September 14, 2025 • 49 mins
Alex and Matt discuss the transition from prototyping to production with 3D printing. Emphasizing the importance of design FOR additive manufacturing (and not just printing any file you found on the internet). They highlight the power of iterative prototyping to refine designs and the variety of plastics available for 3D printers, and what they are good at.
They close the podcast out discussing the big picture ideas of producing parts for someone like managing expectations, part quality, and the amount of work it really take to produce parts in bulk at the quality the customer is happy with.
A great introduction to the grind that is 3D printing and making lots of parts. It's VERY rewarding...but it's also no picnic. If this episode get's you excited about making parts with a 3D printer, you might be built for this life. Join us!
Links:
Alexander G. Orphanos | AG3D Labs: ag3d-printing.com
Matthew Guy | Niche 3D LLC: Niche3D.io
Timestamps:
00:00 Scaling from Prototyping to Production in 3D Printing
02:21 Designing for Additive Manufacturing
03:00 Challenges in Prototyping and Production
17:33 The Power of Material Selection and Print Settings
33:49 Post-Processing and Surface Finish
40:52 Industrial and Specialized Materials
44:08 Customer Communication and Expectation Management
44:56 Prototyping and Production Workflow
45:44 Training and Maintenance for 3D Printers
47:15 Final Thoughts and Future Directions
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You foreign. Welcome everybodyto layered insights. This is a
(00:25):
free printing Podcast. I'm Alex.This is math. What's going on,
Matt,
it's actually a quiet time inthe house right now. No printers
are running right now. You justfinished, like
a big project, right? Yeah, Ijust finished a bag of water. So
off to more designing and thenprinting again, the process,
yep, yep. That's manufacturing,which is what we're doing here.
(00:46):
Even though it's, it's like, itsown thing, 3d printing, right?
It's like, you don't thinkabout, like, injection molding
machines, or like anything likethat. When you think of 3d
printer, you think, like, Iwould think most people think,
like trinkets, or like a lot ofstuff that's coming off of
bamboo printers now.
Mm, hmm, yeah. When I think themajority of stuff we're printing
is has more, it's not trinkets,they actually have real world
(01:08):
applications, and people areusing them for a variety of
different things, absolutely.
Yeah. And I think we're, we'relike the the black magic of the
of the threed printing world,actual, real end use parts. Oh,
the functional printers, yeah,yeah. And that's, that's where
we're going to talk about todayis actually going scaling from
(01:28):
prototyping a part to, like, aproduction part and on on a 3d
printer. It's a greatprototyper, probably one of the
cheapest prototyping anything,yeah, absolutely, yeah. That's
out there. But, like, you can'tjust use a prototype machine to
make an end use part as a wholebunch of other things that you
got to do.
There's a whole, yeah, I mean,when I do it, it's usually a
(01:49):
whole bunch of stages.
Let's get into that. Let's seewhat your process
so I'd say, you know, you'redesigning your part, I don't
know. Let's say 10 prototypes,right? Depending how lucky you
are, yeah. And then you get tothe part that, you know, the
customer likes, right? Theyprove Yes, this is, this is the
(02:12):
part I need and want. Itfunctions how it should, it
looks relatively how it should,right? But then, you know, oh,
they, you know, they want 300 ofthem, right, right? So you're
not going to use that same printfile, maybe not even necessarily
the same model, as you just didfor the prototyping. So you
(02:33):
might, hopefully you design foradditive manufacturing while
you're designing andprototyping. But even then,
there might be a couple ofthings that you discover when
printing the prototype, they arelike, Oh, this could be better
when I'm trying to produce, no,hundreds of them at the same
time. Or, yeah, I found thisproblem. And that's even going
into you're not going to use thenecessarily the same settings,
(02:56):
you know, maybe you want it alittle bit stronger for the real
thing, or to look estheticallybetter. So then you're changing
the settings, and sometimes youwant, you know, to use less
material, cut down on the costand time and the amount of
material. And then, I mean, youwe can even go into like, you
know, Can you print one on on abuild plate at a time? Or do you
(03:16):
print, you know, 10 on a buildplate at a time? Yep. Do use? Do
you try to support the part asmuch as possible, but then post
processing will be a pain, or doyou maybe cut up the part and
assemble it later, so thatyou've lost post processing in
terms of support?
Yeah, 100% and there's, like, somany different ways that you
(03:39):
can, you can go about it and,like, each project is its own
thing. Like, I there's a projectI was working on for something
in my house that I did in onetry, and that's like, that's
what everyone hopes for. Is likeyou hear, is your also your end
use thing. But I had the luxuryof starting completely from
(04:00):
scratch. So I didn't have, youknow, design constraints, or, I
think we work with, I thinkcompanies a lot of the time, or
people starting trying to make aproduct that could, um,
something, so, yeah, like, theprototype can be super cheap and
fast, but you do want that forthe final part that you're
printing like the final product,
(04:23):
but I would also say print timeand material usage and stuff
also doesn't matter in theprototype, right? You're just
printing one to prove theconcept.
Yep, yep. I'm doing that rightnow with a job I have with
someone who's we're basicallyreconstructing or reproducing a,
(04:46):
what's the word? I should like aan architectural icon in the
town that this guy puts on afence for. And so we're trying
to make that into a, like aninsert slash phone stand. Yep.
So then. Air, like theprototype. My prototype for that
one, I printed out some of theit has brick, so I had a
(05:07):
filament that has that brickcolor. But I didn't want to go
to full extreme. Let's see whatI could get away with with just
the color and a few bricks,instead of completely one to
one, like recreating the brickscheme. Because, yeah, I don't
know if the nozzle is going tobe able to handle that, but I
think for me, for for my thoughtprocess, was something like
(05:29):
that. It's run some prototypesquick. That's not even the final
part, just certain features thatyou're interested
in. Oh yeah, even, even just forfit and function, like cut up
your model in different partsjust to make sure this one part
of it fits or functions like itshould, too, yeah, especially if
it's a big part, you know, allthat print hours or what if you
(05:52):
got a print failure? Yeah, thatprototyping time was wasted just
when you're trying to see if onefeature worked,
yeah, yeah. And that kind ofgoes back to, like, your your
point about the putting too manyparts on a bed, or, like, if, if
you're trying to mass produce,you start adding more than one
part, there is a line where,like, if I print more than
these, just one of those partskills the entire print. And with
(06:16):
the with the print time you'retalking about. So prototypes are
going to be either durable, sothey got to be strong, which
means they're going to bebigger, or they have a lot of
different colored aspects tothem. So those things add time.
And so if you're in for 24 to 48hour prototype, which isn't even
the worst case scenario forprint time or prototype like
(06:37):
you're gonna you, you could go awhole day or two without having
anything to show for your work.And so that's, I think, where we
find the magic in what can weget away with and still learn in
the process of it?
Yeah, and some of the like, ifyou are printing a bunch on the
print bed nowadays, some of theprinters are good that they
(06:57):
might catch a failure, and youcan skip that one part, and
maybe you can salvage, you know,the rest that are in the build
plate,
like a bamboo,
yeah, the bamboos have it. Ithink some of the CReality and
some of the other ones have ittoo. It's nice because you'll
do, you know, we'll do thespaghetti detection, so we'll
see the fail print. Actually, onthe process, you can do it too.
(07:20):
Now, at least on the Excel, youcan select part by file name and
skip that one if you see afailure. So wow, that helps a
lot when you're producing a lotof them, because you know you're
printing thin, tall parts, youcould all suddenly just have one
get knocked over. Yep, happensall. And then what if you don't?
(07:40):
You know, if the printer doesn'tcatch it, or you don't catch it,
maybe you can salvage some ofthe parts. But you, you know, if
you're trying to print a bunchof them, it's a long print. You
wasted a lot of time and a lotof material. So we, we'll
probably do a topic on thislater, but how, how dumb the
printers are? Yes, right now,right?
They, they really are when youthink about what they could do.
(08:02):
Yes, yeah, it made me think of apart that had failed. And I'm
sure everyone has a story whereyou print a really tall part,
maybe more than one of them, butlet's say it fails at a certain
layer. You've got half of thispart is beautiful, and then
you're just sitting there going,what layer was that on? You
know, instead of actually, like,counting the layers, because
sometimes that's there's just noway you'd figure it out. Maybe
(08:24):
you get a feature that's nearthat, so you kind of, like,
estimate, that's part oftroubleshooting. And like,
salvaging a job that fails, likenew users of printing run up
against and deal with, andthat's when they learn that
situation. But it's notsomething anyone ever expects
they'd have to do when they
Yeah, I think, like you said,with the layer height too,
because if you're printing abunch of parts, and then you do
(08:46):
have some type of failure, like,okay, we're at this layer
height. What? What part of thetool, path or part settings
caused that error? You know, wasit something weird with
supports, material built up? AmI not doing a Z hop? You should
definitely do Z hops when you'reprinting multiple parts, when
you're going between the parts.So it's like, and what's the
(09:06):
reason for that? Yeah, so youknow, well, either it'll let the
nozzle drop the bed, dependingon your printer, but you're
going between your parts, you'remaking sure if you do have any
material sticking up, the nozzlewon't slam into a part.
It's gonna, it's gonna print onthat one part. And then, without
the Z hop, where it it, thenozzle goes up, or the bed goes
down, yeah, it goes away. It'snot gonna drag the part, which
(09:31):
might have, like a really thinor delicate,
yeah, and even the, you know,unless you tell in the settings,
the nozzle will just blastthrough any parts, unless you go
into the settings and say, hey,when you're traveling around,
not printing, make sure you goaround the part. So there are
settings where you can say, hey,don't cross other models when
(09:52):
you're traveling. Yeah. Sothere's different settings like
that when you are printingmultiple, multiple parts that
you might have to consider. Oreven just the build up material,
or how the nozzle is gettingcleaned, if you are doing
filament swaps or differentthings, or like pet cheese, a
big one, where the material canbuild up on the nozzle, even if
(10:12):
you're just printing multipleparts and not swapping or
anything, yeah, you can stilland you and your flow is right,
you can still have a little bitof material build up on the
nozzle, which can sometimesbecome a problem further in the
print. So it's learning andknowing what's going to cause
the problems, and then adjustingas much as you can the settings.
So yeah, you can print as muchof the same file over and over
(10:35):
again without having failures,without wasting time, without
wasting material, right?
Well, and that's a great I lovethat segue, because I think it
we could do this. We wrote downa bunch of ideas for, like, what
it is to go from scalingprototype to scaling production.
For each one of these, we shouldtalk about what's acceptable for
a prototype and what'sacceptable for production,
(10:57):
because I think there's a lotthat we could just pull from
there. So like, first of all,like a prototyping part, like
what you were describing, that'sa perfectly acceptable thing
with, with the nozzle stuff andbatch printing, it's almost good
to prototype the batch printingbefore you get fully to the
production. Because Absolutely,that's the that's acceptable in
(11:19):
the prototyping phase to hashout if
you, if you can with a client,or if you are in your own
company doing this, it's goodto, you know, print maybe 10 or
20 models. So the batch of yourbatch printing file, yeah, and
then bring it to your client, orthe rest of engineering team is
gonna be using and say, Hey, canyou test these? Is this
(11:41):
acceptable? You know, get theokay from the people that are
getting the parts. To get theOkay, like, run, you know, run
with it and keep printing asmuch as you can. But yeah, it is
good to get the approval of theprototype and then get the
approval of, like, initial batchprint, which with settings that
you think are good and the partsare looking good, just to even
(12:02):
you might go and change somesettings to get the batch
printing working well and timeefficient, and less supports, or
whatever it is, less postprocessing, they might bring the
client and pieces and fittingright or right. It doesn't quite
have the same esthetic you wantit or something. So it's you
gotta keep that communicationbetween your your clients or the
(12:24):
other team open through theentire process. Yeah, yeah.
100% 100% um, so let's, let'stalk. So like, let's say you get
a a model from a customer, andyour your task is, like, we're
going to prototype this, butwe'd like to eventually produce
(12:47):
a lot of these, yeah. How wouldyou approach with the model, the
prototyping phase and then thethe production phase and kind of
like, tie in, like, design formanufacturing, that's also in,
yeah.
So at least for me, a lot oftime I'm actually designing the
parts myself. But even if they,you know, customer comes to me
with a part that I could edit,you know, I usually do look at
(13:12):
it from a design additivemanufacturing first and say,
Hey, can we know, I'll probablygive a list of suggestions,
saying, Hey, can we do this? Canwe do that? Yeah, to not only
make it a better part, have itstronger for three to printing,
but make it easier to print lesspost processing, less supports
all that stuff. So usually I'llmake some suggestions. If it's
(13:33):
good, I'll edit it, and thenI'll prototype it. So like, if
it's a big part or differentthings, I might not do a lot of
outside layers as much as Iwould for the real part, or as
much in fill, probably use lessmaterial, try to print as fast
as possible for them, but at thesame time, it's kind of like
sometimes I'll add more time tothe print because I don't
(13:55):
necessarily care about the printtime, but I want to make sure
the part comes out well, right?Also, maybe I will be more on
the conservative side with thesupports or the settings and
stuff, not tune it in as finelyas possible, because I don't
want to spend time printing abunch of stuff and tuning it in
and have it turns out it's notthe customer wanted, right? You
(14:17):
tune in and you scrape more timeand get it more perfect when
you're in the batch andmanufacturing phase.
Yeah, and it's interesting,because I think, I think
everyone has their their ownapproach, but like, the things
you're talking about are pretty,pretty general, like, good
things to consider. Yeah, I do.I do find this just might be the
(14:38):
prototypes that I work with. Itactually ends up some of the
time being cheaper, just toprint out something early on in
the prototype phase, justbecause I learned so much about
what I need for the productionside of things, yes, or seeing
that part print, or, like,seeing how the part quality is,
and knowing you know what theway we're doing. Doing that
(15:00):
isn't, isn't going to work like,I think this one, this James
Webb model, is like, a perfectexample of that process of like,
I haven't seen, like, a reallyhigh quality version of this 3d
printed. If I'm going to makethese to sell these online, what
do I have to figure out? Andthat was a very this was a very
challenging version of that,because a lot of it had to be in
(15:22):
the printing stage, because Ihad, in this case, print the
whole thing in one piece, inmulti color. So I did spend a
lot of time and filament doingthat, and I I was testing how
good is my hardware? Yeah, whichisn't usually a problem that
most people like try to do, butI like the pain of the process.
(15:44):
So it is what it is. It's justwhen you win in that kind of a
scenario, you can really unlock,and I know that's not most
people's scenarios here.
Yeah. I think the advantage ofthrough printing, because you
can just design it, print it sofast, right? Yeah, I try to get
even if it's, you know, even ifthe design is not fully done or
(16:06):
something, I try to get itprinted as soon as possible, so
the client can just have myideas. Is this, right? Is, is
this what we're trying to gethere? Yes. If it's not, we go,
we can, you know, quickly, goback to the design board and
iterate quickly, but I thinkit's a lot of people haven't
used three different technology,yeah, so it's nice to get them
(16:27):
apart and say, my massmanufacturing is going to look
better, but this is kind of howit's going to end up looking.
And they have a general idea ofwhat to expect, yeah, out of the
process, which is really good,because then, if it's not what
they want, you know, maybe athree printing is not the right
thing, or you have to changesomething, but at least they
they know what to expect, rightand how we might want to move
(16:51):
forward, so we're not wastingtime designing when, you know
this isn't exactly what theywanted and stuff
totally Yeah, And that's, thebalance of of having a customer
and, you know, providing aservice for them. It's just like
you're talking about somethingthat's very important that I
think a good amount of peoplestarting off with printing
struggle with, which is thatwhen you're hired to 3d print
(17:15):
something, the the more time youcan spend on focusing on what
they want instead of maybe howyou would do it, yeah? Because
then your job, once you knowwhat they want, is how to do it,
and if you set thoseexpectations up ahead of time,
the whole process is so muchbetter for everybody involved.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Let'ssee here. So I was trying to You
(17:36):
brought so many good things inthat just like the difference
between prototypes and an actualproduction. So we could, you
know, settings we talked about alittle bit already, filament, I
think for me, oh yeah, startingwith PLA or something very cheap
and something you can print fastis perfectly acceptable, you
know, because we live in a worldof multi color parts, you know,
(17:58):
like this. But like, not everyprototype needs to be multi
colored. In fact, you probablyshouldn't color the prototype
like at all, because you'rejust, you're getting the fit in
the form, and how well do thosesettings work? It's almost like
getting, like a temperature,like a reading on, like, how
close are we to actually?
Yeah, you're you're initiallyfocusing on the design, yes. So
(18:23):
like, definitely print with PLAfirst, especially if, you know,
maybe it is a real engineeringpart, so you have to do
something that's harder toprint, like polycarbonate or
inexpensive, right at theexpense, yes, right? Or even,
you know, maybe even doing apeak and all temp part, or
something crazy. But it's like,let's get the general design and
(18:44):
fit and kind of function how itworks and looks out of the way,
and say, Yes, this is, this iswhat we want. And then you can
kind of tackle, you know, okay,how am I gonna print this in
this hardware engineeringmaterial? Because they're, you
know, some of them are morechallenging to print. You have
to think more about warping indifferent things. But, you know,
(19:08):
you know, some design, you'reprinting five prototypes, and
you don't want to print that insome of these materials. Doesn't
cost you a lot. Oh, yeah, soyou're, you know, you're talking
about maybe the last fewprototypes are in the real
material, because then, youknow, then they can take it
home, and actually, you know,maybe they're using it with
(19:29):
chemicals, they're using it withhigh temperature, different
things. And then, you know, theycan functionally test it more in
that aspect. But yeah, usually,as long as you know a material
is going to function. How youneed it for their environment?
You focus on the design first,and then you say, hey, just use
some cheap PLA right?
Totally, totally, yeah. And Ithink there's a whole because if
(19:53):
it the other thing I think thatpeople run into is they when
it's not a. Brand new part thathasn't been made before, and
you're prototyping, maybereproducing a part, but using
three printing, a lot of theexpectations are like an
injection molded part orsomething that was machined. So
that gets even more tricky,because the prototype may cause
(20:17):
the customer, who's like, brandnew to 3d printing, to kind of
back off and go, oh, there'slike, when you make the
prototype, they're like, that'snot what I was looking for at
all. Yeah, exactly. And that,that becomes a really
interesting dynamic when you'reworking with somebody on how to
get them past the prototype andto, like, you know, you hit the
nail on the head. Like you it'sthe expense, the whole thing,
(20:41):
you know, I'm making thisprototype, but in order for us
to move through the process,let's do this quick and cheap,
because it's going to cost youmore if, if we do it in
something else,
yeah, good. Even if the customeris used to the machine materials
or injection molding, right? Andyou give them the part, then you
(21:01):
can kind of do the back andforth with them, saying, you
know, what? About how it'smanufactured? Do you not like
here? Because, you know, some ofthe things that people don't
like about the reprinting can beactually somewhat adjusted in
the printing process or postprocessing. So it's like, yeah,
you don't completely outrule thetechnology, because there is
(21:23):
ways around it to make sure itfits what your customers are
expecting on the part, right?
No, totally, totally. And Ithink the cool thing about when
you go through that process,especially when it's the first
time this model is being 3dprinted like it's not and not no
printing process, or evenmanufacturing process is
(21:45):
perfect. But I think that's anexpectation that people have
Yes. And one of the importantthings that I always like doing,
unless it's prohibitive cost andtime wise, is to print apart,
because you're also learning howthe machine is going to handle
this that you're going toeventually go to production
(22:05):
with. So there's so many subtlethings, like walls being
thicker, holes being smaller,and just like the overall
dimensions of the part you'regetting a gage on. Like, the
good thing is, you can adjustthat afterwards. You designed it
as three inches, but it comesout as 2.9 well, you can then
(22:27):
make the model point one more,and that's and then you print
it, and then you check it again.And then within two prototypes,
you can get that perfect,essentially, almost,
you know, the sort of processfor three printing so much
faster than the subtractiveprocesses of manufacturing? So
it's like, it's when you, whenyou get to a decent prototype. I
(22:49):
sometimes just encourage mycustomer, put, you know, put as
much through space as possible,try to break it. You know, if
it, if it doesn't hold up to howyou think it should. You know,
there's tons of stuff we can doto, you know, make it stronger,
yeah, yeah. And the ones thatcan document it failing and give
us pictures and, you know, getas involved as possible in that
(23:13):
that gives us so muchinformation to work on, yes, you
know. And then the cool thingis, once you're in the 3d
printed thing, and this is moreyour expertise, then you apply
the material science on itright? Go from a PLA to a peak,
and the part becomes almostindestructible in most uses of
the part, you know, it's like,it's really something, but go
(23:36):
off on it, because
even the right making sure youpick the right material for the
application. I've had customerswork with other companies, and
you know, they're printing withthe wrong orientation, or
they're printing with the wrongmaterial for the environment. So
it's like, and then you know,even you know, there's subtle
intricacies between some of thedifferent materials, where, if
(23:57):
you want more strength or morelayers on all this, there's some
tricks that, either, you know,dehydration or doing thicker
line widths, or different thingsyou can actually do, yeah, to
utilize the material more andget more out of it.
But surface finish too,
right? Yeah, yeah. So that's avery point surface finish too.
(24:19):
So even, like, right, some stuffyou want texture so, like, even
using the fuzzy setting in someof these slicers help, you know,
heights in the layer lines, butalso gives a different type of
part to a customer. And true,but yeah, the it's when you go
into the more engineering, even,like, just poly carbon or nylon
(24:41):
and stuff like that. As a thiscan be a completely different
wheelhouse sometimes than PLA,yes, speed you print it, how you
print it. And they'll have some,you know, little tricks on how
you can, how you can improve theprocess, especially, or if
you're slicing specific.Basically, for that part,
(25:01):
there's different things you cantweak in the slicer to give you
a better outcome in the strongerpart too.
Yeah, no, absolutely. You know,I think we both worked on the
engineering side of things, sothere's kind of choices that
were kind of met with all thetime. So there's a lot of things
that are just kind of like, Ohyeah, you do this, you do this.
But with, I think, some of ourwork, especially nowadays, a lot
(25:24):
of it's more cosmetic or Uberspecific to a very specific
material type. Like, yeah, couldyou talk about some of the just
talk about some of the basicmaterials and, like, what they
might be good for and tradeoffs, like, start with PLA and
yeah, just roll with it.
PLA is definitely like theeasiest to print somebody. Good
(25:46):
for quick prototypes. It's goodfor a lot of fidget stuff and
esthetic models, right? Good forcolor, multi color. Good for, oh
yeah, great for color, yeah. Sothat's kind of the wheelhouse
that's in. What is it bad atit's, well, it's actually pretty
stiff for not having any fibersor other things in it. It's
actually a pretty stiffmaterial. But no, in terms of
(26:12):
higher engineering strength,you're not going to get that PLA
it's gonna shatter. It's gonnashatter. Yeah, it's very
brittle. You don't get it's notgonna be able to stand a lot of
heat. Has less less toughness orimpact strength.
Not an outdoor material,
not an outdoor Oh yeah, it'sgoing to degrade in the sun. The
color is going to degrade andget more brittle. Yeah. So I'd
(26:34):
say, like, the next tier fromthat would probably be like a
pet G, back in the day, it usedto be, I'd say, like an ABS,
yep, but a lot of people haveturned away from ABS because of
the warping, the printabilityand the fumes. Yeah. And right
now, pet trees are really goodalternative and replacement for
that. So your pet tree will be alittle more UV resistant. It'll
(26:59):
be better outdoors. It'll be alittle bit better with the water
it is. It can't absorb a numberof water, yeah, um, so
definitely had to pre dry whileI'm printing, yeah, a large
translucent stuff.
Translucent stuff is almost aeven in even translucent PLA and
translucent pet G, it's almostlike a different plastic, yeah,
(27:21):
printing it,
it's crazy. Yeah, I wouldn'tthink of that immediately.
Well, it's like, you know whatyou think about materials, to
get the colors, to get some ofthe properties, to get some your
PLA Pro, or your patchy Pro, ordifferent things, to putting
additives in it, right? So, likesome of the lower gray plastics
have more additives and lesspure plastic. So there's that
(27:46):
interesting trade off, and howadditives might affect in a good
way or a bad way, the propertiesof the material so petty will
be, you know, a lot morefunctional parts, parts that
might see a little bit abuseparts, I've seen more
environment stuff, yeah,
and that's why it's so good tostart with the PLA because it's
(28:08):
such a well used material, it'sunderstood pretty well, and it's
cheap and you can print it fast,so like, you don't have to deal
with a lot of the problems youmight have To deal with at the
PETG or higher, yes, becausethere, we don't know all the
things about those materialsyet. And once you get past pet
(28:30):
G, it starts to get where yourprototyping time. If you choose
to use that material first,yeah, to eat you apart, because
you're actually dealing with thematerial and not a prototype.
Yeah, you're fighting thematerial versus fighting the
design 100% Yeah, and you'd beunless you have very specific,
(28:50):
unless the client has veryspecific requirements, you can,
I mean, PLA is pretty decentnow,
like you can play, plus there'ssome extra strength and stuff
you can get
away with using PLA for a lot ofparts, unless there's certain
environmental conditions andworking conditions, yeah, from
there, you know, you got yourabs, your ASA, some, some of the
(29:12):
stuff that's sometimes you'lluse it, I probably move closer
to more polycarbonate. You get alot of strength for how cheap.
It's not cheap, but, you know,yeah, you still get a lot of
strength for the price you butyou do need to take in
consideration warping anddifferent
stuff. Yeah? Polycarbonate, atleast from my memory, I don't
(29:34):
remember ever choosing itbecause of the potential fumes,
yeah, but also the, I don'tthink material, I don't think
printers, at that time were evencapable of it, before the, like,
the all metal hot ends, or,like, some of the the 250 C to
250 C on a pretty printer was,like a was, like an expansion
point of all the stuff. Yeah,yeah. That was a an era,
(29:58):
for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And youneed the enclosure, yeah, right,
heated bed, especially for thepolycarbonate, even the ASA and
abs, right? You need a decentenclosure to keep it warm in
there, to prevent warping, yeah,and to get good, decent layer
tuition, Yep, yeah. Thenthere's, you know, a lot. What's
really popular right now isnylon, especially with fibers,
(30:22):
yes, but even nylon you get,it's actually a lot better than
it used to be. All used to be alot harder to print. Mm, hmm,
there's a lot. They even havesome, you know, some of the
nylon builds even absorb lesswater. So it's you have to worry
a little bit less about itabsorbing too much water and not
be able to print with that.
(30:42):
Well, I remember, this is, likethe tall man material. You
remember the tall Yeah, alloy,like that was a very interesting
nylon, and they were a bunch ofdifferent ones that you could
get for different types ofthings. I think I made a
prototype of it was, it was formy friend, like the bottom of
the ski pole, that little, yeah,art, um, I had made a
(31:04):
replacement for him, and I usedthat, that nylon for that. But
just like you said, it was, itwas a struggle, and, like, it
was getting it to adhere on thebed and then to itself, yes, was
always like a struggle. And itfelt like, anytime you opened up
a bag of that stuff, yeah, thebest print you got was from the
very beginning, and then youcould never dry it out enough
(31:26):
for it to get good. But now,especially the stuff with the
fibers, it's really come a longway where it it seems,
anecdotally, even though I'vegot a lot of time with these
harder materials, with withfibers, it seems the fibers
actually help against theproblems of these materials.
And that's, I mean, that's oneof the reasons a lot of people
(31:47):
are adding fibers to filaments.Right now, it is a little bit,
you know, of a craze, and it'soverblown, but it does help in
certain ways, but it's not,yeah, I think people think the
part is going to be strongerthan they actually are by adding
fibers. Yeah, but yeah, I thinkthe overall grade and how the
processing the nylon and makingthese filaments are much better
than back in the day, likenormal people can kind of print
(32:08):
the nylon now and back in theday it was is much more of a
struggle. And the it's since thenylon can be pretty cheap now
and easier to print. You know,it's, it's almost the next thing
people print with besides PLAbecause it's, it's almost the
opposite of PLX you get, youknow, nylon is not brittle,
(32:29):
right? It's going to takeimpacts. It's, you know, you can
form it on the ground and startgoing to break and stuff. So,
yeah, that's kind of almost thenext step people take in terms
of material,
that's crazy. Now art, do youthink those people are actually
have a ventilation setup, or isit just kind of like, is this,
(32:50):
is this hobbyist that you seethis, or
deny one? Yeah, no, I just it's,you know, it's, I think it's
people that have more of theenclosures and a little bit,
maybe one step higher than,okay, like your cheaper
printers,
yeah. Cuz I remember in theearly days when people were
(33:12):
using ABS and PLA, there's a lotof people printing abs in there.
It was like, oh, no, get thatstuff out of there. I mean, it
smelled terrible, so it's notlike it you weren't aware of it.
But yeah, boy, is it not goodfor you?
Not good? Yeah, it releases alot more VOCs than a lot of the
other printing plastics, thanASA too,
(33:34):
yes, and that's why I never usedas a even though I think it'd be
really good for like, outdoor.
Yeah, it is. That's likeanything with the styrene,
that's what you're that'ssmelling again, byproducts of,
yikes, cool. Okay, so thoseCylon and and fibers inside,
(33:57):
that's kind of one stage,
yeah, and then even, well, thenfor a complete of time, material
people are printing with TPU nowa lot more too. Yes, yes, that's
a fun one. I mean, it is, I'dsay it's still, they're making a
lot more printable, but still alittle bit of a challenge or
different, I guess, compared toPLI or some of the other ones
(34:20):
and slower, but you can get, youknow, for soft, semi soft
prints, it's, it's cool materialfor a lot of different things.
Yeah, I've seen people do softrobotics with the more like
elastic robotics, yeah, um, Ithanks to you. This, this
prototype here that we made inthat TV, you foam. Oh yeah, the
(34:42):
super interesting,
very short, yeah, exactly, greatcosplaying material.
It's really like amazing, like,just the it's rebound to its
original shape. It feels likesomething I could buy, like a
backpack, almost like a. Like, afake leather, Oh, yeah. And, but
(35:04):
talk more about that. And, like,how, because it used to be that
there was just, kind of,everyone would say there's
different durometers or, like,different, what's the word I'm
looking for, springiness orsoftness that you can Yeah,
softness, yeah. But it wasn'tlike it was available, like,
there wasn't, like, a wide rangeof them available from every
(35:24):
person. It was, like, thisperson's was harder than this
person's and this, yeah, therewas, like, two bendy so I
couldn't do anything with it.
Yeah. I mean, was like, mostlycoming out of ninja flex, right?
Yes, yep. So, like, I thinkthey're, you know, a couple,
their first ones around the 90 Adurometer. And then, you know,
(35:44):
they got much lower. I think the
Yeah, went lower first, yeah.But, like,
you could count as many, as manyon one hand as the printers that
could print that chinchilla.Chinchilla, yes, it was super
hard to feed.
Yeah, that's that's a majordownside. And struggle with TPU
is your extruder might not be or
(36:08):
it might it has to be of acertain drama to be able to push
it through. Yeah, exactly. Andthen people will come up with
mods so like, there's less gapswithin the extruder for the
because that stuff will justescape, right, right, find its
way out. So, like, actually havea mod for the Excel that tries
to close the path as much aspossible so that I can escape.
(36:31):
That's cool. So it's, you'realmost like limited durometer
for TPU, because you have to beable to push it through and feed
it through the extruder. That'swhere, like,
you can't, you can't push arope, as they say.
So that's where, kind of the,well, and a lot of printers now
are direct drive to which helps,yes, TPU. But then that's where,
(36:53):
like, the very short productcomes in, right? You can
actually get lower durometerdepending on the temperature
you're printing it right, right?So you can kind of scale it and
get lower durometer than you getwith other materials.
Yeah. So up here I had, like,changed the the temperature, so
I believe this was pretty cold,so it's a lot harder. Yep. And,
(37:16):
like, here it was hotter, andI've got, you know, so much
flexibility here that it'sreally,
it's really something. And theWhat I also like about the
material is you can post processit with fire a little bit. Yeah,
you're getting kind of nicefinish. It easily cleans up any
(37:36):
stringing this. You can actuallyget almost, almost a shininess
to it afterwards. It's reallyinteresting.
So what's, what's the actionthere? Is it? Is it? I think
it's an animal that's notburning off. It's turning into
gas as it's printing.
Well, I think it also kind of,because it's, you're printed
that material, you're foamingit,
(37:57):
right? And I think they're obingis carbon dioxide. I think
that's releasing.
I am not actually sure on thatone. Think
I looked into this the vijoshi,but we can, we can add this
later, but yeah, that'll beinteresting. There's something
that's creating the foamingaction. And the higher, yeah,
the more foaming you get.
And I think when you're hittingthe fire, actually closing the
(38:19):
cells, you're getting more of aflatter surface. It's just
giving you that shine. Wow,that's cool, yeah, and then you
can probably paint it a littlebit easier, or get a better
surface finish than you know,that dull foam look porous,
yeah, that porous look Yeah,exactly, yeah. So that's, that's
(38:43):
an interesting material, more ofa there's some industrial
applications, but it's, it'smore of an interesting side, and
especially with, like, you know,more of these printers are now
coming out with multiplematerials. So now you can
incorporate your soft materialswith your hard materials, which
is
really fun. Yep, I know I haddone in the shoes, the shoe, I
was just gonna say that. Yeah,no, the shoes have been very
(39:06):
interesting to watch people, andthis is on social media that I'm
seeing this, but people justprinting TPU shoes, like Croc
knockoffs or whatever. But,yeah, it's, it's interesting
that people are just threeprinting shoes, like, I don't
know how good they're gonna holdup, or anything like that. Those
are mostly with like onedurometer across the whole
(39:27):
print, or something like this.When you think about what it
could do for the shoe industryor the cosplay industry, and if
you start, if you learn thematerial enough, you've
prototyped with it, you'veplayed with it, and you're
setting up a job for production.Like, it was interesting with
this, I was testing, I wasproto. I had to do it very
(39:47):
quickly. So I had, I decided toprint a very small version and
test just like, multipletemperatures to get a gage on.
Like, what? Yeah, it was. Then Iwent a little bit bigger, and
then I print. Did the wholething. That is not, I would not
do that with a customer, but forme, totally fine, because I
(40:07):
needed to get it done in timefor New York Comic
Con. Some of the shoes, theyactually are adjusting the
temperature for the durometer.That's cool. We're adjusting,
like the walls or infill, toadjust the softness too.
That the walls in the infill, Ithink, is, this is the first
time I've seen the materialscience version of applying
that, where, usually, like,you're saying it's a setting
(40:30):
based thing where, like, certaintypes of infills can give you
more bounce on gyroid is moreflexible than, say, gyroid or
something like that. No, notgyroid. Cubic. Cubic, yeah, or
triangles, or whatever else.Most of those are usually hard,
just good for some stuff, butnot necessarily, like a shoe,
yeah? But yeah, we could. Wecould totally dive into that a
(40:53):
whole other day. But above that,you're kind of after the TPUs,
and even in TPU, you're kind ofin the exotic material, but past
that, you're really inspecialized area where you're
only going to use that for apurpose, because it's either
extremely hard to deal with,expensive or both, and
(41:15):
you're usually not on consumeror grade printers.
No, yeah. Yeah. So then it thethe expense of this material,
then just goes up like crazy.Because once you go into the
industrial side of things,you're talking basically five
figures or more for the hardwarealone. And if you're
(41:40):
it's exponential with the costof the printer and the cost of
materials.
Yep, yep, that, that materialgoes from 25 for like a spool of
one kilogram PLA, it goes up to50 for half a kilogram, you
know, or, sorry, 500 I mean, itjust,
it can go. It
(42:02):
can go real crazy. And that'sjust the material,
yeah. And usually that material,it's print a lot slower, uh huh.
So even the print times, and youknow, if, if you fail, you're
spending, you're putting, soyou're sending in so much more
money, yeah, into theprototypes, or the production
parts, 100%
and so, like, that's where we'vereally honed our our skills,
(42:25):
because we've had to deal withprototyping and building parts
on mass with these moreexpensive materials. So like,
we've just felt the burn ofthose things.
It's It's surprising the youknow, the material science of it
has gotten so much better. So alot of, most of these parts are
done, printed in altem or peak,very expensive materials are
(42:48):
very specific. I'd say, youknow, 99% of parts that you
might through to print areperfectly fine with, you know,
the probably, I'd say, the midlevel of, yeah, engineering
grade plastics, which I'd sayalmost all can be printed on
some of these good consumerprinters now, which is crazy,
(43:09):
you know, it
really is. Yeah, it makes youthink about how much, and I
think this is why we're both weboth have the businesses that we
have, how much the industry andthe people using threed
printers, how much learningthere is still to be done, even
something as seemingly obviousas like prototyping and not
wanting to spend too much moneyand but if you, if you don't
(43:30):
have any idea about this stuff,and you just jump in, or you get
hired from a company, and, yeah,they want the project to go,
which is, I think what happensmost of the time is people jump
in, they get a 3d printer, andthey want to go to the moon.
They want to they want to getthis project done ASAP. And then
that's where I think so much ofthe problem happens, where an
(43:51):
operator comes in, startsworking on this industrial
printer, is working with thisindustrial material and trying
to do something that it's notnecessarily made to do or needs
prototyping, and that linebetween a prototype and a
product is blurred, and then itgets real ugly. When you've
(44:11):
you've wasted a bunch ofmaterial and time, you don't
have anything, yeah, the, youknow, it's a show for it, you
know? Yeah, that's where I thinka lot of people get set back,
especially companies trying toimplement this in their own
business.
No, it can. It can take a lot oftime, a lot of money to even try
to prove the concept of thepart, or prove that, hey, you
(44:35):
can three print this. You canuse this material so this, you
know, it can almost be a timeand cost sunk, and you never,
sometimes you never get anythingout of it, because it's just you
don't get to the stage with thecustomer. Or they're like, Okay,
yes, this is this what we want,this what we need. That's, you
know, go through with it. Yeah.So people will chase, chase
(44:57):
these clients, and lot of themwill get nowhere. And. Spend a
lot of money and time trying toacquire them,
yeah, trying to see if there'sanything else we can touch on. I
think this has been great. Ithink we touched on so many good
things about this, and just thestruggle of, or in the art of
going from a prototype to a
production, even, like, I think,like you said about, you know,
(45:20):
just giving someone a 30printer, like I've even if you
give, you know, a person that'snot a three printing, person A
printer, and give them the filesthat you've tested and saying,
Hey, you can mass produce thispart with this file, with this
printer, with this material, youthink you'd get the same result
(45:43):
as what you'd get, but you don'talways like even just you know,
how you utilize the printer, howyou treat the printer, how do
you store the materials, justprinter to
printer, manufacturing. Yeah,
there's so many different themaintenance, the upkeep, how you
handle the build plate, how youclean the build like there's so
many different intricacies thatyou can't just hand someone the
(46:09):
printer and the working file andexpect the same results.
Yeah, it would be great. It
would Yeah, right, it comesthrough. You still need, it's
still a piece of equipment. Youstill need a train technician.
Yep, yep, something we've bothrubbed up against many times.
Yeah, no, it's and thisprototyping to production part
(46:32):
is, I think, really important,because so many people are
looking to 3d printing to make abusiness
or to, yeah, it's an easy upsmall upfront cost. It's, most
people think it's easy to getinto when you get from prototype
to production. And you know,with some of the new printers,
(46:55):
bamboo lab and other stuff,where you can print in
engineering grade materials atvery upfront, low cost. It's,
it's, it's easy to get into, youknow,
yeah, yeah. And, you know, ifthey stick into it long enough,
they can, they can really makesomething that's, that's
incredible. I mean, some of thestuff that I work with people
(47:16):
on, even if it, you know, justbringing an idea into reality
with 3d printing is is somethingthat's a joy of both ours and
this idea like this is where themoney is, as far as like the
value, I should say, not, notthe money. The value is
(47:38):
understanding how to go throughthat and go from idea to final
part. And that's a lot of whatwe talked about today, all the
different areas that you need toconsider, yeah, where things can
kind of go off the rails.
And, I mean, that's where,that's why most of my clients
turn to me, is exactly for thatwe can, I can get you through
(48:01):
that whole product developmentstage and get your parts
afterwards, you know, yeah, so,
and it gets more and morereliable, like, the deeper that
you go into it and invest intoit, yeah. But I think that's
good for today. Man, yeah, yeah,conversation. All right, tell
everybody where they can findyou niche.io.
(48:22):
Uh, Matthew, Guy on LinkedIn,
perfect. I am at AG, 3dprinting.com EG, 3d printing on
Instagram and the AG, 3d partdetective on LinkedIn. On you
can check me out, Alex, yourfinals on LinkedIn as well. If
you're looking for any kind ofheart success, service, design,
prototyping, production, you'vegot niche product
(48:45):
development, product
development, you've got nicheyou've got AG, 3d and the part
detective. So reach out to us,and this has been layered
insights. Finally, have a name.That's it, folks, thanks for
joining us. Keep printing. Havea good one.
You foreign. Welcome everybodyto layered insights. This is a
(00:25):
free printing Podcast. I'm Alex.This is math. What's going on,
Matt,
it's actually a quiet time inthe house right now. No printers
are running right now. You justfinished, like
a big project, right? Yeah, Ijust finished a bag of water. So
off to more designing and thenprinting again, the process,
yep, yep. That's manufacturing,which is what we're doing here.
(00:46):
Even though it's, it's like, itsown thing, 3d printing, right?
It's like, you don't thinkabout, like, injection molding
machines, or like anything likethat. When you think of 3d
printer, you think, like, Iwould think most people think,
like trinkets, or like a lot ofstuff that's coming off of
bamboo printers now.
Mm, hmm, yeah. When I think themajority of stuff we're printing
is has more, it's not trinkets,they actually have real world
(01:08):
applications, and people areusing them for a variety of
different things, absolutely.
Yeah. And I think we're, we'relike the the black magic of the
of the threed printing world,actual, real end use parts. Oh,
the functional printers, yeah,yeah. And that's, that's where
we're going to talk about todayis actually going scaling from
(01:28):
prototyping a part to, like, aproduction part and on on a 3d
printer. It's a greatprototyper, probably one of the
cheapest prototyping anything,yeah, absolutely, yeah. That's
out there. But, like, you can'tjust use a prototype machine to
make an end use part as a wholebunch of other things that you
got to do.
There's a whole, yeah, I mean,when I do it, it's usually a
(01:49):
whole bunch of stages.
Let's get into that. Let's seewhat your process
so I'd say, you know, you'redesigning your part, I don't
know. Let's say 10 prototypes,right? Depending how lucky you
are, yeah. And then you get tothe part that, you know, the
customer likes, right? Theyprove Yes, this is, this is the
(02:12):
part I need and want. Itfunctions how it should, it
looks relatively how it should,right? But then, you know, oh,
they, you know, they want 300 ofthem, right, right? So you're
not going to use that same printfile, maybe not even necessarily
the same model, as you just didfor the prototyping. So you
(02:33):
might, hopefully you design foradditive manufacturing while
you're designing andprototyping. But even then,
there might be a couple ofthings that you discover when
printing the prototype, they arelike, Oh, this could be better
when I'm trying to produce, no,hundreds of them at the same
time. Or, yeah, I found thisproblem. And that's even going
into you're not going to use thenecessarily the same settings,
(02:56):
you know, maybe you want it alittle bit stronger for the real
thing, or to look estheticallybetter. So then you're changing
the settings, and sometimes youwant, you know, to use less
material, cut down on the costand time and the amount of
material. And then, I mean, youwe can even go into like, you
know, Can you print one on on abuild plate at a time? Or do you
(03:16):
print, you know, 10 on a buildplate at a time? Yep. Do use? Do
you try to support the part asmuch as possible, but then post
processing will be a pain, or doyou maybe cut up the part and
assemble it later, so thatyou've lost post processing in
terms of support?
Yeah, 100% and there's, like, somany different ways that you
(03:39):
can, you can go about it and,like, each project is its own
thing. Like, I there's a projectI was working on for something
in my house that I did in onetry, and that's like, that's
what everyone hopes for. Is likeyou hear, is your also your end
use thing. But I had the luxuryof starting completely from
(04:00):
scratch. So I didn't have, youknow, design constraints, or, I
think we work with, I thinkcompanies a lot of the time, or
people starting trying to make aproduct that could, um,
something, so, yeah, like, theprototype can be super cheap and
fast, but you do want that forthe final part that you're
printing like the final product,
(04:23):
but I would also say print timeand material usage and stuff
also doesn't matter in theprototype, right? You're just
printing one to prove theconcept.
Yep, yep. I'm doing that rightnow with a job I have with
someone who's we're basicallyreconstructing or reproducing a,
(04:46):
what's the word? I should like aan architectural icon in the
town that this guy puts on afence for. And so we're trying
to make that into a, like aninsert slash phone stand. Yep.
So then. Air, like theprototype. My prototype for that
one, I printed out some of theit has brick, so I had a
(05:07):
filament that has that brickcolor. But I didn't want to go
to full extreme. Let's see whatI could get away with with just
the color and a few bricks,instead of completely one to
one, like recreating the brickscheme. Because, yeah, I don't
know if the nozzle is going tobe able to handle that, but I
think for me, for for my thoughtprocess, was something like
(05:29):
that. It's run some prototypesquick. That's not even the final
part, just certain features thatyou're interested
in. Oh yeah, even, even just forfit and function, like cut up
your model in different partsjust to make sure this one part
of it fits or functions like itshould, too, yeah, especially if
it's a big part, you know, allthat print hours or what if you
(05:52):
got a print failure? Yeah, thatprototyping time was wasted just
when you're trying to see if onefeature worked,
yeah, yeah. And that kind ofgoes back to, like, your your
point about the putting too manyparts on a bed, or, like, if, if
you're trying to mass produce,you start adding more than one
part, there is a line where,like, if I print more than
these, just one of those partskills the entire print. And with
(06:16):
the with the print time you'retalking about. So prototypes are
going to be either durable, sothey got to be strong, which
means they're going to bebigger, or they have a lot of
different colored aspects tothem. So those things add time.
And so if you're in for 24 to 48hour prototype, which isn't even
the worst case scenario forprint time or prototype like
(06:37):
you're gonna you, you could go awhole day or two without having
anything to show for your work.And so that's, I think, where we
find the magic in what can weget away with and still learn in
the process of it?
Yeah, and some of the like, ifyou are printing a bunch on the
print bed nowadays, some of theprinters are good that they
(06:57):
might catch a failure, and youcan skip that one part, and
maybe you can salvage, you know,the rest that are in the build
plate,
like a bamboo,
yeah, the bamboos have it. Ithink some of the CReality and
some of the other ones have ittoo. It's nice because you'll
do, you know, we'll do thespaghetti detection, so we'll
see the fail print. Actually, onthe process, you can do it too.
(07:20):
Now, at least on the Excel, youcan select part by file name and
skip that one if you see afailure. So wow, that helps a
lot when you're producing a lotof them, because you know you're
printing thin, tall parts, youcould all suddenly just have one
get knocked over. Yep, happensall. And then what if you don't?
(07:40):
You know, if the printer doesn'tcatch it, or you don't catch it,
maybe you can salvage some ofthe parts. But you, you know, if
you're trying to print a bunchof them, it's a long print. You
wasted a lot of time and a lotof material. So we, we'll
probably do a topic on thislater, but how, how dumb the
printers are? Yes, right now,right?
They, they really are when youthink about what they could do.
(08:02):
Yes, yeah, it made me think of apart that had failed. And I'm
sure everyone has a story whereyou print a really tall part,
maybe more than one of them, butlet's say it fails at a certain
layer. You've got half of thispart is beautiful, and then
you're just sitting there going,what layer was that on? You
know, instead of actually, like,counting the layers, because
sometimes that's there's just noway you'd figure it out. Maybe
(08:24):
you get a feature that's nearthat, so you kind of, like,
estimate, that's part oftroubleshooting. And like,
salvaging a job that fails, likenew users of printing run up
against and deal with, andthat's when they learn that
situation. But it's notsomething anyone ever expects
they'd have to do when they
Yeah, I think, like you said,with the layer height too,
because if you're printing abunch of parts, and then you do
(08:46):
have some type of failure, like,okay, we're at this layer
height. What? What part of thetool, path or part settings
caused that error? You know, wasit something weird with
supports, material built up? AmI not doing a Z hop? You should
definitely do Z hops when you'reprinting multiple parts, when
you're going between the parts.So it's like, and what's the
(09:06):
reason for that? Yeah, so youknow, well, either it'll let the
nozzle drop the bed, dependingon your printer, but you're
going between your parts, you'remaking sure if you do have any
material sticking up, the nozzlewon't slam into a part.
It's gonna, it's gonna print onthat one part. And then, without
the Z hop, where it it, thenozzle goes up, or the bed goes
down, yeah, it goes away. It'snot gonna drag the part, which
(09:31):
might have, like a really thinor delicate,
yeah, and even the, you know,unless you tell in the settings,
the nozzle will just blastthrough any parts, unless you go
into the settings and say, hey,when you're traveling around,
not printing, make sure you goaround the part. So there are
settings where you can say, hey,don't cross other models when
(09:52):
you're traveling. Yeah. Sothere's different settings like
that when you are printingmultiple, multiple parts that
you might have to consider. Oreven just the build up material,
or how the nozzle is gettingcleaned, if you are doing
filament swaps or differentthings, or like pet cheese, a
big one, where the material canbuild up on the nozzle, even if
(10:12):
you're just printing multipleparts and not swapping or
anything, yeah, you can stilland you and your flow is right,
you can still have a little bitof material build up on the
nozzle, which can sometimesbecome a problem further in the
print. So it's learning andknowing what's going to cause
the problems, and then adjustingas much as you can the settings.
So yeah, you can print as muchof the same file over and over
(10:35):
again without having failures,without wasting time, without
wasting material, right?
Well, and that's a great I lovethat segue, because I think it
we could do this. We wrote downa bunch of ideas for, like, what
it is to go from scalingprototype to scaling production.
For each one of these, we shouldtalk about what's acceptable for
a prototype and what'sacceptable for production,
(10:57):
because I think there's a lotthat we could just pull from
there. So like, first of all,like a prototyping part, like
what you were describing, that'sa perfectly acceptable thing
with, with the nozzle stuff andbatch printing, it's almost good
to prototype the batch printingbefore you get fully to the
production. Because Absolutely,that's the that's acceptable in
(11:19):
the prototyping phase to hashout if
you, if you can with a client,or if you are in your own
company doing this, it's goodto, you know, print maybe 10 or
20 models. So the batch of yourbatch printing file, yeah, and
then bring it to your client, orthe rest of engineering team is
gonna be using and say, Hey, canyou test these? Is this
(11:41):
acceptable? You know, get theokay from the people that are
getting the parts. To get theOkay, like, run, you know, run
with it and keep printing asmuch as you can. But yeah, it is
good to get the approval of theprototype and then get the
approval of, like, initial batchprint, which with settings that
you think are good and the partsare looking good, just to even
(12:02):
you might go and change somesettings to get the batch
printing working well and timeefficient, and less supports, or
whatever it is, less postprocessing, they might bring the
client and pieces and fittingright or right. It doesn't quite
have the same esthetic you wantit or something. So it's you
gotta keep that communicationbetween your your clients or the
(12:24):
other team open through theentire process. Yeah, yeah.
100% 100% um, so let's, let'stalk. So like, let's say you get
a a model from a customer, andyour your task is, like, we're
going to prototype this, butwe'd like to eventually produce
(12:47):
a lot of these, yeah. How wouldyou approach with the model, the
prototyping phase and then thethe production phase and kind of
like, tie in, like, design formanufacturing, that's also in,
yeah.
So at least for me, a lot oftime I'm actually designing the
parts myself. But even if they,you know, customer comes to me
with a part that I could edit,you know, I usually do look at
(13:12):
it from a design additivemanufacturing first and say,
Hey, can we know, I'll probablygive a list of suggestions,
saying, Hey, can we do this? Canwe do that? Yeah, to not only
make it a better part, have itstronger for three to printing,
but make it easier to print lesspost processing, less supports
all that stuff. So usually I'llmake some suggestions. If it's
(13:33):
good, I'll edit it, and thenI'll prototype it. So like, if
it's a big part or differentthings, I might not do a lot of
outside layers as much as Iwould for the real part, or as
much in fill, probably use lessmaterial, try to print as fast
as possible for them, but at thesame time, it's kind of like
sometimes I'll add more time tothe print because I don't
(13:55):
necessarily care about the printtime, but I want to make sure
the part comes out well, right?Also, maybe I will be more on
the conservative side with thesupports or the settings and
stuff, not tune it in as finelyas possible, because I don't
want to spend time printing abunch of stuff and tuning it in
and have it turns out it's notthe customer wanted, right? You
(14:17):
tune in and you scrape more timeand get it more perfect when
you're in the batch andmanufacturing phase.
Yeah, and it's interesting,because I think, I think
everyone has their their ownapproach, but like, the things
you're talking about are pretty,pretty general, like, good
things to consider. Yeah, I do.I do find this just might be the
(14:38):
prototypes that I work with. Itactually ends up some of the
time being cheaper, just toprint out something early on in
the prototype phase, justbecause I learned so much about
what I need for the productionside of things, yes, or seeing
that part print, or, like,seeing how the part quality is,
and knowing you know what theway we're doing. Doing that
(15:00):
isn't, isn't going to work like,I think this one, this James
Webb model, is like, a perfectexample of that process of like,
I haven't seen, like, a reallyhigh quality version of this 3d
printed. If I'm going to makethese to sell these online, what
do I have to figure out? Andthat was a very this was a very
challenging version of that,because a lot of it had to be in
(15:22):
the printing stage, because Ihad, in this case, print the
whole thing in one piece, inmulti color. So I did spend a
lot of time and filament doingthat, and I I was testing how
good is my hardware? Yeah, whichisn't usually a problem that
most people like try to do, butI like the pain of the process.
(15:44):
So it is what it is. It's justwhen you win in that kind of a
scenario, you can really unlock,and I know that's not most
people's scenarios here.
Yeah. I think the advantage ofthrough printing, because you
can just design it, print it sofast, right? Yeah, I try to get
even if it's, you know, even ifthe design is not fully done or
(16:06):
something, I try to get itprinted as soon as possible, so
the client can just have myideas. Is this, right? Is, is
this what we're trying to gethere? Yes. If it's not, we go,
we can, you know, quickly, goback to the design board and
iterate quickly, but I thinkit's a lot of people haven't
used three different technology,yeah, so it's nice to get them
(16:27):
apart and say, my massmanufacturing is going to look
better, but this is kind of howit's going to end up looking.
And they have a general idea ofwhat to expect, yeah, out of the
process, which is really good,because then, if it's not what
they want, you know, maybe athree printing is not the right
thing, or you have to changesomething, but at least they
they know what to expect, rightand how we might want to move
(16:51):
forward, so we're not wastingtime designing when, you know
this isn't exactly what theywanted and stuff
totally Yeah, And that's, thebalance of of having a customer
and, you know, providing aservice for them. It's just like
you're talking about somethingthat's very important that I
think a good amount of peoplestarting off with printing
struggle with, which is thatwhen you're hired to 3d print
(17:15):
something, the the more time youcan spend on focusing on what
they want instead of maybe howyou would do it, yeah? Because
then your job, once you knowwhat they want, is how to do it,
and if you set thoseexpectations up ahead of time,
the whole process is so muchbetter for everybody involved.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Let'ssee here. So I was trying to You
(17:36):
brought so many good things inthat just like the difference
between prototypes and an actualproduction. So we could, you
know, settings we talked about alittle bit already, filament, I
think for me, oh yeah, startingwith PLA or something very cheap
and something you can print fastis perfectly acceptable, you
know, because we live in a worldof multi color parts, you know,
(17:58):
like this. But like, not everyprototype needs to be multi
colored. In fact, you probablyshouldn't color the prototype
like at all, because you'rejust, you're getting the fit in
the form, and how well do thosesettings work? It's almost like
getting, like a temperature,like a reading on, like, how
close are we to actually?
Yeah, you're you're initiallyfocusing on the design, yes. So
(18:23):
like, definitely print with PLAfirst, especially if, you know,
maybe it is a real engineeringpart, so you have to do
something that's harder toprint, like polycarbonate or
inexpensive, right at theexpense, yes, right? Or even,
you know, maybe even doing apeak and all temp part, or
something crazy. But it's like,let's get the general design and
(18:44):
fit and kind of function how itworks and looks out of the way,
and say, Yes, this is, this iswhat we want. And then you can
kind of tackle, you know, okay,how am I gonna print this in
this hardware engineeringmaterial? Because they're, you
know, some of them are morechallenging to print. You have
to think more about warping indifferent things. But, you know,
(19:08):
you know, some design, you'reprinting five prototypes, and
you don't want to print that insome of these materials. Doesn't
cost you a lot. Oh, yeah, soyou're, you know, you're talking
about maybe the last fewprototypes are in the real
material, because then, youknow, then they can take it
home, and actually, you know,maybe they're using it with
(19:29):
chemicals, they're using it withhigh temperature, different
things. And then, you know, theycan functionally test it more in
that aspect. But yeah, usually,as long as you know a material
is going to function. How youneed it for their environment?
You focus on the design first,and then you say, hey, just use
some cheap PLA right?
Totally, totally, yeah. And Ithink there's a whole because if
(19:53):
it the other thing I think thatpeople run into is they when
it's not a. Brand new part thathasn't been made before, and
you're prototyping, maybereproducing a part, but using
three printing, a lot of theexpectations are like an
injection molded part orsomething that was machined. So
that gets even more tricky,because the prototype may cause
(20:17):
the customer, who's like, brandnew to 3d printing, to kind of
back off and go, oh, there'slike, when you make the
prototype, they're like, that'snot what I was looking for at
all. Yeah, exactly. And that,that becomes a really
interesting dynamic when you'reworking with somebody on how to
get them past the prototype andto, like, you know, you hit the
nail on the head. Like you it'sthe expense, the whole thing,
(20:41):
you know, I'm making thisprototype, but in order for us
to move through the process,let's do this quick and cheap,
because it's going to cost youmore if, if we do it in
something else,
yeah, good. Even if the customeris used to the machine materials
or injection molding, right? Andyou give them the part, then you
(21:01):
can kind of do the back andforth with them, saying, you
know, what? About how it'smanufactured? Do you not like
here? Because, you know, some ofthe things that people don't
like about the reprinting can beactually somewhat adjusted in
the printing process or postprocessing. So it's like, yeah,
you don't completely outrule thetechnology, because there is
(21:23):
ways around it to make sure itfits what your customers are
expecting on the part, right?
No, totally, totally. And Ithink the cool thing about when
you go through that process,especially when it's the first
time this model is being 3dprinted like it's not and not no
printing process, or evenmanufacturing process is
(21:45):
perfect. But I think that's anexpectation that people have
Yes. And one of the importantthings that I always like doing,
unless it's prohibitive cost andtime wise, is to print apart,
because you're also learning howthe machine is going to handle
this that you're going toeventually go to production
(22:05):
with. So there's so many subtlethings, like walls being
thicker, holes being smaller,and just like the overall
dimensions of the part you'regetting a gage on. Like, the
good thing is, you can adjustthat afterwards. You designed it
as three inches, but it comesout as 2.9 well, you can then
(22:27):
make the model point one more,and that's and then you print
it, and then you check it again.And then within two prototypes,
you can get that perfect,essentially, almost,
you know, the sort of processfor three printing so much
faster than the subtractiveprocesses of manufacturing? So
it's like, it's when you, whenyou get to a decent prototype. I
(22:49):
sometimes just encourage mycustomer, put, you know, put as
much through space as possible,try to break it. You know, if
it, if it doesn't hold up to howyou think it should. You know,
there's tons of stuff we can doto, you know, make it stronger,
yeah, yeah. And the ones thatcan document it failing and give
us pictures and, you know, getas involved as possible in that
(23:13):
that gives us so muchinformation to work on, yes, you
know. And then the cool thingis, once you're in the 3d
printed thing, and this is moreyour expertise, then you apply
the material science on itright? Go from a PLA to a peak,
and the part becomes almostindestructible in most uses of
the part, you know, it's like,it's really something, but go
(23:36):
off on it, because
even the right making sure youpick the right material for the
application. I've had customerswork with other companies, and
you know, they're printing withthe wrong orientation, or
they're printing with the wrongmaterial for the environment. So
it's like, and then you know,even you know, there's subtle
intricacies between some of thedifferent materials, where, if
(23:57):
you want more strength or morelayers on all this, there's some
tricks that, either, you know,dehydration or doing thicker
line widths, or different thingsyou can actually do, yeah, to
utilize the material more andget more out of it.
But surface finish too,
right? Yeah, yeah. So that's avery point surface finish too.
(24:19):
So even, like, right, some stuffyou want texture so, like, even
using the fuzzy setting in someof these slicers help, you know,
heights in the layer lines, butalso gives a different type of
part to a customer. And true,but yeah, the it's when you go
into the more engineering, even,like, just poly carbon or nylon
(24:41):
and stuff like that. As a thiscan be a completely different
wheelhouse sometimes than PLA,yes, speed you print it, how you
print it. And they'll have some,you know, little tricks on how
you can, how you can improve theprocess, especially, or if
you're slicing specific.Basically, for that part,
(25:01):
there's different things you cantweak in the slicer to give you
a better outcome in the strongerpart too.
Yeah, no, absolutely. You know,I think we both worked on the
engineering side of things, sothere's kind of choices that
were kind of met with all thetime. So there's a lot of things
that are just kind of like, Ohyeah, you do this, you do this.
But with, I think, some of ourwork, especially nowadays, a lot
(25:24):
of it's more cosmetic or Uberspecific to a very specific
material type. Like, yeah, couldyou talk about some of the just
talk about some of the basicmaterials and, like, what they
might be good for and tradeoffs, like, start with PLA and
yeah, just roll with it.
PLA is definitely like theeasiest to print somebody. Good
(25:46):
for quick prototypes. It's goodfor a lot of fidget stuff and
esthetic models, right? Good forcolor, multi color. Good for, oh
yeah, great for color, yeah. Sothat's kind of the wheelhouse
that's in. What is it bad atit's, well, it's actually pretty
stiff for not having any fibersor other things in it. It's
actually a pretty stiffmaterial. But no, in terms of
(26:12):
higher engineering strength,you're not going to get that PLA
it's gonna shatter. It's gonnashatter. Yeah, it's very
brittle. You don't get it's notgonna be able to stand a lot of
heat. Has less less toughness orimpact strength.
Not an outdoor material,
not an outdoor Oh yeah, it'sgoing to degrade in the sun. The
color is going to degrade andget more brittle. Yeah. So I'd
(26:34):
say, like, the next tier fromthat would probably be like a
pet G, back in the day, it usedto be, I'd say, like an ABS,
yep, but a lot of people haveturned away from ABS because of
the warping, the printabilityand the fumes. Yeah. And right
now, pet trees are really goodalternative and replacement for
that. So your pet tree will be alittle more UV resistant. It'll
(26:59):
be better outdoors. It'll be alittle bit better with the water
it is. It can't absorb a numberof water, yeah, um, so
definitely had to pre dry whileI'm printing, yeah, a large
translucent stuff.
Translucent stuff is almost aeven in even translucent PLA and
translucent pet G, it's almostlike a different plastic, yeah,
(27:21):
printing it,
it's crazy. Yeah, I wouldn'tthink of that immediately.
Well, it's like, you know whatyou think about materials, to
get the colors, to get some ofthe properties, to get some your
PLA Pro, or your patchy Pro, ordifferent things, to putting
additives in it, right? So, likesome of the lower gray plastics
have more additives and lesspure plastic. So there's that
(27:46):
interesting trade off, and howadditives might affect in a good
way or a bad way, the propertiesof the material so petty will
be, you know, a lot morefunctional parts, parts that
might see a little bit abuseparts, I've seen more
environment stuff, yeah,
and that's why it's so good tostart with the PLA because it's
(28:08):
such a well used material, it'sunderstood pretty well, and it's
cheap and you can print it fast,so like, you don't have to deal
with a lot of the problems youmight have To deal with at the
PETG or higher, yes, becausethere, we don't know all the
things about those materialsyet. And once you get past pet
(28:30):
G, it starts to get where yourprototyping time. If you choose
to use that material first,yeah, to eat you apart, because
you're actually dealing with thematerial and not a prototype.
Yeah, you're fighting thematerial versus fighting the
design 100% Yeah, and you'd beunless you have very specific,
(28:50):
unless the client has veryspecific requirements, you can,
I mean, PLA is pretty decentnow,
like you can play, plus there'ssome extra strength and stuff
you can get
away with using PLA for a lot ofparts, unless there's certain
environmental conditions andworking conditions, yeah, from
there, you know, you got yourabs, your ASA, some, some of the
(29:12):
stuff that's sometimes you'lluse it, I probably move closer
to more polycarbonate. You get alot of strength for how cheap.
It's not cheap, but, you know,yeah, you still get a lot of
strength for the price you butyou do need to take in
consideration warping anddifferent
stuff. Yeah? Polycarbonate, atleast from my memory, I don't
(29:34):
remember ever choosing itbecause of the potential fumes,
yeah, but also the, I don'tthink material, I don't think
printers, at that time were evencapable of it, before the, like,
the all metal hot ends, or,like, some of the the 250 C to
250 C on a pretty printer was,like a was, like an expansion
point of all the stuff. Yeah,yeah. That was a an era,
(29:58):
for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And youneed the enclosure, yeah, right,
heated bed, especially for thepolycarbonate, even the ASA and
abs, right? You need a decentenclosure to keep it warm in
there, to prevent warping, yeah,and to get good, decent layer
tuition, Yep, yeah. Thenthere's, you know, a lot. What's
really popular right now isnylon, especially with fibers,
(30:22):
yes, but even nylon you get,it's actually a lot better than
it used to be. All used to be alot harder to print. Mm, hmm,
there's a lot. They even havesome, you know, some of the
nylon builds even absorb lesswater. So it's you have to worry
a little bit less about itabsorbing too much water and not
be able to print with that.
(30:42):
Well, I remember, this is, likethe tall man material. You
remember the tall Yeah, alloy,like that was a very interesting
nylon, and they were a bunch ofdifferent ones that you could
get for different types ofthings. I think I made a
prototype of it was, it was formy friend, like the bottom of
the ski pole, that little, yeah,art, um, I had made a
(31:04):
replacement for him, and I usedthat, that nylon for that. But
just like you said, it was, itwas a struggle, and, like, it
was getting it to adhere on thebed and then to itself, yes, was
always like a struggle. And itfelt like, anytime you opened up
a bag of that stuff, yeah, thebest print you got was from the
very beginning, and then youcould never dry it out enough
(31:26):
for it to get good. But now,especially the stuff with the
fibers, it's really come a longway where it it seems,
anecdotally, even though I'vegot a lot of time with these
harder materials, with withfibers, it seems the fibers
actually help against theproblems of these materials.
And that's, I mean, that's oneof the reasons a lot of people
(31:47):
are adding fibers to filaments.Right now, it is a little bit,
you know, of a craze, and it'soverblown, but it does help in
certain ways, but it's not,yeah, I think people think the
part is going to be strongerthan they actually are by adding
fibers. Yeah, but yeah, I thinkthe overall grade and how the
processing the nylon and makingthese filaments are much better
than back in the day, likenormal people can kind of print
(32:08):
the nylon now and back in theday it was is much more of a
struggle. And the it's since thenylon can be pretty cheap now
and easier to print. You know,it's, it's almost the next thing
people print with besides PLAbecause it's, it's almost the
opposite of PLX you get, youknow, nylon is not brittle,
(32:29):
right? It's going to takeimpacts. It's, you know, you can
form it on the ground and startgoing to break and stuff. So,
yeah, that's kind of almost thenext step people take in terms
of material,
that's crazy. Now art, do youthink those people are actually
have a ventilation setup, or isit just kind of like, is this,
(32:50):
is this hobbyist that you seethis, or
deny one? Yeah, no, I just it's,you know, it's, I think it's
people that have more of theenclosures and a little bit,
maybe one step higher than,okay, like your cheaper
printers,
yeah. Cuz I remember in theearly days when people were
(33:12):
using ABS and PLA, there's a lotof people printing abs in there.
It was like, oh, no, get thatstuff out of there. I mean, it
smelled terrible, so it's notlike it you weren't aware of it.
But yeah, boy, is it not goodfor you?
Not good? Yeah, it releases alot more VOCs than a lot of the
other printing plastics, thanASA too,
(33:34):
yes, and that's why I never usedas a even though I think it'd be
really good for like, outdoor.
Yeah, it is. That's likeanything with the styrene,
that's what you're that'ssmelling again, byproducts of,
yikes, cool. Okay, so thoseCylon and and fibers inside,
(33:57):
that's kind of one stage,
yeah, and then even, well, thenfor a complete of time, material
people are printing with TPU nowa lot more too. Yes, yes, that's
a fun one. I mean, it is, I'dsay it's still, they're making a
lot more printable, but still alittle bit of a challenge or
different, I guess, compared toPLI or some of the other ones
(34:20):
and slower, but you can get, youknow, for soft, semi soft
prints, it's, it's cool materialfor a lot of different things.
Yeah, I've seen people do softrobotics with the more like
elastic robotics, yeah, um, Ithanks to you. This, this
prototype here that we made inthat TV, you foam. Oh yeah, the
(34:42):
super interesting,
very short, yeah, exactly, greatcosplaying material.
It's really like amazing, like,just the it's rebound to its
original shape. It feels likesomething I could buy, like a
backpack, almost like a. Like, afake leather, Oh, yeah. And, but
(35:04):
talk more about that. And, like,how, because it used to be that
there was just, kind of,everyone would say there's
different durometers or, like,different, what's the word I'm
looking for, springiness orsoftness that you can Yeah,
softness, yeah. But it wasn'tlike it was available, like,
there wasn't, like, a wide rangeof them available from every
(35:24):
person. It was, like, thisperson's was harder than this
person's and this, yeah, therewas, like, two bendy so I
couldn't do anything with it.
Yeah. I mean, was like, mostlycoming out of ninja flex, right?
Yes, yep. So, like, I thinkthey're, you know, a couple,
their first ones around the 90 Adurometer. And then, you know,
(35:44):
they got much lower. I think the
Yeah, went lower first, yeah.But, like,
you could count as many, as manyon one hand as the printers that
could print that chinchilla.Chinchilla, yes, it was super
hard to feed.
Yeah, that's that's a majordownside. And struggle with TPU
is your extruder might not be or
(36:08):
it might it has to be of acertain drama to be able to push
it through. Yeah, exactly. Andthen people will come up with
mods so like, there's less gapswithin the extruder for the
because that stuff will justescape, right, right, find its
way out. So, like, actually havea mod for the Excel that tries
to close the path as much aspossible so that I can escape.
(36:31):
That's cool. So it's, you'realmost like limited durometer
for TPU, because you have to beable to push it through and feed
it through the extruder. That'swhere, like,
you can't, you can't push arope, as they say.
So that's where, kind of the,well, and a lot of printers now
are direct drive to which helps,yes, TPU. But then that's where,
(36:53):
like, the very short productcomes in, right? You can
actually get lower durometerdepending on the temperature
you're printing it right, right?So you can kind of scale it and
get lower durometer than you getwith other materials.
Yeah. So up here I had, like,changed the the temperature, so
I believe this was pretty cold,so it's a lot harder. Yep. And,
(37:16):
like, here it was hotter, andI've got, you know, so much
flexibility here that it'sreally,
it's really something. And theWhat I also like about the
material is you can post processit with fire a little bit. Yeah,
you're getting kind of nicefinish. It easily cleans up any
(37:36):
stringing this. You can actuallyget almost, almost a shininess
to it afterwards. It's reallyinteresting.
So what's, what's the actionthere? Is it? Is it? I think
it's an animal that's notburning off. It's turning into
gas as it's printing.
Well, I think it also kind of,because it's, you're printed
that material, you're foamingit,
(37:57):
right? And I think they're obingis carbon dioxide. I think
that's releasing.
I am not actually sure on thatone. Think
I looked into this the vijoshi,but we can, we can add this
later, but yeah, that'll beinteresting. There's something
that's creating the foamingaction. And the higher, yeah,
the more foaming you get.
And I think when you're hittingthe fire, actually closing the
(38:19):
cells, you're getting more of aflatter surface. It's just
giving you that shine. Wow,that's cool, yeah, and then you
can probably paint it a littlebit easier, or get a better
surface finish than you know,that dull foam look porous,
yeah, that porous look Yeah,exactly, yeah. So that's, that's
(38:43):
an interesting material, more ofa there's some industrial
applications, but it's, it'smore of an interesting side, and
especially with, like, you know,more of these printers are now
coming out with multiplematerials. So now you can
incorporate your soft materialswith your hard materials, which
is
really fun. Yep, I know I haddone in the shoes, the shoe, I
was just gonna say that. Yeah,no, the shoes have been very
(39:06):
interesting to watch people, andthis is on social media that I'm
seeing this, but people justprinting TPU shoes, like Croc
knockoffs or whatever. But,yeah, it's, it's interesting
that people are just threeprinting shoes, like, I don't
know how good they're gonna holdup, or anything like that. Those
are mostly with like onedurometer across the whole
(39:27):
print, or something like this.When you think about what it
could do for the shoe industryor the cosplay industry, and if
you start, if you learn thematerial enough, you've
prototyped with it, you'veplayed with it, and you're
setting up a job for production.Like, it was interesting with
this, I was testing, I wasproto. I had to do it very
(39:47):
quickly. So I had, I decided toprint a very small version and
test just like, multipletemperatures to get a gage on.
Like, what? Yeah, it was. Then Iwent a little bit bigger, and
then I print. Did the wholething. That is not, I would not
do that with a customer, but forme, totally fine, because I
(40:07):
needed to get it done in timefor New York Comic
Con. Some of the shoes, theyactually are adjusting the
temperature for the durometer.That's cool. We're adjusting,
like the walls or infill, toadjust the softness too.
That the walls in the infill, Ithink, is, this is the first
time I've seen the materialscience version of applying
that, where, usually, like,you're saying it's a setting
(40:30):
based thing where, like, certaintypes of infills can give you
more bounce on gyroid is moreflexible than, say, gyroid or
something like that. No, notgyroid. Cubic. Cubic, yeah, or
triangles, or whatever else.Most of those are usually hard,
just good for some stuff, butnot necessarily, like a shoe,
yeah? But yeah, we could. Wecould totally dive into that a
(40:53):
whole other day. But above that,you're kind of after the TPUs,
and even in TPU, you're kind ofin the exotic material, but past
that, you're really inspecialized area where you're
only going to use that for apurpose, because it's either
extremely hard to deal with,expensive or both, and
(41:15):
you're usually not on consumeror grade printers.
No, yeah. Yeah. So then it thethe expense of this material,
then just goes up like crazy.Because once you go into the
industrial side of things,you're talking basically five
figures or more for the hardwarealone. And if you're
(41:40):
it's exponential with the costof the printer and the cost of
materials.
Yep, yep, that, that materialgoes from 25 for like a spool of
one kilogram PLA, it goes up to50 for half a kilogram, you
know, or, sorry, 500 I mean, itjust,
it can go. It
(42:02):
can go real crazy. And that'sjust the material,
yeah. And usually that material,it's print a lot slower, uh huh.
So even the print times, and youknow, if, if you fail, you're
spending, you're putting, soyou're sending in so much more
money, yeah, into theprototypes, or the production
parts, 100%
and so, like, that's where we'vereally honed our our skills,
(42:25):
because we've had to deal withprototyping and building parts
on mass with these moreexpensive materials. So like,
we've just felt the burn ofthose things.
It's It's surprising the youknow, the material science of it
has gotten so much better. So alot of, most of these parts are
done, printed in altem or peak,very expensive materials are
(42:48):
very specific. I'd say, youknow, 99% of parts that you
might through to print areperfectly fine with, you know,
the probably, I'd say, the midlevel of, yeah, engineering
grade plastics, which I'd sayalmost all can be printed on
some of these good consumerprinters now, which is crazy,
(43:09):
you know, it
really is. Yeah, it makes youthink about how much, and I
think this is why we're both weboth have the businesses that we
have, how much the industry andthe people using threed
printers, how much learningthere is still to be done, even
something as seemingly obviousas like prototyping and not
wanting to spend too much moneyand but if you, if you don't
(43:30):
have any idea about this stuff,and you just jump in, or you get
hired from a company, and, yeah,they want the project to go,
which is, I think what happensmost of the time is people jump
in, they get a 3d printer, andthey want to go to the moon.
They want to they want to getthis project done ASAP. And then
that's where I think so much ofthe problem happens, where an
(43:51):
operator comes in, startsworking on this industrial
printer, is working with thisindustrial material and trying
to do something that it's notnecessarily made to do or needs
prototyping, and that linebetween a prototype and a
product is blurred, and then itgets real ugly. When you've
(44:11):
you've wasted a bunch ofmaterial and time, you don't
have anything, yeah, the, youknow, it's a show for it, you
know? Yeah, that's where I thinka lot of people get set back,
especially companies trying toimplement this in their own
business.
No, it can. It can take a lot oftime, a lot of money to even try
to prove the concept of thepart, or prove that, hey, you
(44:35):
can three print this. You canuse this material so this, you
know, it can almost be a timeand cost sunk, and you never,
sometimes you never get anythingout of it, because it's just you
don't get to the stage with thecustomer. Or they're like, Okay,
yes, this is this what we want,this what we need. That's, you
know, go through with it. Yeah.So people will chase, chase
(44:57):
these clients, and lot of themwill get nowhere. And. Spend a
lot of money and time trying toacquire them,
yeah, trying to see if there'sanything else we can touch on. I
think this has been great. Ithink we touched on so many good
things about this, and just thestruggle of, or in the art of
going from a prototype to a
production, even, like, I think,like you said about, you know,
(45:20):
just giving someone a 30printer, like I've even if you
give, you know, a person that'snot a three printing, person A
printer, and give them the filesthat you've tested and saying,
Hey, you can mass produce thispart with this file, with this
printer, with this material, youthink you'd get the same result
(45:43):
as what you'd get, but you don'talways like even just you know,
how you utilize the printer, howyou treat the printer, how do
you store the materials, justprinter to
printer, manufacturing. Yeah,
there's so many different themaintenance, the upkeep, how you
handle the build plate, how youclean the build like there's so
many different intricacies thatyou can't just hand someone the
(46:09):
printer and the working file andexpect the same results.
Yeah, it would be great. It
would Yeah, right, it comesthrough. You still need, it's
still a piece of equipment. Youstill need a train technician.
Yep, yep, something we've bothrubbed up against many times.
Yeah, no, it's and thisprototyping to production part
(46:32):
is, I think, really important,because so many people are
looking to 3d printing to make abusiness
or to, yeah, it's an easy upsmall upfront cost. It's, most
people think it's easy to getinto when you get from prototype
to production. And you know,with some of the new printers,
(46:55):
bamboo lab and other stuff,where you can print in
engineering grade materials atvery upfront, low cost. It's,
it's, it's easy to get into, youknow,
yeah, yeah. And, you know, ifthey stick into it long enough,
they can, they can really makesomething that's, that's
incredible. I mean, some of thestuff that I work with people
(47:16):
on, even if it, you know, justbringing an idea into reality
with 3d printing is is somethingthat's a joy of both ours and
this idea like this is where themoney is, as far as like the
value, I should say, not, notthe money. The value is
(47:38):
understanding how to go throughthat and go from idea to final
part. And that's a lot of whatwe talked about today, all the
different areas that you need toconsider, yeah, where things can
kind of go off the rails.
And, I mean, that's where,that's why most of my clients
turn to me, is exactly for thatwe can, I can get you through
(48:01):
that whole product developmentstage and get your parts
afterwards, you know, yeah, so,
and it gets more and morereliable, like, the deeper that
you go into it and invest intoit, yeah. But I think that's
good for today. Man, yeah, yeah,conversation. All right, tell
everybody where they can findyou niche.io.
(48:22):
Uh, Matthew, Guy on LinkedIn,
perfect. I am at AG, 3dprinting.com EG, 3d printing on
Instagram and the AG, 3d partdetective on LinkedIn. On you
can check me out, Alex, yourfinals on LinkedIn as well. If
you're looking for any kind ofheart success, service, design,
prototyping, production, you'vegot niche product
(48:45):
development, product
development, you've got nicheyou've got AG, 3d and the part
detective. So reach out to us,and this has been layered
insights. Finally, have a name.That's it, folks, thanks for
joining us. Keep printing. Havea good one.
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