrapped gas I assume).

I would like to know how they did it.

Seems like even in a vacuum it could still make a metal foam, but perhaps would help minimize defects?

That's just PVD or CVD, which does massively decrease defects but being a gaseous process slows down growth considerably.

Parallelization? As in you grow layers upon layers in parallel, align them and chemically bond them?

I never noticed this before but at 2:10 when he mentions the word subscribe, the subscribe button animates. How long has this been happening?

At least a few months. I don't think it has been more than a year.

Same happens with “like” I just noticed this a couple of days ago!

This is brilliant. So many problems solved. This person is awesome!

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