Introduction

[Inkjetfacts]

I am new to this site today 7/20/2019 but not new to printing with inkjets. My inkjets are single nozzle inkjets and piezo driven jets using Hot Melt inks. Hot Melt inks have a long history (much longer than 3D printing as defined by the top brands and marketing people) I want to educate the world on jetting with inks that started the real 3D industry. Inks used before stand-up drops on surfaces were just flat. Flat printing is 2D printing. 3D printing put feeling into printing with Braille and characters and images that were raised above the printing surface. Do you now when melted solid inks were first printed? Do you know the names of any solid inks?

[Inkjetfacts]

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is defined as joining layer upon layer of materials to produce a objects from a 3D model file. Key words here are Additive", "joining", "layer on layer', "materials", "objects" and "3D model file". It specifies this is not a subtractive manufacturing process. Does anyone besides me question this and other definitions of AM. I would be rich if I had a dollar for everyone who has said to me "Who cares" about definitions. We all know Additive Manufacturing has been known as 3D printing too. I have a problem with all of these words and topics and would like others to contribute to a discussion on them.
In my introduction I talk about materials of 3D inkjet printing. I bring up inkjet since it is my specialty. I mentioned the materials should have some substance to them to show 3D characteristics but anyone making objects strives to make them as smooth as possible and the thinner the layer the better the surface finish. This is important for curved surfaces but not with straight walled objects. Layers can thus be thin or thick depending on the model structure. Let's say the important thing is the term layers and not thickness of the layer. Do you know about 2.5D layers?

[Inkjetfacts]

A single nozzle inkjet will deposit one 0.0035 inch drop on a surface spot and the thickness will be about 0.0025 inches after solidifying. A HP Fusion printer will deposit millions of drops of bonding agent per second over a 0.0039 inch thick bed of powder and this will give a layer of about 0.004 inches. These technologies both print in single layers of material, one layer at a time. But I ask if a single-layer-model qualifies as an Additive Manufacturing object. The single-layer may have millions of drops of bonding ink or it may have many drops of inkjet ink from a Continuous Inkjet. Early single nozzle Continuous inkjets printed liquid metal inks and formed objects from model data in the 1960's. The objects could be handled and put back into the printer to melt and be printed again.

[Inkjetfacts]

Standard thickness for a printed circuit board conductor is 35 microns or 0.0014 inches. It is common knowledge that you can 3D print circuit conductors today. 35 microns is about 1/2 of a layer with a Drop-on-Demand single nozzle inkjet. As I see it, a layer can be any thickness, or even a fraction of a layer thickness. Additive Manufacturing's definition of layers upon layers of material to make an object is incorrect since printing electronic circuits is considered 3D Printing and its less than a layer thick. The Continuous Inkjet with Liquid-metal alloy ink printed letters and numbers in 1969 for signage at 1200 characters per minute and the printed objects were approximately 25 microns thick. In those days things like this were not labeled 3D objects. The term 3D appeared during the computer graphic arts era. We have met all definitions of AM except we haven't mentioned the 3D Model file. Oh. All you need is a 2D-file to print characters, right! Its the 3D-material not the file.

[Inkjetfacts]

The missing post was a duplicate of a previous post.

[Inkjetfacts]

In my introduction of myself, I have discussed the origins if 3D printing back to the earliest times. It originated with materials that had physical properties of solids when cooled, reinforced with a binder fluid or UV cured. Actually water would be a good 3D material except its hard to freeze it and keep it frozen to show off a object made from ice. Anyways, the main thing about 3D objects is the materials that they are made of. 3D Printing as everyone calls it took many years to be understood because there were so few materials that could be made into objects with the technologies available. Prototype models was and has been the most popular use of 3D printing for all of these years. Even today, expensive machines are required to demonstrate how things can be designed and made using 3D printing. Making many objects with 3D printing is slowly gaining ground as people learn more about the process with a specific machine. It has taken years to develop software to design and build higher quality objects with specialized materials. My main interest is looking at 3D printing, understanding the fundamentals and researching when these key component were invented. Hind sight on the process as it matures helps identify what it takes to print 3D materials and why its called three dimensional printing. It all started with the material that could be added to a surface and maintain shape. If there were no materials that would build upon each other, then there never could have been 3D additive modeling.

[Inkjetfacts]

I am not receiving responses here. I would like to include them in this discussion. Please check your message settings. This should be a good topic for feedback.

[Inkjetfacts]

Three-Dimensional print is computer graphically positioned images or characters on a surface with any ink that is raised above the print surface. The earliest continuous electronically deflected stream inkjets printed on paper with hot-melt wax inks (wax) and shortly after this magnetically deflected stream of drops printed on metal plates with liquid metal alloy inks. Each of these inkjet technologies were patented and one actually became a product in the 1960's with both printing an amazing 1200 characters per minute. The wax inks printed characters but these only grew to be about 1/4 inch tall when the paper feed jammed but it printed Roman Numerals and Japanese characters. The liquid metal printed output from stock market data which included numbers and letters and were about 1 mil thick. Three-Dimensional print was started in 1960's and is different than Additive Manufacturing because "Layers" of Three-Dimensional Printing (3D as they call it today) wasn't discussed until the 1980's. Printing one drop at a time (Drop-On-Demand) was invented in 1972 by Steve Zoltan (a year after Liquid Metal Printing was patented by Johannes Gottwald in 1971 of Teletype Corp) but it took another decade to see subtractive color print with individual inkjet printed color drops placed on top of each other to show all true colors with the Howtek, Inc HT1 or Pixelmaster color printer. Howtek invented the Thermoplastic Hot-Melt CMYK color inks and improved the Zoltan glass single nozzle inkjet with Tefzel single nozzle material and then printed at 120C for the first time in the inkjet history with piezo electric transducers. Robert Howard had researched inkjet printing and hired a number of top people from the Danbury Systems Division's printer business to start Howtek, Inc. When I arrived to RH Research (Howtek's first company name in 1984) the maintenance guy, Dana Merrill was heating and forming glass nozzles and my job was to make them work. Within a few months, in early 1984 the glass nozzle jets were printing with a water based ink from 1-10K Hertz with very little variation in drop volume and velocity. The Zoltan Inkjet was given a new life at Howtek and printing 3D Hot-Melt Thermoplastic inks was born. This clean Hot-Melt material was cleverly developed to contain no ash residue when dissolved or burned because inkjets will clog with particles. This key feature of Thermoplastic inks led to the idea of "investment casting" for making parts from models printed in Layers upon layers to form Three dimensional objects. The Vice President of Howtek, Al Hock proposed this idea of using the technology for investment casting sometime in the 1980's seeing the print of a memo that printed over itself many times (1/8 inch tall letters) and named "Alphabet soup characters' by some key people at Howtek.

[Inkjetfacts]

Google these things:
Who invented Layered inkjet printing?
Who invented inkjet Subtractive color printing?
Who invented true color printing?
Who invented inkjet CMYK inks?
Google references laser printers that only printed in black and white.
Google never heard of Inkjet subtractive printing
Google has never heard of anyone inventing CMYK inkjet inks
Google has no idea who invented inkjet color printing
Few people have ever heard of RH research, Robert Howard Research or Howtek, Inc, Hudson, NH

[Inkjetfacts]

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