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Copper Filamet™ Profile Added to the Cura Marketplace

A printer profile for our Copper Filamet™ was recently approved to appear in the Cura Marketplace, which makes it available to millions of users of Ultimaker 3D printers worldwide. This material is the first of its kind to be published in this well-respected directory.

Cura is the world’s most popular 3D printing software. It converts part drawings into formats that enable them to be printed on Ultimaker’s popular 3D printers. Print profiles are supplied by material manufacturers and specify a range of slicing parameters. This data ensures that parts can be produced accurately and reliably from their materials on Ultimaker printers.

The majority of print profiles in the Marketplace are for plastic resins. But a few are a blend of plastic and metal, designed to be printed and then polished to a metallic finish. The Virtual Foundry’s Copper Filamet™ is the first plastic-infused metal filament that’s designed to be printed and then processed into pure metal parts via sintering

Normally, material suppliers use proprietary software to define, tweak and test these print parameters on their own. They test their settings against a series of sample models with complex geometries for FFF 3D printing. When a profile is sufficiently tested and validated by the supplier, it is submitted to the Cura Marketplace.

But our unique material required additional scrutiny, according to the founder of The Virtual Foundry, Bradley Woods.

“Ultimaker put our copper filament through extensive real-world testing in their labs before publishing it in their Marketplace,” he explains. “Because it must be sintered, they wanted to ensure that our settings would result in a reliable 3D printing process for their users.”

After six to eight weeks of testing, Ultimaker did approve our copper filament to appear in the Cura Marketplace. Next, we will submit three other metal-infused filaments for review: Stainless Steel 316L Filamet™, Rapid 3DShield Tungsten Filament, and Aluminum 6061 Filamet™.

“Having our print profiles listed in this directory enables many product designers to create high-performance metal parts using Ultimaker printers, at a fraction of the cost of traditional metal additive manufacturing technologies,” Woods adds.

To learn more about The Virtual Foundry’s revolutionary metal filaments, contact us today.

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