What We Do at Slant 3D
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
In this post, we hope to give you a full layout of Slant 3D and what we do.
Our mission is to decrease the cost of manufacturing so a kid in a dorm room can create physical products as easily as they could write software or a book.
3D printing is the obvious solution for this. Unlike any other process, 3D printing uses only the most basic inputs to create an object: the raw material and the energy to change its shape. Injection molding costs thousands of dollars just to get a first part, and machining creates waste. Additive manufacturing will replace most traditional manufacturing.
With that in mind, we are building services that allow anyone to access large-scale 3D printing quickly, easily, and reliably at scale. We are giving you 1,000 3D printers on tap.
3D Printing API for Software Developers and AI
This is the core of our entire service. Any developer in the world can access our API for free to tap into our print farms, allowing them to print and deliver parts directly to their users.
Video games can print physical statues of player avatars.
AI applications can generate spare parts and have them delivered days later.
All of this happens with a single API call to one of the largest 3D printing operations on the planet. And yes, we provide Markdown files and context calls so your AI can one-shot an application using the API.
Case Study: Tooltrace.ai uses the Slant 3D API to print custom shadow boxes on demand.
Teleport: E-commerce 3D Printing Application
Connect your e-commerce store to our giant print farm without the hassle of operating your own 3D printers. When you get an order, we print and ship the item directly to your customer.
Teleport connects to any major e-commerce platform—Shopify, WooCommerce, TikTok Shop, and more. Whatever platform you use, Teleport can link to it so you can start shipping orders tomorrow.
With over 12,000 businesses already using Teleport, it has proven its ability to help companies grow without needing to build an in-house print farm or fulfillment infrastructure.
Portals: A Faster Selling Channel
Portals is a marketplace feature inside of Teleport that lets you begin selling 3D prints in 30 seconds. Just upload a file, set your price, and publish. You can customize your profile to your taste and set your profit margins to whatever level you like.
YouTubers like Luke Edwin have earned thousands of dollars through Portals without having to build an e-commerce website or set up complex back-end systems. Creators can focus on making awesome products while taxes, printing, packing, shipping, returns, and customer support are entirely handled by us.
SlantBox: Refill the Assembly Line
Named after the earlier generation of 3D printers used in our print farm, the SlantBox is an inventory Kanban box that essentially gives you 1,000 3D printers in a box.
How it works:
Upload your file.
Instantly get a quote for the part.
Order a box full of parts.
As you use them, we track your consumption. When you need the box refilled, we automatically ship you a fresh set of parts. No more running through repetitive quoting processes or trying to figure out how much inventory you have left. SlantBox ensures you always have enough and never run out.
Companies use this for 3D-printed parts that go into larger assemblies. For example, the 3D-printed bracket of a humanoid robot can be delivered right to the assembly line by a SlantBox. If you are tying up your own print time just making the same part over and over, a SlantBox is the perfect option. It frees up your in-house printers to work on development and custom orders.
Slant FBA: Refill the Warehouse
Some parts shouldn't be delivered to a customer directly; they need to be bundled with the rest of your inventory. For instance, a customer might want to buy a set of traditional tools and a 3D-printed shadowbox in a single order.
If you need to replenish warehouse stock at Amazon or a distributor, simply upload your file and barcodes to Slant FBA. We will print, pack, barcode, and palletize a refill order for your Amazon inventory so you can have 3D-printed products fulfilled by Prime or other 3PLs.
Batch Production
Our largest 3D print farm, the Megafarm, is spec’d for 3,000 machines. This scale allows us to produce parts at prices that are competitive with injection molding.
If you simply need a batch of 1 to 100,000 parts produced, you can upload your file and get an instant quote for up to 1,000 pieces, or talk to a team member for orders exceeding 1,000.
We actually started the company doing exactly this. We knew that if we couldn't hit true production scale, the rest of the services wouldn't matter. We successfully broke even with the cost of molding on most parts back in 2021.
Tangled - Low Cost Filament For Print Farms in the USA
The filament supply chain was broken. So we fixed it. The difference between the cost of the the raw materials and the cost of the final product was to great and would never allow print farms to scale up.
So we created low cost materials from the production that we were doing of filament for internal use. Starting with PLA that costs $10 per KG. And now working to lower the cost of PCTG with our Tangled TUFF Filament.
We have also used Tangled to explicitly bring manufacturing of products back to the USA just to show how the manufacturing can be done. OilStick is a very specific example of this.
A Couple of Other Things
What Kind of Parts are Best Suited for 3D Printing?
Ideally, you want your design to be "chunky." Be sure to check out our videos and other resources to learn about good design practices for 3D printing.
Excellent applications include:
Industrial Parts
Accessories and Tools
Consumer Products
Electrical Housings
Toys and Games
Home Goods
What Materials are Available
We print with FDM. So we only work with polymers. But these range from one application to the next. Here are some common examples.
PLA - bioplastioc
PCTG/OPM - An ABS alterantive that is more durable
ASA
TPU - flexible
And basically any color that you need.
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