Hi Rachel,
to create models, that have a metal look, you can go with SLS printers, which sinter metal powder with a laser.
This technique can use all sorts of metals, with incredible details, but the prints are very expensive. With average prices of 10-20$ per cm³ printed, you will pay hundreds of dollars for your letters.
Resins can’t contain any composite to look like metal, you could only paint them.
Lastly (and this is, where I come in) there are FFF/FDM machines, which are the standard 3d printers.
These usually use colored plastic strings to melt in a nozzle and extrude your model.
The quality is decent, but more importantly the price per cm³ is very cheap.
As I said the plastic strings (called “filament”) are usually just normal plastic, but there are brands like Colorfabb or Proto Pasta, that produce filament out of common plastics blended with metal powder.
The available metal-plastic composites are:
bronze
copper
brass
stainless steel
iron (magnetic)
All of those (especially the first 3) are made to be polished, to look like metal.
I do offer bronze, copper and brass. I’ve printed, sanded, polished and finished several prints in all those three materials, and it would be no problem, to print those letters for you.
If needed I could also design the letters for you.
One of the first prints in brass was the 3dHubs mascot Marvin. Pictures of the print can be seen below.
If you want to get in contact with me to get your own brass print made, you can contact me via my hub at:
www.3dhubs.com/siegen/hubs/marius
Just start an enquiry (“contact this hub”), to discuss further details.
Colorfabb (the producer of bronze, copper and brass) is setteled in europe and due to incredibly high shipment cost, there are only a few hubs in america, that offer those metal composites, especially because the brass composite is their newest invention and not that popular so far.
Although I don’t live in America, it wouldn’t be a problem to print the models for you (upon request sanding, polishing etc. can be done). The shipment cost is fairly low, from my experience it’s 15$, but for larger orders it’s free!
Kind regards,
Marius Breuer
PS: the brass print looks greenish due to a special polish, that I used. Your polish can be customly changed. Sharp edges and cavities aren’t polishable, that’s why you see some unpolished material at the edge of Marvins face and in his eyes.
The metal composites can be sanded to get a flawless smooth surface, in the case of Marvin, I selected 0,15mm layer resolution, theoretically I could go up to 0,05mm, but usually this isn’t necessary due to the ease of sanding.
