How High Volume 3D Printing Works?
At Slant 3D we operate factories that contain hundreds of automated 3D Printers. These fleets of machines work continuously without human intervention to produce parts on-demand or in large quantities.
With such scale these 3D Printer farms are able to produce 10,000's of parts per week from a wide variety of materials at costs comparable to or better than injection molding. This makes 3D Printing a mass production option for your product.
With such scale these 3D Printer farms are able to produce 10,000's of parts per week from a wide variety of materials at costs comparable to or better than injection molding. This makes 3D Printing a mass production option for your product.
Key Benefits
|
High Volume, but No Tooling Costs
Injection molding makes the manufacture of a new product very expensive. Molds can easily run into the 10,000's of dollars, and there is never a guarantee of sales at the end. Since 3D Printing is a digital process there is no tooling cost. There is only the cost per part. And with the scale achieved by our 3D Printing farms the cost per part can be comparable to injection molding. |
A Section of Print Farm Beta
|
|
Flexible Production Rates
3D Printing has no minimum volumes, and no real maximum. You can manufacture 100 or 100,000 pieces. This allows new products to develop and grow with any demand. Reducing exposure and up front costs to new products. With production 3D Printing no part needs to be produced until it is needed. This reduces warehousing cost because large amounts of inventory are no longer necessary. |
|
Design Flexibility
Without molds the design of a product is no longer set in stone. Anytime during production the design of the part can be updated. Companies can now iterate on a product based on consumer feedback and ensure that they are addressing the market. This has never been possible with traditional manufacturing |
|
|
Materials and Colors
Since injection molding is done with a few large monolithic machines there are limitations on the materials you can manufacture with at a single company. And variations in colors can increase the minimum-volumes necessary to be affordable. Since 3D Printing farms a distributed means of manufacturing these limitations do not exist. At Print Farm Beta there are entire nodes of machines committed to ESD safe material, or Carbon Fiber. And since changeover is not as difficult as with molding, a production run of a few hundred pieces can be split into other colors without significantly impacting cost. |