Since coming to work at TriMech, I’ve learned a lot about both the CAD industry and the rapid prototyping industry as well. Since becoming the “Expert” on 3-D Printers at TriMech, I have learned a lot about this technology. These machines are capable of a lot, but when it boils down to it, the technology itself is pretty easy to discuss. At a very high level, the benefits of 3D Printing include, but are not limited to the following:
• You can quickly produce prototypes of your models to see if they work as you expect!
• You can modify your model, print it again, and make sure it is ready to be produced!
• You can save valuable time and money whereas previously you might have to send your models off to expensive prototyping shops!
These are the most important benefits and selling points for the Dimension printers that we sell. Every time I go visit a customer who has a Dimension printer, I hear stories about how great of an investment their printer has been. From medical device companies able to put a prototype of a product into a surgeon’s hand before producing it to other industries producing low-volume production runs, it seems like everyone who buys one of these machines gets a great amount of use out of it.
Despite the obvious popularity of the machines, I find myself wondering where the process could go from here- how it could be expanded. A lot of people have seen the Dimension clip with Jay Leno where he uses a printer to create molds to build replacement parts for his old, no longer manufactured cars (if you haven’t seen it, check it out here, it’s actually pretty good). This clip is a great example of taking this technology to the next level beyond “just producing a prototype”
Most engineers know that despite the usefulness and power of CAD software like SolidWorks, sometimes you just can’t get the look and feel right for your designs, especially if the shape is more “organic”. But what if you already had a mock-up of a product, created by hand, and you needed to carry that concept through to actual production? With 3DScanning technology, you could scan the model and then send the part right into your CAD system. From there, you could use SolidWorks to create the mold around the part. In the last and final step, you would use the Dimension printer to create the mold for production runs, or simply to produce “X” number of low volume production parts from the original scan.
I’ve just scratched the surface of what can be accomplished with a Dimension 3D Printer. I think we are at a point in this product’s life cycle very similar to 20-30 years ago with Plotters. Back then, large plotters were sometimes viewed by engineering departments as “nice to have”. Pretty soon, their adoption rates made it pretty obvious that to generate the drawings from all electronic files we were rapidly creating, the plotter was going to be a necessity. This is the simple evolution of a next step, we’ve just added the third-dimension to the plot. Pretty soon, I believe these printers will be integral to every engineering department and down the road, companies will wonder how they ever functioned without them.
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