Currently, the commercial 3D printing landscape is dominated by contraptions that create everything from toys to watchbands out of plastic. But there’s another manufacturing revolution in the making: metal 3D printing. Big companies like Rolls-Royce and GE are already working on using 3D printing to make metal parts for jet engines, but their machines have a startup cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars – not exactly within reach for the garage hobbyist. Now, engineers from Michigan Technological University in Houghton have rigged up their version of a 3D metal printer that can be made with less than $1,500 of...