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Montana has become the first state to prove 3D printing as an alternative to traditional concrete block structures. This is a big step because even though 3D-printed houses have been around for a while, they've kind of been looked upon with a certain amount of reticence because people don't really know what they're able to do. That makes sense because 3D-printed houses have only been around for a few years. They haven't really been able to be time tested the same way really old building methods have been like bricks and wood, which have been around for hundreds of years so we know how they last and how they hold up as a structure. This new regulatory approval from Montana now proves out 3D printing is a legitimate alternative to traditional manufacturing. The machine that has been approved and the process that has been approved was created by Apis Cor you may have heard of them they're the ones who have created the largest 3D printed building in the world over in Dubai. The gentleman who actually pushed for this approval up in Montana wanted to use Apis Cor to produce a small development inside of Billions, Montana his name is Tim Stark. He is hoping that the new process will reduce the cost to build houses by about 30 percent both from the reduction of labor and the simplification of the processes and the material. He also hopes that it will reduce the time to produce new developments quite substantially as well which has been really important in the current kind of housing crisis that has existed. This is a big step for them regulatorily but it also proves that their materials and their processes have finally reached a point where they can be considered reliable. 3D-printed houses have always had the same sort of material challenges as other types of 3D printing. They are not able to run standard concrete through their nozzles as they're laying down these layers for a wall. The companies that have created these machines have had to create custom machinery and custom cement mix that are stable enough dry quickly enough and flow well enough to be able to be put down in layers and not have the whole thing melt as it's going up, which traditional concrete would do. This is a great step forward it has proven out the technology and it has proven out that these are now ready to kind of be deployed. It'll still be a long time before 3D printed houses are really really commonplace but it is a good step. Let us know down in the comments about other things that you'd like to hear about and let us know about what you would use a 3D printed house for! Have a great day everybody! Happy Printing!
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Here at Slant 3D, we end up producing a lot of products with PLA. We have gotten very familiar with the pros and cons of that material. We want to showcase things to be aware within the production of what can be done and what can't be done what increases cost and what decreases the cost. PLA is one of the most common materials that we actually work with at Slant 3D. The reason for that is that many of our clients are already prototyping their products with their own 3D printers. This normally means they're very often led towards PLA because it's a very simple material to work with at home or prototyping machines. However, PLA has a few advantages and disadvantages, especially when moving it into production that we're going to try to discuss here as much as possible. First of all, PLA is bioplastic. There are several different grades of it it goes from a number called 4043 which is very brittle and is generally the low-cost option of PLA up to a number called 870 which is a very durable kind of less brittle more reliable almost abs replacement type plastic but it is more expensive so it is less scalable. This generally means PLA is used because of how brittle it is to be cost-effective. It's used for promotional products certain types of toys, good quality surface finish consumer products, that kind of thing, but it is almost never used for engineering products or high-reliability products. It's kind of a not tchotchke material but a consumer product brick block kind of material. that being said depending on the design it can be turned into anything, PLA does have a reasonable amount of flexibility so you can use designs like grip fins and that kind of thing within it that have just a little bit of flex to allow something to fit. The tolerances of PLA since it's FDM there is generally fairly low pro tolerances of about 0.2 millimeters. That is the general tolerance to play with any sort of 3D printed part but if you were able to design in a wider tolerance that decreases the cost of parts long term because QC standards are lower and it's easier to produce lots of parts without having to check and have secondary processes to inspect them. PLA has the largest color variation of almost any material the only other alternative might be like Pet-G and ABS but in PLA we were able to do custom Pantone matches for almost any color that you can imagine though those take a couple of extra weeks for creation. PLA also is able to offer a fairly quick turnaround because it does not have as much setup cost it is quicker to start up it's quicker to set up. it's also very good for print on demand because it can produce one part out of the blue very reliable because it's a very stable material. PLA is the lowest cost material in our catalog depending on the design but it lends itself to being highly automated with auto ejection and it is just a low-cost source of material that may be changing in the future so check back with future updates to see if other materials have become less expensive but in general that's a good rule of thumb. Another thing to watch out for with PLA is its strength lower inner layer adhesion is not amazing compared to other materials it is more brittle so you do not want vertical surfaces that have layer lines going through them pointing straight up in the air because they will snap off with a reasonably small amount of force so those either need to be very reinforced or just try to avoid them if possible. the closer you can get to a sphere or a block is something that you want to do PLA into scale generally kind of bottoms out fairly high certain other materials like pet g is actually cheaper at mass production if the part is right because the cost of raw materials is less even though PLA is easier to work with so there's a trade-off there depending on the design of the part Itself. PLA has a very good surface finish, in general, it's very consistent because it flows smoothly and does not require any sort of complexity and setup or settings and it's also the most robust for adjusting to different types of geometries just again because it's a very robust material inside of the 3D printing process PLA a fairly good general option for products with some sort of aesthetic leading component lamps, consumer products, household items, and certain types of toys PLA is not able to stand up to the outdoors it melts inside of a hot car it will literally deform and soften so it is not something for functional parts inside of a hot car in Arizona but it can be used within a house within a controlled environment Hopefully that covers kind of the pitfalls in the general outline of PLA and where it can be used if you have any other questions comment down below and we'll try to create a video to cover some more of that stuff and let us know if there's anything else that you'd like us to talk about having a great day, everybody. Bring the Rain with this durable and team-oriented squirt gun that makes water sports an actual battle. Squirt guns have always lacked the team-based nature that make paintball and air-soft so much fun. Thus the idea of Splash Blaster was born. When having a water gun fight, it's always hard to have a team battle and be able to tell which team did the most damage. Splash Blasters eliminate this problem with Red/Blue Team Colors for your guns and ammo! With push action technology and an easy-to-grip knob, all ages can get in on the fun. Rugged and Simple, Splash Blasters are ready to let any age "Bring the Rain"  Made For Team Play Traditional squirt guns are just made for free-for-alls, but what's the fun in rolling solo? That's why we created a squirt gun that is made for team play. Splash Blasters come in Red & Blue Team Colors so you can always tell the difference between friend and foe. But we didn't just stop there, Splash Blasters also come with red and blue dye packets that you can add to your teams water supply. Wear all white and paint the other competitors with your color! This dye is washable and non-toxic, designed to color swimming pools and water features. But please don't spray the walls of a white house. Go to the park or something.  Multiple Firing Options A good battle strategy always come with leaving your opponents guessing. Splash Blasters give you multiple firing options so you can be effective from any range. Storm the frontlines and engage in close-quarter combat with burst fire. Or sit back and snipe your enemies from up to 30 feet with one long stream. Coordinate a battle plan with your team to deal damage from all distances! Transparent Tank We got tired of shaking squirt guns to know how much ammo was left. So we wanted to make sure Splash Blasters actually showed how much was left in a wildly clear way. The barrel of the Splash Blaster is not only 360 transparent but also has milliliter markings to show how much longer until you need to reload.  Quick Reload
In a pinch? Sometimes there just isn't enough time to pull water through the nozzle. With Splash Blasters, you can just remove the plunger, scoop your ammo, and get back in the fight! Join The Battle Splash Blasters bring a team-based aspect that other squirt guns can't compete with. Say goodbye to the days of free-for-all battles that leave you wondering who reigned supreme. So, are you ready to take your water gun fights to the next level? Choose Your Side and Leave Your Mark, only with Splash Blasters. There are a couple of reasons metal 3D printing hasn't caught on. The way it was hyped a few years back and we're going to talk about that a little bit. Metal 3D printing has gained a lot of hype. So much hype that I cannot go into a meeting where we talk about FMD 3D printing, mass production, and 3D printer farms without somebody asking “Are you ever going to do metal?” and the answer is at this moment no. We really don't anticipate doing metal but there's a reason for this. Metal 3D printing still has a very large technological hurdle and the problem is it is not necessarily an engineering technological hurdle. It's almost a scientific-technological hurdle. The difference between those is an engineering hurdle you can see and you can say okay if we work at that here's kind of a solution we'll figure it out there's a pathway to it. a scientific-technological hurdle is we have got to figure out how to do fusion. There's some fundamental piece of science that isn't figured out or so complex that it doesn't really work. With metal printing whether of all the processes that exist ultimately what they always come down to is you have metal powder suspended in a resin a binder you then print out the part which is then a green part which is just a glued together metal powder you then take that glued together metal powder and you either D bind it you get rid of the resin out of it and then it holds its shape and then you put that into a centering oven. The centering oven melts all the particles of metal together. You eventually end up with what is essentially a cast metal part that could either be machined down a little bit more or something along those lines. Here is the problem the first part of the process the binder jetting or the bound powder that's fine that works great that's very well proven in fact we print parts like that very often the D binding is also not a problem the binding and removing that binding material is very easy heck you can put it into the center and just have it burn off. The problem is in the centering of it. Here is the thing in order to center apart reliably you have to know every single detail about that part and that part needs to be exposed in an oven to the perfect amount of heat but not too much. If you have something like a dumbbell or a kettlebell that you see at the gym it has a handle on top of the ball of metal on the bottom if you are making a part like that in a centering oven you run into a problem of the inconsistency in the geometry itself to where the handle is going to heat up and bind much more quickly than the big old mass of metal down at the bottom. You have to design for the centering process so that the whole thing can be baked at a regular level. Another analogy to this is cooking cookies if you have a bunch of small cookies they will all bake in 15 minutes but then if some kid comes along and puts a little dollop of dough on your dish now you have to bake it for a half hour to get all the stuff cooked and bound together. the baking of metal parts is causing a lot of problems because the rules change with each new part. If you're doing watch faces you can load up a thousand watch faces and figure out what is the formula and the recipe for baking those watch faces a thousand at a time inside of that oven but then if you take it down to 500 well the rules of making then change or if you change to a different watch face or a different type of part then the rules of cooking change again and this is the problem that metal 3d printing has had. The science of what is the correct way to bake something comes down to art like a lot of 3D printing. The guys eyeball it and they're like ah it's not quite done cooking yet we got to cook that for a little bit longer. There's not enough intelligence or enough science available to really quantify every possible variation that 3D printing can create and what has happened is that for companies that are pursuing mass production of 3D printed parts they work fine and they can do it but the problem is they are not very flexible because they're able to do a thousand watch faces but you can only run a thousand watch faces at a time. That's how the line is set up you print them over here you do bind them and then you bake them and that oven is set up for a thousand watch faces at a time and nothing else. If you ever change what you're making the change might be a bit easier than doing a new cast of new bowls and that kind of thing. It is a big change because you have to recreate a new recipe for the new part and this is what's slowing down metal 3D printing adoption. The current process of metal 3D printing works fine at a smaller scale for shops and even hobbyists. It's not that big of a deal because again you can eyeball. It's part of the gig machine in itself and sometimes has some creative and artistic flair to it. It's not necessarily a hard science, but for a process to reach mass production, it has to be hard science. If it wants to hit the goal of 3D printing which is high flexibility then it really has to know the science. Metal just isn't there yet and it's a fundamental problem that the industry has to solve before it's really scalable and to replace molding or casting at a large scale. because it has no more flexibility. The 3D printed metal machines for mass production are essentially large metal injection molding machines so unless you're making a part with a unique geometry that requires printing to create that geometry there are very few benefits to it over regular casting. We keep an eye on it and we're really excited about what everybody is doing with metal but it is just still too early and it has this fundamental problem of how to cook a part and do it flexibly and reliably that just hasn't been flushed out yet. That's kind of the problem with metal 3D printing. Comment down below if there are other components of 3D printing or other parts of the industry that you want to talk about and we'll try to get them answered. Happy Printing! This is a Yuri Gagarin bust. This model was downloaded from Thingiverse, I believe. You will notice that he is supported in certain areas. He has a lot of detail right there but overall the model should be fairly easy. But if you look at the back right here, there is error, there is a separation between the model and his helmet or between the neck and his helmet. Now normally if you were looking at that you would say “oh the printer jammed for a moment because a spool hung or something like that and it lost connection” that would be true, except the other half looks like this. That is a perfect print right there. The thing that actually happened right here when you see a perfect print and then a messed up component of it somewhere, This is actually a fault in the 3D model itself. The mesh of the STL was messed up in some kind of way, had some giant hole in it in how the head and the body were pressed together so the head just printed separately it was a separate part from the actual body itself. You can tell that because this is a perfect print and that's all nasty. If that's the issue you need to look at your STL clean it up close any holes and some general cleaning on the file. Hope this helped and let us know if you have any questions related to 3D printer problems. Happy 3D printing! Here at Slant 3D, we have a lot of people come to us with outdoor parts so we're going to talk about the solutions of making those pieces around UV resistance. Not a lot of people know this but most plastics degrade when exposed to sunlight UV radiation, which is what gives you the sunburn, can cause plastics to fade and degrade and then brittle over time. If you have an application that you want to mount on the side of a telephone pole for five or ten years generally isn't the best thing. Here's the thing, most plastics are actually quite resistant to UV aside from discoloration. ABS and Pet-g are materials that are resistant. They're not fully resistant but they're pretty resistant to UV. That's why you see plastic bottles alongside the road forever but materials like PLA and other sorts of bioplastics like that are not UV resistant. They will fade very quickly but they will hold up outdoors. People overrate the amount of degradation that can occur with plastics. They are all plastics and they all have a half-life of a thousand years so you can place them outdoors and they will last a very long time. It kind of depends on what type of outdoors but it's okay. As far as UV resistance the materials that are UV rated are materials like ASA, TPU, and some nylons though they're also not great because they do fade very quickly, again ABS is also a very good one. Here's the thing, all those materials are fine and they work great but in mass production, they're not very good materials. ASA is a highly temperamental material to work with so it's very expensive to mass-produce parts with that. FDM is kind of in a similar vein even though it's a cheaper cost of material and then the other ones like nylon are much more affordable than ABS or ASA to produce with but again you have that fading that comes with it. There is PET-G which is very often used for outdoor applications because it has that durability but there is another solution to this that many people overlook. The features of the raw material are not necessarily what has to be done used to get a UV-resistant part. In the dashboard of your car, many of the parts within your car are not UV resistant and yet for some reason, they hold their color and last for the 20 years of a lifetime of a car. The reason for that is that auto manufacturing actually uses UV-resistant coatings which are transparent. They protect the underlying material from UV radiation and this is literally a rattle-can run across the part. Generally, if we have a client that is seeking high UV resistance we will try to get them into those UV-resistant materials potentially but depending on the cost and parameters of the project it can be much easier to just print the part in PET-G or PLA even and just coat it with a UV resistant coat and that will give it the resistance that it needs to survive the sunlight. That's the solution for kind of doing mass production with UV you have a lot of materials that are UV resistant and most plastic is able to hold up to the sun for quite a few years but if you want that really high engineering grade UV resistance there are particular materials that have that but then you can also just paint it with a UV resistant coat. Let me know what you think down in the comments and let us know of any other topics that you would like to hear about how to manufacture particular types of products with 3D printer farms. Have a great day everybody! At Slant 3D, since the pandemic started, we have been working with manufacturers and product sellers to bridge their production needs. If they had something overseas they would make something with us and then we'd produce it on through for them as either a temporary measure that eventually turned into a longer-term relationship but we wanted to expand on that. Right now there is still difficulty getting parts especially difficult to do spare parts. There are websites and shops and stores where an item just cannot be obtained anymore. In our own area, we have a particular type of hex screwdriver that we can't get a hold of anymore so we've had to recreate it. We want to make this service more widely available and while we're building out the software to access that we wanted to kind of put this public announcement out there. If you have a need for a part a spare part whatever it happens to be a cap for a chair that you can't get anymore, a knob for a car that you can't get anymore please send us that list of parts that you need. If you have a website you can send us a list of the thousands of items that are out of stock. If you have just a store so this listed a few things that you would like to get a hold of and just send them directly to us. We will flip the bill for the creation of the design and the verification of the product and we will start up a wholesale relationship with you to where you can purchase those items from us in basically, the same way you did before except now they are 3D printed. You can actually have access to them from now until eternity because the stock levels will never run out because they're made on demand. Reach out to us if you are having trouble getting particular spare parts where you have items that are plastic that has been out of stock on your website for a while. We do everything from bioplastics to ul certified fireproof to aluminum replacement parts from carbon fiber nylon to rubbers and everything else in between. Please reach out to us with any of your spare parts needs. Hopefully, soon we'll be able to announce some things that will make that process even more accessible. Have a great day everybody! We just got the news that Hasbro has teamed up with Formlabs to do 3D printed action figureheads so this is huge news. Hasbro is a very significant company and Formlabs is a big company in the 3D printing space. For Formlabs to work on this level of consumer-grade product is a big step both as a demonstration of 3d printing at scale hopefully but also of it to be affordable and accessible to the average person.  Formlabs has done customizable items before they have worked with Gillette in the past to do things like razors. Unfortunately, they have never really hit low general level consumers and the razors were very much kind of a promotional item. Sure these action figures are going to be promotional items too but they get closer to just general products being 3D printed, which is not something that the industry has really hit yet. Now we don't have a lot of information about how it's going to go. They're going to start out with four key characters and you'll be able to use the Hasbro app to scan your face presumably. It's gonna work probably on IOS because the iPhone has an actual scanner built into it and they'll have some sort of implementation from there. It will be interesting to see how detailed the actual models come out and if Hasbro keeps it up. We know that the action figures are going to cost about $60 when they come out this fall. From there we'll see if Hasbro continues on and expands the category and therefore helps Formlabs continue to decrease the cost or if it'll be like a lot of these customization products that has kind of been gimmicky and then never gone from there.
Customization within 3D printing even though 3D printing itself is very flexible has always been very difficult because customization still requires very constant constraints to make sure that the things that are being customized are still manufacturable. It's easy to stick a name on the side of something or a serial number or barcode but to completely change the shape of something to absorb a different type of geometry has always been tough. These action figures are an interesting case because they have kind of a datum feature where the head interfaces with the model which is the same across all of them and then they just change the facial features and the hair to look like the person that's doing it. It's also going to be kind of interesting to see how they're painting and coloring these since form labs isn't able to handle color. None of the less, it's a big thing for the industry it's a big demonstration of how 3D printing is able to help with mass production of customizable items and we wish him the best of luck hopefully it turns out great. Lately with COVID and all the supply challenges that have come from that. Manufacturers have been looking for new ways to figure out how to manufacture the parts that they need, especially smaller batch manufacturers that may have a custom PCB that needs a box. Historically, this has always been done with molds and you would go through you would design the mold, you would probably send that design off to some place overseas where they would cut a mold of it, they would then send you some sample parts, and then you would say okay we need 1000 or 10 000 parts. They'd send those to you and then if you ever wanted to reorder you would either modify that mold for the updated design or you would just use the exact same mold and have them make more parts so order a thousand at a time but then you have tooling and setup charges every time. This is a really cumbersome way to do it and actually limits what you're able to do. Molds are not able to work with highly abrasive materials which are often ESD safe materials or solid materials like carbon fiber-reinforced parts. Molds are molds you have to pay for, the cost of the mold even though the PCB itself that you're putting inside one of these boxes is changing very quickly. Molds are a very rigid way of doing it and right now, they're just a very unreliable way to do it because it might get stuck on a boat in a harbor someplace. There are other ways to get it done. 3D printing is at a point where it can mass-produce tens of thousands of parts as cost-effectively as injection molding quite easily. But there are some things to be concerned about and to be aware of. Number one you do need to design for the process. 3D printing is a different process for molds. It has no inferiority if you're designing for that process. But if you have an injection molded design that you then try to 3D print you will probably run into challenges there. There are a few basic things to know about 3d printing number one fill it all the edges make the part as rounded as you can possibly get to something like this. Number two, take advantage of some of the advantages of 3D printing. You can have really thick walls, you can have chunks like this that you could not mold otherwise because that would be too much material would cause shrinkage. You can create complex mechanisms if you need a box or enclosure that has a latch on top you can do that and this is all printed as a single piece. Here at Slant 3D, we offer design services that can help you create these types of mechanisms where you can open it up latch it closed and now it's set forever. Those types of things are not possible with molds but it allows you to do even more than that because there is a wide range of materials. You do not have to commit to it your box no longer has to be a generic box that your PCB inside has to conform to. You can have the box change with the PCB. If you shave off half of it you can take the box down to half the size and save the cost on the next thousand pieces that you make. With 3D printing, as far as material options are concerned you can do ESD safe you can do ul 94 rated fireproof parts you can do carbon fiber nylon that is exceptionally durable and useful. If you're even doing something where you might need some sort of bounce resistance or drop resistance, you can print parts out of hydrometer that is difficult to mold with or expensive to mold with and gives you a level of security and durability in your enclosure that you couldn't get otherwise. Printing has a lot of advantages over molding, and then aesthetically if you're designing a final product that houses your chip if you have something that plugs into a wall but needs to be displayed or something along those lines 3D printing allows the options for textures and all kinds of different patterns and embedded designs that again you could not do with molds. This part, this simple bump on the outside would prohibit this or this little ladder part right here would prohibit this part from ever being molded because there's no way to eject it from the mold. Also, it's a perfect square and you can't make a perfect square with molds. You have to have a draft angle on it all the way through, which really limits what you're able to design. If you're making a consumer product and housing to enclose a PCB for a consumer product, you have many more options with 3d printing as far as textures patterns and designs. 3D printing is able to hit the scale that you need it is able to create design components that you need so that you can create custom enclosures of various sizes that are able to be competitive with injection molding and get here quicker because of a print farm can be closer to you. Slant 3D has costs because you do not have to hold those 10 000 pieces for a year and a half or two years as you make all the product to move out the door or the hundred thousand pieces pick your number you instead can order them on demand saying we need a thousand pieces a month for the foreseeable future and just order those as they come. This completely simplifies your supply chain, reduces the cost of the parts, and eliminates the amount of cash stored in a warehouse from parts just sitting there waiting to be used so it streamlines the supply chain in ways that were never possible before. That's kind of a summary of it as far as the parts that you can make. This is a really good example of a good spread of pieces. We can obviously do different colors but it doesn't really come up very often because most people doing custom enclosures like black usb safe fireproof whatever it happens to be but you can have parts in various size ranges. You can of course have standoffs that you would normally have in any sort of enclosure. You can get more and more creative with it to where you either have special designs and rounded components or get into the really exceptionally detailed designs where you need all kinds of features for either functional or aesthetic needs. That's kind of a summary of what can be done with 3D printing. As far as the scale of what it can hit obviously everybody's used to prototyping parts with 3D printing. But what is the maximum number? It depends on the design. It really does but very often these parts are made for a couple of dollars when they're in mass production with 3D printing. A few dollars for a 3D printed part might be a few cents more than the injection molded part. It gives you all of that supply chain flexibility. They show up on time and they give you the flexibility long term to where you don't have to buy a new mold every time you change the design of the chip inside of it which should be able to change as often as it needs to keep up with technology. 3D printing is a really good way to make custom enclosures in a way that was never possible before it simplifies your supply chain. It's more reliable it gives you more material choices and since you're not buying molds anymore. It very easily and very quickly becomes more affordable than traditional molding because you get that flexibility. You eliminate the warehousing cost and you eliminate the mold cost comment down below. If there are other topics in mass production 3D printing that you want to talk about or let us know about the types of products or designs that are interesting to you Thank you and happy printing! 3D printing really makes manufacturing enormously more environmentally friendly. There are a few reasons why. The number one advantage of 3d printing over different processes is it does not have to overproduce. if you look at typical consumer products today as a toy for a particular movie coming out at the Christmas time, manufacturers will produce generally about 15 to 25 percent more than anyone will ever buy. This means that 15 to 25 will basically be landfilled at the end of the holiday season, which is a huge amount of waste but this isn't necessary. Historically, this has been necessary because when injection molding, you get one run you get to make all of the parts, and then you're basically done for that year. You get all of your inventory made in like Q1 or Q2 and then you store that until the Christmas season when you sell as much of it as you possibly can. The biggest sin is to stop selling and be short of a product because then you missed out on that one-year opportunity. With this, you then have to wait until the next year for it to come around again. The issue here is that you have all of this waste because you have to overproduce because if the cost to produce a figurine is 50 cents, the loss of landfilling or scrapping or shredding all of those toys is less than if you were to be than the loss you would have if you didn't have those toys available to sell to somebody else. The potential gain is greater than the potential or almost definite loss of these consumer goods each year, 3D printing doesn't need that. With large-scale 3d printing farms, you're able to produce thousands of parts on-demand as needed. There's no longer a reason to produce tens of thousands or millions of a component at the beginning of the year, store them for a year, and then sell as many of them. You can simply make them as you sell them and it becomes less of a one-year exercise of getting your inventory and more of a month-to-month or even week-to-week exercise of getting your inventory. Right there with that fundamental supply advantage, the ability of 3D printing to produce on-demand at scale, you eliminate 15 to 25 percent of manufacturing waste, especially in consumer goods, toys, and that kind of thing. The other input is that 3D printing is just the most efficient process imaginable. If you think about the raw inputs of manufacturing with the molding you have the mold and then you have electricity heat and plastic to make the part. It's pretty set there after you have the mold but you've got to make that mold. If you're machining, you have a block of something and then you pick away at it until you have the shape of the thing you want to carve away at it which means that you waste or have to recycle or post-process all of those shavings all the stuff that you took away. It's very efficient in that regard because you have to double process the material. With 3D printing, you have electricity and you have the plastic and that's it the final part comes out. Now admittedly 3D printing isn't perfect. All the time, there are support materials and other kinds of components to it that can require post-processing. But a well-designed part can come off a machine fully complete and ready to go with zero waste. Again since it's only coming in response to the demand for that item, there's never any wasted inventory. Just from that straightforward kind of high-level view, 3d printing is more efficient than traditional manufacturing methods by anywhere from 25 to as much as 50 percent. You only make what you need when you need it so there's basically zero waste and there are no extraneous processes that need extra touches and extra energy to produce and maintain. Those are kind of the main reasons that 3D printing is just phenomenally more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than other types of manufacturing processes. Have a great day everybody! |
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