The rule in electronics has been the same for decades: you make the plastic, then you bolt on the electronics. The circuit board is flat, it comes from somewhere else, and you wait for it. A small veteran-led company in Loogootee, Indiana is trying to break that rule with a spool of filament that fits the printer already on your bench.
The company is Kupros, Inc. The material is called Cu29, an all-metal conductive filament built to run on standard FDM printers. It has been getting fresh coverage this month, and it is worth a careful look, because the claims are big and the ones that hold up matter a lot for anyone building drones, RF hardware, or shielded enclosures.
What Cu29 actually is
Cu29 did not start in a startup garage. According to an interview with founder Ian Ramsdell published by 3DPrint.com, the filament was developed at Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane and handed to his team through the National Security Innovation Networks (NSIN) Foundry Program, a Department of War initiative that moves lab technology out to new companies. Ramsdell is a former U.S. Navy Petty Officer First Class and a disabled veteran.
The point of the material is conductivity you can actually use. Most so-called conductive filaments are plastics loaded with carbon, which is fine for static dissipation and useless for carrying current. Kupros publishes a measured resistivity for Cu29 of 1.226 x 10 to the negative 5 ohm centimeters, and states the material has been tested at 12,500 volts and 5 amps with no sintering, plating, or chemical post-processing required.
Honest context: bulk annealed copper sits around 1.68 x 10 to the negative 6 ohm centimeters, so the published Cu29 figure is roughly seven times the resistivity of solid copper wire. Enormously better than carbon-filled plastic, not the same thing as copper. We also noticed an earlier published interview cited a different, preliminary resistivity figure, so if you are specifying this for real hardware, ask Kupros for the current datasheet rather than quoting a magazine (including this one).
I need a circuit board prototype and the vendor quoted me six months. Is there a faster way?
Yes: for early-stage prototypes you can print conductive traces directly into a part on a desktop FDM printer in a day, iterate the same afternoon, and save the traditional PCB order for the design you have already proven. That is the specific gap Cu29 was built for. Ramsdell told 3DPrint.com that a Department of War prototype PCB currently takes 28 to 36 weeks to produce, and that by the time the boards arrive the design has often already changed. Order a hundred, get ten that behave, redesign, wait again.
The trade is straightforward. You are not replacing a qualified production board. You are replacing the first three or four painful rounds of waiting, so that when you finally do order boards, you are ordering the right ones.
Can I print conductive parts on the desktop printer I already own, or do I need special equipment?
Kupros designed Cu29 specifically to run on inexpensive, standard FDM printers rather than on dedicated printed-electronics machines that can cost several hundred thousand dollars or more. Ramsdell said the company deliberately validated the material on the cheapest FDM machines it could find, on the theory that anything running on a budget printer would run fine on an industrial one. He noted that a customer later validated the material on an nScrypt system using an FDM printhead, which supports that logic.
That is the real story, and it is bigger than one spool. The existing additive-electronics machines are excellent and completely out of reach on most program budgets. Putting usable conductivity on hardware people already own changes who gets to try things.
Where this actually matters: drones, RF, and shielding
Kupros states that Cu29 has been evaluated and purchased by organizations including NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, KBR, and U.S. Army DEVCOM for embedded antennas, conformal RF circuits, and structural integration. Those are company statements we have not independently confirmed, but they line up with where the technology obviously fits.
Think about a drone airframe. Today the shell is printed and somebody threads a wiring harness through it by hand. With traces printed into the structure, the harness becomes part of the wall. Ramsdell also described embedding a Faraday cage into a lower drone housing for electronic-warfare protection. Antennas are the other obvious one: a flat antenna on a curved airframe is a compromise, and printing the trace onto the curve removes it.
What it does not replace
The unglamorous part: a printed trace is not a certified PCB, and nobody is claiming it is. Layer adhesion still governs how much abuse the part survives, current-carrying capacity depends on the cross-section you actually print, and repeatability across printers is a real question you should test yourself before designing around it. As a prototyping and low-volume integration tool, though, it is a genuinely useful new option, and the fact that it came out of a Navy lab and a veteran-owned company rather than an overseas supply chain is not nothing right now.
Where we fit
We do not sell Cu29 and have no relationship with Kupros. We handle the structural half of the same problem: the printed part the electronics live inside. If you need a housing, bracket, duct, or shielded shell made properly in the USA, that is what our build and ship service handles, in engineering materials, with a $20 minimum order. And if the part only exists as an object on your bench because the drawings are long gone, 3D scanning and reverse engineering gets it back into CAD.
Working on something where a printed conductive trace would solve a real headache? Tell us about it at info@dcadditivepros.com.
Note for materials and equipment brands: we test and write about additive manufacturing hardware and materials regularly. If you would like your product considered for a hands-on writeup, reach out to info@dcadditivepros.com.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really 3D print a working circuit on a normal desktop printer?
Yes, with a conductive metal filament such as Kupros Cu29 you can print current-carrying traces on a standard FDM printer, though the result is a prototype-grade conductor rather than a certified circuit board.
Is conductive 3D printing filament as good as copper wire?
No, not yet: the manufacturer-published resistivity for Cu29 is roughly seven times that of bulk annealed copper, which is far better than carbon-filled plastic filaments but still short of solid copper conductors.
Why does a printed circuit board take six months to get?
Long PCB lead times come from batch minimums, queue position at the fabricator, and redesign cycles stacking on top of each other, which is why Kupros founder Ian Ramsdell cites 28 to 36 weeks for defense prototype boards.
Who can 3D print a custom drone or enclosure part for me in the USA?
DC Additive Pros prints custom drone, robotics, and enclosure parts in engineering materials in Rockville, Maryland, with a $20 minimum order, and can reverse engineer an existing part if no drawings exist.
DC Additive Pros is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Kupros, Inc., NASA, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, KBR, nScrypt, or the U.S. Department of War. All third-party names are used nominatively to identify the products and organizations discussed. Technical figures cited here are as published by their sources and have not been independently verified by DC Additive Pros. Sources: 3DPrint.com interview with Ian Ramsdell, and kuprosinc.com product documentation, accessed August 8, 2026.