Comment by lrasinen
20 hours ago
They're not great for anything that might produce heat. Seeing a MOSFET slowly starting to imitate the Tower of Pisa after dissipating a measly 1 W for a few moments was a sight to behold.
For about two seconds before I cut the power.
If heat dissipation matters and we're determined to 3D print at home then extruding a clay is probably the way to go. Laser sintering also seems relevant. For anyone concerned about an open fire a small electric oven isn't particularly expensive.
If you really wanted to go the route of printing plastic I guess you could fix the heat dissipation issue by using the plastic print to do lost PLA casting of an iron die with which you could cut a much thicker sheet of copper. But if you're going to melt iron you might as well give in and fire clay.
I once encountered a very old ceramic board related to telecoms. I'm not sure about the why but it consisted of a ceramic tablet with some sort of conductive resin printed onto it. A crude sort of layering was accomplished by printing a small spot of insulator on top of the junction where two traces crossed one another. I'd guess the board I saw dated to the mid 80s or earlier.