Manufacturing Custom Venting with 3D Printing

Ducting and cooling create very complex plastic components for consumer and industrial products. Historically these parts have had to be roto or injection molded. The problem is that many of these parts are for limited production runs. So the cost of tooling can be very high. This is an area where production 3D Printing can make a very large difference, by completely eliminating the cost of Tooling while manufacturing plastic ducting and venting.

A Project that was recently completed at Slant 3D was several hundred cooling vents for a piece of medical equipment. These vents distribute air to multiple chambers during a testing process. Normally a piece like the one below would have to be broken into multiple pieces and then molded. The process could take up to 12 weeks and would still require assembly. At Slant 3D we were able to take the design, perform some slight modifications for 3D printing and then produce 100 sets within 10-14 days at a fraction of the cost. And since there were no molds the client was able to make modification and return with a new iteration of the design several months later.

3D Printed Ducting System for Medical Testing Equiptment

A Much simpler example is just the covers on Ducting itself. Locally Slant 3D works with a company called Silverdraft Computing, who manufactures high performance machines for VR and rendering operations. 

Silverdraft needed several hundred vent covers for their computers. They wanted to maintain their logo on all hardware so they designed a vent that was custom to them.

Normally such a piece would have cost over 5000 dollars in molding alone, and required several weeks to complete. At Slant 3D we took the 3D model and produced 100 parts in just 2 days so that they could hit their production targets. Production of parts like this now continue, and as Silverdraft grows they are able to take advantage of larger scale pricing. It is likely that parts like this will never be molded.

In the more industrial context ducting is used in factories and large pieces of machinery to move large quantities of air or material.

This large duct made for House of Design on one of their projects was made to move air and actual parts and pieces to a delivery bin. It had to be durable long term. And the part had to be on the shelf in less than a day.

Slant 3D finished the part less than a day after it was ordered and has since produced many of these parts for inventory and new machines.

A large part of this would have cost more than 10,000 dollars to mold, and severl thousand to machine. 3D printing was able to produce the first part for several hundred dollars. And today it can be mass produced by the hundreds for a few dollars.

Production 3D printing is able to produce vents large and small, simple and complex. And it is able to do it faster and cheaper than any other process. Clients get parts fast, at any volume they need, and with any specs they need, all from just a 3D model file.

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