3D printing is often considered a second-rate manufacturing process. Something that is alright for rough prototypes but never for final products. But this idea often comes from experiences with low-grade desktop machines operated by amateurs. Professional 3D printing machines, and operators have thousands of hours of skill and validation built up to make sure that the results are consistent and high quality. Assumptions from what was observed in a garage of a friend are generally wrong when it comes to production 3D printing.

But even if they weren't, the flexibility of the process allows designers to create more freely than ever before. And the mild downsides in quality can be overcome quite readily. A prime example of this are the beautiful 3D printed table lamps created by Gantri. 

Gantri is a San Francisco-based startup that is determined to bring 3D printed products into the home. And they are doing it by created phenomenally beautiful and unique lamps that are 3D printed except for the electrical components. By using 3D printing as the manufacturing method Gantri is able to to pursue the "long tail" products, which would be to expensive to produce with traditional methods for the volumes that can be sold. 3D printing lets them be ultra-niche.

But the design of the products is a beautiful example of how 3D printing does not create a "low quality" product. Especially if the product is designed specifically for additive manufacturing.

When a part is printed Gantri employees run the parts through a finishing process. And then perform final assembly. This makes sure that the parts are sleek and beautiful. Ensuring they have built product that people love.

3D printing is not some inferior manufacturing method that should be reserved for rough-outs. It is an affordable, and scalable means of manufacturing final products without the huge startup and long term costs of traditional manufacturing.

​See More Beautiful 3D Printed Lamp at the Gantri Webstore.

Interested in having your product manufactured with 3D printing. Get a 3D printing quote today from Slant 3D.

Toys are a product that is is constantly changing. But the cost of the molding and traditional setups often make manufacturing toys prohibitively expensive for the lone garage inventor. Therefore most toy inventors attempt to license their ideas, but few ever succeed.

High Volume Production 3D printing offers an alternative to traditional toy manufacturing. It makes manufacturing and selling a toy as easy as making a website to sell it on. You just upload the files and then the printing factory can produce 10 or 10,000 as your sales grow. And, if you utilize the fulfillment capabilities of your 3D printing service then you never even have to pack and ship product. Slant 3D offers all of these resources. You basically just have to create a webstore, upload the 3D printing file, and watch the sales occur as all the manufacturing and fulfillment is handled by Slant 3D.

There are very few limits on geometry when 3D printing a plastic part. This makes it possible to create very complex shapes as one single part. Which ultimately means that a toy is cheaper to assemble in production, and safer for the end user since fewer pieces, such as screws, are available to choke on.

A great example of using 3D printing to create parts that are simpler to manufacture and safer for children, are the LittleBots. Littlebots are a series of STEM robotics kits. But one of the things that makes them special is that they have very few fasteners. The LittleBots team was able to design each 3D printed piece to snap and join with others without requiring complex assembly. This has made the kits faster and easier to assemble in the classroom, but safer should younger children work with them.

Few new products ever sell a million in their first year, or even in their lifetime. But molding requires that you order thousands of units at a time. This is a very expensive option for a designer that is just launching a new product and is not sure of the demand.

Fortunately 3D printing has no minimum, and is able to scale with demand. An inventor can have a printing service produce just 10 units of an item then, when those are sold, he can grow to 100, then 1000, then 10,000. All without ever having to put down more cash than the individual cost of each item. No tooling, no inventory. Just on-demand manufacturing at any scale. But when your product is on track to sell millions then you can transfer to injection molding without worrying about the risk of the tooling.

The last advantage of 3D Printing production is there is no cost in changing the design as you grow. If you utilize injection molding then it is tens of thousands of dollars every time you tweak the product. With 3D printing that is not an issue. You can change the design as much as you want with very small fees to update it in production.

The ability of 3D printing to free the toy designer is not often seen. Certainly it can combine assemblies, but those could still have been made with some other process, using more assembly. But 3D printing can create toys that were simply not possible before. Some pieces are just too complex to be made with other processes, period.

Great examples of this are the Gualala Gadget toys. These small complex marble towers could not be produced by any other method than 3D printing. Even if the could be broken into small enough pieces to be molded, the resulting product would be expensive and unattractive. 3D printing allows these beautiful toys to be created with basically zero startup cost.

Since production 3D printing can make any part, at any time, at any scale there is no reason to build up an inventory of a product. But this can can be taken even further. Instead of purchasing 100 units and holding them in your own warehouse, why not simply have them stored and fulfilled at the source.

Slant 3D offers assembly and fulfillment services to clients that do not want to deal with the supply chain. We will print your product, assemble and package it, and implement you into our fulfillment system, This means all you have to do is create the design and create a sellers portal on Ebay, Etsy, Amazon, or your own website. It leaves you free to design more amazing toys.

This is a great resource of a product just starting out and for designers that might not be familiar with the logistics of fulfillment.

High volume production 3D printing makes it possible to just design the 3D model of a file and immediately start production. Compared to traditional manufacturing the cost of setup is practically zero. And a designer can scale supply as needed, without having to order 1000's upfront.

This makes 3D printing essentially a  manufacturing backend. Just as a server farm only delivers an app when it it downloaded, production 3D printing can deliver a toy only when it is purchased.

Toy inventors and companies now have the capability to test and expand on new ideas in a very low cost scalable way.

Interested in having your toy manufactured with 3D printing so that you can spend your time creating more toys and building a business rather than dealing with manufacturing? Get it quoted today!