After working with various other home and economical 3D printers for years, I decide to splurge and get a Syntratec SLS Kit.  SLS stands for Selective Laser Sintering, which is a fancy way of saying it uses a laser to weld plastic together.  The advantage to this is you can get some high quality, high resolution, chemical resistant, and heat resistant 3D Printable plastics.  The resolution on these prints are outstanding.

Sintratec is one of the few companies that sells laser sintering to the average consumer.  They have some rather expensive industrial sintering devices, but they also have a “kit” for the person who wants to save a few bucks.  That is kind of relative, because even with the price reduction for the kit, it still comes out to over five thousand dollars to buy this.  There are other manufacturers (like HP) that have laser sintering devices, but they are even more expensive, with some of their industrial machines topping out at over a quarter million dollars.

Sintratec is based out of Switzerland and they make a professional kit.  I used their USA-based rep 3D Chimera to obtain the kit and also their supplemental and customer support package, both of which I highly recommend.  This project will be rather difficult to construct and the help the 3D Chimera tech team gave me was invaluable.  They charged a couple thousand bucks for the support, auxiliary devices, tool kits, etc, which in hindsight (I’ve already finished the kit) was well worth the money.  Many of the documents are in German, the instructions are not very intuitive, and the kit doesn’t come with many tools to make the project easier.  3D Chimera’s supplementary saved me a full day on the estimated construction time, and it would have saved me another day if I hadn’t been filming everything all the time.  Also, by going through 3D Chimera, it saved me a lot of shipping time, because it didn’t have to be hung up in customs or international shipping directly from the EU.

Anyway, enough preamble, here is the Unboxing video:

I’m going to post several more videos and article detailing all the tips, tricks, and other things that helped me while building this Sintratec Kit.  It took me 3 days to build the beast, and a lot more time to edit these videos.  My editing skillz are super rusty.  I hope things will get better as I move forward with the follow up videos.

My plan is to make the following videos:

  • Unboxing
  • Tools to Help Build the Sintratec
  • Building the Door
  • Building the Case
  • Building the Guts
  • Wiring the Sintratec Kit
  • Calibrating the laser, galvos, and other stuff
  • Testing the Machine
  • Fixing Leaks
  • Maintaining the Device
  • Scripting for Import/Export and STL model placement in the bed

I’m already printing with this thing, so it already works.  But it will take me some time to edit the videos and make articles like this in between my various projects. I’ll keep things posted as I find time, so be patient.  Please comment below if you have any questions.

Onward.