I'm an injection molding process technician who also has several 3D printers..... As someone that's very familiar with both ends of the spectrum this is a flat out lie. I'm currently on a 4400 ton machine right now typing this waiting for the 119 zones of hotrunners to heat up. there's not a 3D printer on Earth that could come close to matching this performance or speed.
I was going to say something similar. I can't see a 3d printer ever being able to spit out pieces at the capacity and speed injection molding does. Like Bic pens, that's never, ever going to be more efficient than injection molding.
That holds true if the high unit volume object is NOT required to iterate, or change frequently, say for example plastic ball point pen barrels, plastic lighter housings, or plastic disposable utensils, or other such items. For those applications injection moulding is unbeatable. Where 3D printing beats injection moulding is for small to medium runs of many similar, but non-identical objects. It would be prohibitively expensive to have 10 different moulds machined for 10 objects of medium volume production runs instead of producing the objects with 3D printers.
Let's compare dollar for dollar though. An injection molding machine might cost the same as a farm of 100 printers. The printers can print anything in any quantity on demand.
@@stevenmcculloch5727 Injection molding can stamp out arbitrary complex pieces at the rate of 10s of thousands an hour. 100 3d printers can't come close to that. How much would a pen cap be if it was 3d printed? It's such a simple piece and yet 3d printing it would be a pain, maybe print 500 of them in an hour with 100 printers. Then you have to check for errors, fix broken prints, keep the print heads maintained, and so on. And in all that time a factory in France has spat out 10k Bic pen caps and the die mold has paid for itself a million times over.
@@stevenmcculloch5727 also, show me a hundred 3d printers that could print one precision Lego brick in 3 seconds. I'll show you a production die that can make 500 in 3 seconds. Now show me a polypropylene chair seat made in 10 seconds. The list goes on.
I work with a lot of the largest injection mold manufacturers in the world and have single molds producing millions of parts a day. I can't even fathom how big a 3d printing operation would need to be to keep up with one mold.
Not a chance, scale is absolutely a factor for a wide variety of plastic parts, and the design does not change or need to change once it is established. The last injection molding shop that I worked at we had three 64 cavity molds running 24/7 365 days a year to keep up with demand. In a single day we could produce over 1.5 million parts from these 3 machines alone. You're talking about a specific subset of the consumer market and ignoring a large portion of the injection molding industry. Most injection molding shops aren't making little trinkets to sell on Etsy.
I can assure you there are plenty of things that just dont hold up as 3d prints where injection molding is the answer. Something you sorely missed here: sure with 3D printing you can change something quickly and test it out, but you are only gonna 3D print it to see it in physical form. Once you've 3D Printed the piece you consider final, the design THEN goes to injection. Not try to keep changing and testing molds. 3D printing will complement Injection molding nicely, not replace it. (At least not in its current state.)
Missed points here is isotropic vs anisotropic. Molded parts are isotropic. Second missed point is that 3d printed molds are an option to bring the cost of injection molded parts way down and allow for rapid change because the mold costs are cheap and they wear out faster.
Small brain: 3D printing will replace injection molding Big brain: 3D printing will enhance injection molding A metal-printed mold for large scale production can be produced faster and cheaper than traditionally milled one already, and for small iterative batches resin-printed injection molds are fast and cheap enough even for hobbyists. Between mass production scalability, better mechanical properties and wider material choices, injection molding will be around for a while.
You’re funny, I had an entire paragraph written about how over half the points you made are straight up wrong. “You can change it” are you doing technical drawings or just “guessing” when making your designs? Like there’s a massive difference between prototype and production. If you’ve ever worked with injection moulding you would know that it’s light years faster than 3D printing. Also injection moulding can provide stronger parts than in 3D printing. I seriously have no idea where you’re getting your information other than making it up.
Comparing 3d printers and injection molders is very much like comparing vans to trains. Injection molders are like Trains, which carry a lot of cargo at once and are fuel efficient, but also constrained by the railroads, which cost a lot to build. 3D printers are like vans, which have the flexibility of not being constrained by railroad tracks, but they also have a significantly lower cargo capacity and poor fuel efficiency. Both serve a very similar purpose, yet the one you pick ultimately comes down to the size of the workload. It makes as little sense to run a train that has the van's capacity's worth of cargo on board as it does to use a van to ship the whole train's capacity
I definitely wouldn’t say that 3D printing will REPLACE injection molding, but I understand that your argument is that in most cases it will prevent small businesses from needing to take the extreme step that is injection molding
Yeah - no. FDM and resin processes have an important place in prototyping, but there are some glaring shortcomings in the material properties of the parts produced. As for mass production, its hard to beat the volume and low cost of injection molding. The part's mechanical properties are better (uniform) with IM as well. And, highly precise parts are probably still going to be machined from billets, (can't tell you how many acetal and nylon gears I had to make during my machining career). All the products of engineering are compromises. Its always a case of whether the choices made will meet the mechanical needs of the application.
@@slant3dNope you're wrong, on a manufacturing stand point when mass producing parts or toys, btw over 300 million units of those star wars figures were sold in the 80s not thousands.
As optimistic as I am about the concept of the shelves producing the parts, there are some things that cannot be *FDM* 3D printed, at least with our current machines. Take Lego. They cannot, and will not, change their design to make it more easily mass producible using printing. Changing the design would effectively strip them of all brand identity. Also, Lego will never accept the surface quality that FDM produces, even with the tiniest nozzle and the smallest layer height. Sadly, this isn’t an isolated case. Syringes, as someone else mentioned are in the same boat. Sure, you could insert some kind of plastic bladder inside to make it reliably watertight, but does cost allow it? Probably not. Then there is the problem of large objects. Make them out of several small parts? That will result in seams which are sometimes unacceptable. (I doubt 3D printing will ever get to EDM levels of zero tolerance precision.) With future technology advancements, something like powder bed fusion could maybe work how you are describing. No need for bed adhesion, no need for supports (in sls at least). These processes run into their own challenges of post processing and expensive materials, though. What Slant3D is doing is truly awesome. The number of products that can be mass produced (after tweaks) using FDM is huge. As technology advances constraints such as simple first layers and overhangs will become things of the past. Maybe one day we will even see multi-material (or at least multicolor) mass production. This will make even more products fit for FDM mass production. You make many claims which seem valid. The concept of reducing development costs and eliminating long distance shipping in particular. My suggestion, with admittedly no experience in the field of mass production, is to stop diluting valid, thought provoking ideas, with what I think is hyperbolic misinformation. False claims will make it more difficult to convince people to trust the true ones, so take care.
@valeriyproklov2868 Wholeheartedly agree. I love many of the videos/ideas I get from this channel but they constantly dilute their content with these desperate, half-baked, zero-research, low effort videos. And for what? The sake of releasing a video? To convince some birdbrain client that will believe anything without any evidence? Idk just seems WAY too forced sometimes. Which is unfortunate because they would easily be my favorite 3D printing channel since they actually make unique content and don’t just bow down to the BambuLords like everyone else nowadays. Just wish they did their due diligence more consistently.
@@slant3d The fact that you exist is proof to the argument that no one is debating. There is no doubt that there is a massive number of products that are mass producible using 3D printing. There is no doubt that 3D printing mass production is a valid method and has its own place. This isn’t what we are discussing. The fact that you run a mass production 3D printing company, and “do it every day” is in no way proof to your claim that injection molding will be completely displaced by 3D printing. In your video you state that most products do not reach the production volumes necessary to make injection molding economically favorable to 3D printing. But the term “most” means you acknowledge that there are products that do. I agree with that. There are, and in my opinion always will be, products that have volumes so large as to demand injection molding. Injection molding and 3D printing will coexist. Each has their own application.
@@slant3d I could only find a wooden duck replica that was handed out at The LEGO House event in 2022 as a limited edition item. Is that what you're referring to, or are there more than just that one product they've sold? I'm starting to see why this video upset so many people. It really did seem like you were trying to claim that injection molding will become obsolete and/or completely taken over by FDM printing. But I think the issues about quality, durability, and surface finish speak for themselves. I think I, and nearly every commenter here, would just like an admission that there will, as far as anyone can see, always be a place for injection molding, even while 3D printing farms like yours take some market share and expand its own market share. We all appreciate how down to earth and realistic your videos are. We come to see how you creatively overcome novel engineering restraints to design products with this new process, this new way of thinking about designing for mass manufacturing. We all want to see you succeed. Don't double down on this takeover narrative. Please address the surface finish and large part size advantages that injection molding has.
This is an uninformed take on manufacturing that resembles the hype around 3D printing 10yrs ago. A better video would discuss the drawbacks (strength, accuracy, time, etc) of printing and theories on how they could be overcome to eventually compete with the efficiency of molding.
we have 3 molds where i work that produce 48 parts every 5.24 seconds and a robot pulls them and sorts each one by cavity and bags them. and it runs 24/7 for 3 months at a time with very little downtime and zero flow lines. that's not even the peak of what injection molding can do. For 3d printers to replace that, it will be a long time
Dude, I respect your perspective, I've learned a ton (even for my comparatively miniscule small-scale printing) from watching you, but... I think you missed the bus on this one. Injection molding is a different way of doing things than 3D printing, much like it was a different way of doing things than making parts out of cast (or machined) metal, and each of those approaches has their respective 'sweet spot' (you'll notice that there are still both machined and cast metal objects out there). You're absolutely right that 3D printing is a threat to injection molding on the 1k-10k production runs, but there are a lot of parts out there (literally hundreds of them under the hood of any modern car, and upon occasion, I've bought boxes of 1k from a supplier for surprisingly little money from industrial suppliers) where the volume is there to make injection molding absolutely crush 3D printing on production costs. And (with some, not all, materials) injection molding can have mechanical properties that are far superior to anything I've seen out of 3D printing (for example, quote me 1k 16oz 'throw' cups to be screen-printed for a Mardi Gras float, preferably ones that won't leak when loaded with alcohol).
@@dumpsterdave3710 yeah, it's insincere and so common these days. I have started blocking accounts that do this hoping the algo punishes the behaviour instead of rewarding it.
This has to be bait for clicks and your business right? An injection molding nachine can quite literally bury a 3d printer in parts before it ever finishes one print. A hammer isnt a screw driver. Lets use the correct tools for the correct applications.
This guy only cares about pushing his printing business and doesn't care that he's doing it by spreading lies and general bs. 3d printing will never replace injection molding...
This is complete bull. You're shilling your business and blatantly lying. Your point is basically "you can run a print shop instead of producing a unique product efficiently at scale with an injection mold." Implying that innovators use injection molds for their prototyping is unhinged. Your conclusion that, because 3d printing allows you to iterate on and develop a design better/more quickly, 3d printing should replace injection molding is a delusion with zero basis in reality. Reported for misinformation.
Let me guess, you have some financial interest in 3d printers? They are good for rapid prototyping and that is it. Injection moulding is orders of magnitude cheaper in quantity. You just can't expect a print head to move through three axes in the time molten plastic under pressure can fill a mold (blink of an eye). Like for like 3d printed parts are usually weaker in use too.
@slant3d Can you explain your point a little bit? A company can have multiple molds that all have multiple cavities. If the product didn't have a long cooling time after each injection, the tool can eject parts several times a minute. That would be awfully hard to keep up with.
I'm gonna have to pile on with the other naysayers. I just dont know where to start, so I'll begin with the claim that most injection molded products are manufactured in the thousands. This is utterly false. Most injection molded parts we encounter range from food containers, plastic utensils, disposable medical devices, electronic/electrical connectors, etc. These products are produced in the tens of millions yearly with very complex molds and processes to optimize the bottom line. I wonder how many people have seen 128 cavity stack molds spitting out bottle caps -- millions! Further, 3d printed parts cannot approach injection molded parts for appearance, precision, and mechanical/physical properties. The argument that injection molds cant be changed or iterated just doesnt hold up. Most molds are made to fit in standard mold bases. The cores and cavities themselves are made from separate components that are easily modified to suit engineering changes. It's almost like somebody with a calculator has already thought about this.
These are my thoughts too. Another thing that injection molding can do far better than 3D printing, is over molding/two shot molding. Think durable lettering keycaps with white and black plastic or rubber bumpers molded onto tools.
@@boomermatic6035 Good points. Add to that the variety of plastics -- PEEK, PEI, PAEK, LCPs, and other high performance materials that can't be 3d printed (practically).
As CEO of ErectorBot ultra large format 3d platforms. No way, they both have their own place in industry... I have many years in the injection industry aside of the additive scene. Also one of the originals that invented 3d metal direct deposition.
Massive 3D printing hobbiest here. This is just a flat out lie. It's basic economy of scale. 3d printing is great for small business, very specific needs or hobbiests but on large scale production it just does not keep up at all with injection molding
@@slant3d Congrats on doing something far less efficiently for much more cost then if you are running enough printers to compete with industry level injection molding production capability But we are not talking that scale. When companies want to make hundreds of thousands of a product very quickly 3d printing does not scale to that at lest not as a efficently as injection molding. Prints would need to take 1-2 minutes to get close to compete with how large injection molding setups can make millions of parts a day. Congrats on your small business but please don't try and lie to people all of the comments are tearing you apart
@@kaymcmullen9521at some point speed does not matter for products. Sure you can injection mold in a week what would take 3d a few months. You now have to store all those parts that will take years to sell through. That costs money
@@kyletaylor6942 Again that only applies at smaller scale. Hasbro isn't going to 3d print toys because they need to have them shipped out to thousands of retailers across the world who are going to be the ones handling and storing them and it's far cheaper to injection mold in a factory than 3d print. Certainly, if you only have a limited amount of demand and are not selling to other retailers 3d printing is going to be beneficial provided storage is an issue. For a lot of small businesses it isn't much of a cost due to having spare space to store things e.g store rooms in offices, garages in home business. 3d printing becomes less efficient and more expensive the bigger the scale becomes in the overwhelming majority of scenarios.
'Most products fail' this is probably the single biggest takeaway from this video, unfortunately so many missed it. Though I don't see 3D printing totally replaces molding any time soon, when you already have the winning design, and need to produce hundreds of thousands of them, molding is the better option. But again, you can afford to go that route by that point. 3D printing reduces the cost of failure, allowing you to try more things and eventually have a higher chance of success. And as 3D printing gets faster, I'm sure the threshold where molding overtakes printing is also going to get higher.
No one missed the point except the author of the video that said "3D printing will *obviously* *replace* injection molding". That statement just isn't true and it clickbaited me into the comments.
3D printing is great for fast iterations and personalized products. But we will never 3d print syringes. They will be injection molded - alongside many other products that we do demand millions of. 3D printing has it's place, injection molding has it's place.
3D Printing Printing will effectively replace tradition in effectively all product ranges. We still use horses today because cars can't walk. Doesn't mean horse are "better"
@@slant3d I definitely agree with you for 95% of the types of products that are currently injection molded. 3D printing cuts into that low, medium, and even high volume. But not extremely-high scale. Plus, I'm a software developer, the personalisation aspect is ideal as you said, but it's extremely hard to do and going to take a lot of IP to get there. Plus some tools (Like LIDAR, which are being added to modern flagship smartphones, so that's not too far away).
1 injection molding setup can produce thousands of parts an hour. For any high rate production 3D printing cannot keep up with that pace. For a small simple model you would need thousands of printers to produce thousands of parts an hour. If anything stands a chance it’s resin. If we get to the point where we can resin print in seconds it stands a chance.
I really like the thought process and have been convinced that 3d Printing is viable for mass production. But I disagree that it is a replacement for injection molding. They are different tools that are good at different things. 3d printing interestingly enough potentially opens up huge blue ocean market that molding can't touch. In that there are lots of small budget inventors and niche markets that would never end up with a molded product due to the up front cost. There are also impossible to mold shapes that 3d printing opens up. That said 3d printing is also terrible at reproducing some things that can be molded very easily. 3d printing may well end up the dominant manufacturing form over injection molding but it will never just replace it because it is good at different things.
In the past I thougt so as well. But there are many limits in 3d printing that can't be broken. I dont think it will ever be dominant manufacturing method, but imagine a quickly 3d printed moulds, they can be done now they only suffer problems related to 3d printing quality which should be fixed in time. Also imagine a mould that consist of thousands self setting small screws with just a flexible protectin sheet on top of them.... That mold could set itself quickly in any shape you program it into...
You make some good points, especially regarding niche markets and small budget inventors, but these are _not_ mass production markets as Slant3D describes them. His characterization of mass production as volumes in the thousands is ludicrous, and this clickbaity video is full of ridiculous presuppositions. If what he was saying were true, manufacturers would've replaced IM with 3d printing 20 years ago -- the core technologies and limitations of 3d printing haven't changed much since then, although cheap FDM and resin printers have exploded in the consumer and prosumer markets. "Obviously"? - this guy has zero credibility in my eyes.
I'm another with donkeys years of injection moulding experience, 2 decades of outsourced rapid prototypes and more recently, in house FDM. I admire your design for printing tips but this video completely misrepresents injection mouldings and the infrastructure that makes them possible. Injection moulded parts have better surface quality and mechanical properties, and they're more consistent part-to-part than FDM parts. Its true that tool costs have to be amortised but once they are, there's no tooling cost. The real benefit of 3D prints is in making low volumes of products that you probably couldn't demold in any case. If you want your FDM part to look like an injection moulded part, you need a skilled modelmaker to spend hours finishing it. I recommend that you stick with what you know which, as I have said, is great. Your design for FDM tips are leading edge. Lets have more of that!
Flexibility does not equal scalability, and injection molded parts are foodsafe due to low porosity. We print containers to organize parts, not tupperware to put in our fridges. Surface finish is a huge contributor to why injection molding is the way it is, spend $$$ on a perfect mold to make perfect parts for a long time on a single machine, it eliminates the variability that is every printers calibrations, variables are scaled down and production is scaled up. I know you're smarter than this, extruding filament slowly in singular layers, is not a catch-all solution.
how about 3d printing moulds? This would give the advantages of 3d printing, and let you make large amounts of products once you have a design you're happy with.
Speaking with several years of product development experience, including iwth injection moulding manufacturing, this video is not realistic. Injection moulds for lets say a certain small part the same part can cost anywhere between $800-$12000 depending on the manufacturer, so you can get cheaper moulds as well, they will just have a lower lifetime like 10,000 units. The quality is still better than any 3D printer apart from MJF printing and possibly Polyjet. Many products like consumer electronics sell millions of pieces, such as game consoles, phones, etc. The material properties of injection moulded parts is superior to 3D printing in terms of strength, especially with small parts. There has been significantly higher research done with Injection moulding for material properties as well, and colour science with Pantone and RAL colours for example. None of that exists for 3D printing yet either. I know of a company that uses MJF 3D printing instead of injection moulding to produce parts, but it is only because they are producing small parts in high volume, and they were producing small internal components for headlights, so for them it was feasible. Otherwise 3D printing is more expensive, by a factor of ~10 in some cases, and I know because I did the cost quotation comparison for products I developed. So while 3D printing is s viable production method for very specific cases, we are far from a reality where it is usable for mass production to replace injection moulding. We have no printer that can produce the material properties, surface finishes, colour accuracy etc. that injection moulding machines can do. You made this video with barely any knowledge of product development, Industrial deisgn and injection moulding, and the comment section full of experts who have worked in this field calling you out is more telling than the opnion piece you made. Be realistic. 3D printing has many advantages.
He's running a business. So of course he's going to ignore the cases in which injection molding clearly wins. Either that, or he doesn't understand fix vs variable costs in economical terms.
I can understand 3D printing replacing injection molding for many engineering products. But I don't understand how it will replace injection molding for most consumer products. I look around my computer table and I see lots of smooth parts with silk screen printing that I pick up and hold in my hands or touch with my fingers. Wireless phone, cellphone, keyboard, Sharpie, magnifying light, coffee cup, beer bottle opener, laser pointer... In general, I like things that I routinely pick up to be smooth and easily wiped clean, not textured to hide layer lines. There are parts of the electronic calipers that definitely benefit from texturing, but its got labeling on its buttons and a printed scale. And how can you make caliper jaws that measure down to 0.1 mm or 0.01 mm with 3D printing, without jumping through as many hoops as having the part be injection molded?
There are certainly some parts where 3d printing will replace a molded part but I think you are underestimating just how many parts are high volume. In my industry I’ve seen many parts moved from a machined metal process to 3d printed, but never a part that would have been molded to 3d printed. If the volume is high enough to justify the cost of a mold, then the volume is too high to justify 3d printing it, the space required and manpower needed to match the speed of the mold just doesn’t add up. One of the 4 molders in my facility makes 300k parts daily and very rarely ever stops due to over production. I see 3d printing as far move of a threat to machining then to molding.
This is like comparing screen printing to something like dye sublimation or direct pigment printing. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages. 3D printing has its own of each as well as injection molding. For that reason i don't think 3d printing will completely take over injection molding, but it will definitely have it's own share of the market.
Are you deliberately trying to destroy your channel? This guy made an excellent case. High volume molds for high volume mfg won't be 3d printed. It will be interesting to see a 3d printed mold made out of a hardened tool steel that can with stand 50,000 psi of injection pressure last millions of cycles. Get your head out...
@@robertwiedeman5602Honestly, comparing Slant's responses here to their other video's comments... Did someone have too much to drink then go on TH-cam for some flame wars? Slant's comments here are aggressive, full of hyperbole and weak analogies, and just come off as rude. WTF is going on at Slant? And all the claims made are just vaporware, they give no source to back it up. I'm becoming less interested in their cheap PLA subscription by the minute.
Disagree entirely. When you sell to a store and receive you are not at liberty to change it as you wish. I sold to a small music store first order was 8k pcs. When you mould 100k pcs the mould cost is negligible and the margin is such that you can dump the rest in a landfill. I get that you’re trying to find arguments that align with your business but this premise is wrong and your smart enough that it comes off as disingenuous
Laughable, i make molds and inject inhouse, when injecting multi cavity molds (28pcs every 15sec) where you would need a SLA printer to make and be within tolerance of 10 microns on each part, good luck replacing injection molding at those speeds, but thats not to say that semi big parts can't be 3d printed and at a cheaper price especially if volume isn't there, but for me the average order on parts are at 25k parts so 3d printing is a no go in most industry's and volumes keep going up if with more and more consumers in the world so its not sustainable and will never bee with the world population going up consuming more and more, thats my 2cents on this matter
I make injection molds. Cnc and modern machine tool tech is continuosly making mold making much more efficient and 3d print has a very long way to go. Don't scrap your milling machines just yet. 😂
Yeah, no. Injection molding *cant* be replaced by FDM *maybe* by some form of volumetric SLA or SLS will come close but even then it has shortcomings with precision, finish, post processing, and such. Injection molded parts when designed correctly for the process are high precision, whatever surface finish you could ever want from grainy to mirror shine, comically inexpensive in volume, fairly low energy cost, and very fast to produce by virtue of being a volumetric process. That is an incredibly difficult combination of optimizations to beat. FDM certainly cannot and won't. It'll take an as yet unforeseen breakthrough in volumetric printing technology to make something close to competitive in the categories injection molding excels in, which is almost all but the upfront cost for low volume production. You can even get *desktop injection molding machines* for as little as 6K USD now that use aluminum molding plates if you do enough small production runs
Nope. As long as 3d prints are weaker in one direction (try to print a 1 mm tube that is 1 m long…. And I know it is extruded but…..), can’t offer smooth surfaces on all sides, are not food safe, cost more energy to produce (. 1 molder vs 1000 printers, especially if you consider other materials than PLA. ABS being the most used material). And so on. Both technologies will coexist in the future till the point we have replicators able to “print” atom by atom….. and quickly.
I enjoy your thoughts on filament and additive processes, but you don't need to pick fights with other manufacturing methods in order to hype up 3D printing. All it's done here is hurt your credibility. In a perfect world, printers would be able to create high-precision molds, and the two technologies would be used side by side to create parts both quickly and flexibly. This should not be a competition. We should be looking for ways to incorporate all such processes into our toolkits.
@senorali there is actually someone who is trying this idea, don't know if u have seen it, but 3D Printing Nerd recently posted video with such idea, but the polymer used for mould is water-soluable, which enables to achieve structures and geometry unachievable or very costly for traditional mould. I leave video here for anyone interested in this topic th-cam.com/video/4kIeqTK5iao/w-d-xo.html
I think you should see the actual injection moulding process. You dont have a clue what you are talking about. Do you actually believe this bs that you made up?
No. Just no. Not the same result. Not the same speed of production, or the same material properties. 3d printing may replace some limited scenarios, such as limited run, delicate parts, but will not replace plastic injection molding in general. Printed parts are weak and flawed. In some cases you can 3d print the molds vs cnc machining the molds though.
Printed parts can be made stronger than you might think. While they might have issues with layer lines, it's not so bad that they are delicate. I've made pieces where I'm pretty satisfied with the strength.
@@logicalfundy yeah, strong enough in some cases, but almost always inferior to injected part. And printing is slow as hell compared to casting or injection molding. It's ok for prototypes and one-offs. But if you need 5,000+ make a mold. And cost. Injection molding is way cheaper in materials and aluminum molds are pretty cheap now.
@@erikturner8005 printing at scale isn't done with a single printer though. Every business I know of that is trying to print large quantities uses a farm.
@@logicalfundy so? Even with farm you have to post process parts, vs injection mold drops finished parts into the hopper. I have a friend who prints a production product.. for that product resin printing is appropriate for the number he sells vs the hassle of making injection mold setup. But that's not commonly the case. The post process labor isn't worth it vs molding for anything approaching scale.
@@erikturner8005 Resin printing is not what you use for large scale 3D printing, and has more post processing than most other types of 3D printing because you have to handle a curing process as well as the print. What he is talking about in this video is FDM, which usually requires no post processing. Injection molding can require post processing as well with complex enough shapes, in fact what Slant 3D often refers to as "impossible geometry" is basically complex enough geometry as to require post processing with injection molding, but no post processing with 3D printing.
I still see injection molding to be the prime packaging method to create consumer package goods like shampoo bottles, antiperspirant containers, etc. They are manufactured in the millions by CPG companies. I don't see 3D print farms replacing injection molding for those types of packaging.
Except... those are typically blow molded, not injection molded. It's a different process, but I agree, if you need millions of something, molding probably is still the way to go.
Whoa. 3d printing is a very good low-volume test environment. Way different market than high-volume injection molding ie packaging products, food containers, construction, medical, etc... These markets often require millions of parts per day. It has its place but quality and product integrity still have a long way to go for printing. You might want to go visit a large molding plant and reassess those comments.
Yeah 3D printing and injection molding do not share the same purpose at all. Injection molding is for making parts that are needed in massive quantities very quickly. Parts that you will need a lot of, for a long time. 3D printing is for prototyping, making drafts, being able to change the model being produced on the fly, and perhaps most importantly, being an accessible means of production to people who don't have dozens of thousands of dollars or more. However, I'm not saying that print farms can't be effective ways to make money quickly. We wouldn't see print farms hardly at all if that was the case. Print farms can change their produced product in just 24 hours with little to no modifications. They serve a different purpose than injection molding, which is why they will not replace it.
@@slant3d Packaging is 100% a product. And how can molding have it if 3d printing will replace molding? I have had to design geometry for polystyrene for boxes to hold things during shipments. Molds are made, there are requirements for draft angles and radii etc. To think that packaging isn't a product just shows me that you haven't designed products. Thermo formed "blister packs" are designed. So if your smartphone came shipped in a sock vs a well designed box it would be the same thing? And you missed the point of the comment and focusing on one thing in it. To think some of the medical device projects I have worked on for clients would be end use FDM is laughable and it shows that you are in a bubble. Sure FDM print farm for etsy shops selling trinkets is fine, but to claim that it will replace injection molding is either something you are doing as click bait or you drank your own koolaid man. FDM can exist without waging a war on other manufacturing processes.
Some really interesting points here! But both have seperate places, FDM prints even from the best printers don't give the clean faces, consistancy or in some cases, strength required for quite a number of products to be marketable. The other 3D printing methods have quite a number of their own downsides also, such as high cost and limited material availibility, high machine cost, lengthy and labour intensive post processing etc... Production 3D printing's best application in the commercial sector is likely with startups which have limited budgets and a need to start at a small scale then scale up exponentially with the demand. The idea of marketing a product that is still very much in the iterative phase would probably not be a very liked idea by bigger industry players and wouls likely not be a wise aproach. You can also not achieve the same results with 3D printing as are availible with injection moulding, such as overmoulding.
What about cars and legos? Where high volume, infrequently changing design, and a need for high surface finish quality are combined, I don't see even the most efficient print farm outcompeting an industrial plastic injection mold setup. I think you've made your point about scalability really well, but I'm curious how you think 3d printing could take on well established and steady markets like car parts and LEGOS. Thoughts?
Looking around me, there are not many plastic parts that I think would benefit from 3D printing passed the prototyping phase. What I see in front of me: keyboard, phone, computer monitor (large enclosure), pair of scissors (handles), pill box, shirt buttons, all sorts of cables and connectors, ... And I mean, look at 5:55 , these bins don't look 3D printed to me, and if a print farm doesn't print its bins, who will?
This guy is not an expert at all in manufacturing process to say that 😂. 3D printing is not the solution for mass production like we need for certain plastics parts... I have 9 years in industrial design experience and I know this is full of 💩
replace is a very strong word. stuff that are already there already have a process, this only works if you have new parts or new designs and the thing is complex enough.
I think it depends on the design and the (post)process. SLS/SLA might work as the parts are more or less homogenious, typical FDM might work aswell, depending on the used filament and postprocessing. But overall I disagree that 3D printing will completely replace injection molding, it'll be taking some business away from injection molding, but not replace everything. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.
I've been watching this channel for a long time and you produce great videos on 3D printing but I don't understand why you're insisting on this point so much. You'll never match the finish compared to injection molding which instantly disproves your point. At the extremes, you're not going to match the scale either, certainly when you take the floor area required for both processes into account.
@@slant3d But in the majority of products a smooth surface is desired and 3d printing struggles to do this without further processing that also has its own problems.
you can do all kinds of finish in injection molding. its also important to have pressure for many plastics. it affects properties, just like humidity. thats why consistency is not that easy in fdm unless you nail down the parameters constantly
if you are trying to bait the discussion i think its a little cheap on your side but effective none the less lmao. On the other side i think you are way too retail oriented on your business, at least that is what we see on youtube, it would be nice to see real industrial, well engineered parts on the videos and discussions on that front, at least imo. And it would be nice to see a little humility on the answer of real well argumented comments, and not take the "im too ahead of my time" kinda Steve Jobs take that you are having. You are also reaally underestimating the possibility of cost reduction on the moulding machine side, at the end of the day it is a cheap block of aluminium or steel in most cases, so the cost is all industrial, that means potential cost reduction over time approaching material cost.
@@slant3d Again, a well thought out and articulate comment and you can't be bothered to give them a real answer. Why respond at all if you aren't going to try and address the comment. "Check our library". You could provide links to relevant videos that address the comment, if they exist.
@@LearnEverythingAboutDesignbecause he's wrong and he knows it. This is an ad for his business. He doesn't really know what hes talking about when it comes to mass production of components. He also doesn't go over surface finish which is a massive drawback to 3d printing.
Very contentious opinion: 1.- Economics: do not underestimate the volume that certain industries require, for example automotive, one car will need thousands of different pieces and literally hundreds of thousand pieces of each, eventually your farm footprint, energy use and administration will be more expensive than the equivalent injection machine, and not every mold is a super expensive tool with slides and cooling ducts, some of the simpler ones can be made with a good CNC machine. 2.- Engineering issues: while 3d parts are improving injection molding is still generally tougher, less prone to quality concerns, while a 3d printed part can fail basically anywhere injection mostly fails at the seam or the sprue, which depending on the application isn't a big deal, yeah they can shrink or warp too but they are much less prone to do that, some parts are actually easier to inject than to 3D print because of support material which you will never be able to completely avoid and FDM printing should not be used in some industries like medical and food due to safety issues of having lots of small crevaces in your part. Also what about larger parts? It would be really tough to print a car dashboard or a large box with 3d printing, that would be a very wasteful application where you would need a very large 3d printer with lots of empty spacebor even specially designed, also what about transparent parts? I can go like this forever but I think those are enough. I love 3d printing, I do it all the time and see the value of it but this is overselling it.
@@slant3d that's a very unfortunate statement considering they sell just in the US around 250k Corollas per year. Most vehicle programs produce AT LEAST 50k units per year and the larger ones like the F150 sell around 750k units per year.
Tolerances are the main thing injection molding has going for it i.e. Lego ;) Sure we can print building blocks but not to the spec Lego has them set for. If we figure that out then life will dramatically change to the way you envision it but until we can get those tight tolerances AND reliability for say a million 1x1 blocks I don't think it will happen
Yeahhhhh I think a lot of people are going to (correctly) disagree with this. Open up the scope of products you're thinking about. People aren't only using injection molding for toys at Walmart
This is flat out lies! As a person owning 50 professional 3d printers and CNCs and casting machines as well I can tell you this video is totally wrong. It only applies to customized products or under 500 pieces products and both of which must suffer worse quality. CASTING cost fraction per piece and takes a fraction of time to produce with a significantly higher quality. You would have to be insane to go for 3d printing if you can sell more then 500 pieces. If you need it faster or cheaper then get 3d printers a bit better and 3D print the Moulds! This will never change even in the future - and moulding have potential to get much better when using a variable self changing moulds.
Welp, I believe the comments section has captured it all. While the upfront cost of injection molding tooling is high, we usually design in a way to share it with other products or future-proof it. The tooling manufacturer can also modify the tooling to accommodate certain dimensions. I appreciate 3D printing during the prototype stage, but it doesn't seem likely to completely replace injection molding in the near future. Each has its own place.
Looking at the part examples and your perspective, it seems that you have only been exposed to the consumer trinket and gadget market. That is fine, but that does not represent the world in it's entirety. There are many major industries where 3D printing flat out can't do the job. You ignore dimensional tolerances, surface finish, mechanical properties. Things that aren't acceptable in medical or aerospace... Your claim that no products ever run in major quantities is simply false. If you truly looked around at the world and saw what was molded you would see the mass scale that printers cannot hit. Your expensive printer farm cannot hit mass numbers. Look at the food industry and the BILLIONS of molded food containers and bottles produced every single year. Your printer can't even make 1 of those parts let alone begin to match the scale. And you provided zero evidence that you can match the speed of an injection mold. There is no printer on the planet that can match the speed of an injection mold. You have to build the part one tiny layer at a time vs a mold that is filled pretty much instantly. Additive manufacturing is cool and has it's place. However, it is not a 100% replacement to any manufacturing process though. It surely will take some market share away from traditional manufacturing but not to any concerning extent and certainly not any total takeover like you claim. As you pointed out, the major benefit to additive is it's prototyping ability.
"Scale doesn't exist in the real world" wow that's some bias towards your buissness model if ive ever seen one... scale very much does exist... let's take one very small, common, and simple part... a zip tie... go ahead, print one... now print enough for a box of 1000, now print enough for a data center... I can throw our a dozen more similar products used in the hundreds of millions each year, but I think you see what I mean... now I do love 3D printing, I have a dozen printers... but every process has its place... you have to understand a niche when your in one, and your not doing that, you are trying to proclaim 3d printing can just replace something that can produce tens of thousands of parts per week at scale, with way less maintinence, moving parts, and both a better surface finish, and better strength to weight ratio... some stuff needs that, you can't just design a solo cup to be 3d printed as well as a real one, yes there are some things that don't need to be injection molded but some things, alot of things... really... really do
Imagine 3d printing a dashboard of a toyota car or truck XD He is not right or wrong. I think people underestimate printing turn around on troubleshooting a design is super fast as for tooling the amount of engineering it requires to even consider a prototype and let alone the cost can be overwhelming making new products its not easy for everyone specially if it fails. I do see a future where 3d printer in certain areas will take over. But not in the following. Food, Medical, Aerospace etc. The tolerances that IM can give you cant replicate with 3d printing To make it short and not argue about anything hospitals, military, Food industry, Drink Industry Blow molding, Car industry, anything aerospace. Will be really hard to replace. They expect plastic molecular and quality inspections will disqualify 3d printing for now. but who knows in the future.
I love my subscription, I don't think about filament anymore, I just make. Finally getting value out of my Prusa mini that's been sitting around doing nothing for years now.
This year I sold around 3k 3D printed parts in kits and kits consisted out of different parts. Yes, I could have injection molded the main part, but would have needed a way higher upfront investment and would have needed to match look and feel with the low volume "auxiliary" parts. What people ignore is how insane of a quality MJF nylon sintering produces and how well it scales especially for smaller parts. Those prints can even be chemically treated / vapor smoothed to be gas-proof or cerakoted, if need be. This way I could modularize the kits to better match customer needs. And I was able to order in two seperate batches according to customer demand all with less than two weeks of lead time.
That's all well and fine but it's not a replacement for injection molding and your own comment proves it. 3k parts is nothing for an injection mold. They can make that in a couple days depending on part size. Also you mentioned the need for post processing to improve surface finish. Something that isn't needed on injection molded parts. Also i checked the tolerance for mjf nylon and its .012" that's laughable in the injection molding world when a loose tolerance is .005" and a tight tolerance is .002" like come on now. So while 3d printing is a great tool for small batch and medium production it will never fully replace injection molding the way it is now. Another thing to think about as well is large components. Can you 3d print a lawn chair as fast and as cheap as molding it NO. How about car interiors. How about tool bodies with multiple materials. What about metalic components like a dead blow hammer. While I don't doubt that 3d printing has a lot of cool applications to save money and time mass production of parts is not one of them. End of story.......
Absolutely impossible, not now, not in the near future, not ever, unless the 3d printer start materializing the objects instantly, but then will be not a printer anymore :) There is no 3d printer that can get even close to the quality of injection molding, and if we come to a textured surfaces the situation is even worse. But the surface quality is the least issue, the speed is something that no 3d printer may achieve. Even for large and complex details the cycle time is measured in seconds. 3d printers have their application, low volume production, prototypes, impossible for molding shapes, that's all, they always will be much more slower, low quality, more expensive parts.
Unsubscribed. This video is full of dishonesty. 3D printing is a great technology but it will never replace injection molding, not even in most applications. Wishful thinking from someone who is completely blinded by your own biases.
@@slant3d Your company does 1000’s of parts. The global market for injection molded parts is billions of times that. 3D printing is not as scalable as injection molding due to the human labor component required to keep 3D printers running at capacity.
@@slant3d Yeah you have an FDM print farm and make false claims about FDM being equal to molding. Got it! You can promote your business and FDM and not try to make it some massive global take over. IF you were going to do that with 3d printing why on earth would you pick FDM as your horse in that race? MJF, SLA, SLS all have major benefits over FDM. The downside is the startup cost. So you picked the cheapest option, that most people have at home. An injection mold machine can spit out more parts in an hour than your print farm can spit out in a week. And that is fine. Just don't try and skew it. You are either lying to people so they use your service, or you are very out of touch with the entire industry of manufacturing. Not sure which is worse, but please back up your claims or state them as opinions so people know.
3D printing can only replace injection modling for low scale/low volume applications. You are not correct when saying that many products are made in tens of thousands only. My brother works at an injection molding factory in Europe and they can be pumping out tens of thousands crates of one design per day for months for some supermarket chain. 3D printing cannot compete with this scale at all. I understand that you're promoting your business, but this video is not truthful at all. You should more clearly explain that 3D printing is for small scale start-ups which are trying to find their niche. Established industrial companies will continue to pump out millions of copies of the same product using injection modling for decades to come.
the cost efectiveness of a product comes from the manufacturing scale, at the end of the video you talk about the objective of basically making custom products for each order... exactly how much do you plan on charging for an elon musk wearing a mickey mouse hat figurine? 200 usd? are you really considering the labor time of customizing orders? yes, you may find someone every once in a while that is willing to pay that, but do you really plan on having a business based on this niche market?
Plus the ability to manufacture on demand. Inventory doesn’t exist and need to be stored somewhere if you can make it when it already has a destination. I’m still new, at a beginner hobby level, but I see the potential 3d printing can offer me at a small scale, so it’s exciting to see it grow on a large scale to democratize manufacturing. 👍
Here is what you forgot. injection molding machines produce more parts per sq foot of shop space. If you measure output per sq foot, you immediately run into a wall of cheap space is in locations without skilled labor and skilled labor is in locations with high cost per sq foot. That alone is a huge justification for injection molding.
@@SirSpence99 upfront costs are good to be exorbitant regardless. To some extent you can grow into a print farm, but you run into issues really fast like not having enough amps on the breaker. So now you have to remodel to turn your warehouse into a factory. Molding to some extent requires you to just start with a factory, so slight advantage 3d printing, but we are comparing prototyping to production kinda by definition at that point. Anyone looking at either needs to deploy serious cash regardless. Downtime is a more interesting conversation. Would you rather have 10 percent of your machines broken at any point in time or 100 percent of your machines broken 10 percent of the time? It would be the same total throughput, but the first requires way more labor to manage.
You’ll need be printing parts pretty quick to keep up with injection molding. Also, 3D printing creates “fake parts” as I like to refer to them currently, they have a long ways to go before the material properties match what injection molded products. Take PEEK parts for 1 of thousands of examples, hard to match. Does 3D printing have some advantages, YES of course, prototyping and testing out an idea/design concept, you can’t beat it. But this idea of 3D printing replacing molding anytime soon is laughable. Just an expert opinion from a mold maker, mold designer, tooling engineer.
if you limit the scope of this video to small companies with very small scale production of many products then yes, MAYBE you have a point, but replacing injection molding in industry? even if we ignore the quality issues of current 3d printed parts, what is the plan exactly? a 1000 3d printers farm creating 10 parts an hour each? consider the space you would need for that, and the babysitting of the machines, and one power outage mid print will basically ruin 10 thousand parts at once, the electric consumption, the heat generated, the manual post processing of all those parts after each print... a single injection molding machine can print thousands of parts a day, of better quality and surface finish, it requires minimal babysitting and depending on the part it may not even require post processing and the excuse for this is "i dont want to spend 5k on a mold, and once i do im stuck with the product design"? how much money would you have to invest on 3d printers to match the production of a single injection molding machine? this is ridiculous
1000% agree with this comment! Injection molding machines can spit out up to thousands of parts per hour and run 24/7 without stopping. I just don't see how FDM or any 3d printing process can every compete with that speed and repeatability. The thought process is lacking for sure. 5000 FDM machines in a warehouse making 1 part per hour is not the same thing as 1 injection mold machine popping out 5000 parts per hour.
@@slant3d Either you are being intentionally dishonest or disconnected from reality. Just because you say something on the internet doesn't make it true. Do you work in the injection molding industry? Do you see issues with molds failing to produce parts once production starts? Do you have experience designing molded parts? Injection molding machines are highly toleranced, accurate and well oiled machines that have been running for years. A mold machine that can spit out 5000 parts in an hour is not some warehouse full of 5000 hobby reprap machine. No 3d printer is going to match the speed of a single injection molding machine ever. There are just physical limitations to squirting plastic out of a small nozzle layer by layer to build a part up in 3d. The difference as the part grows in the Z direction is drastic. Each process is different and building a part up layer by layer is not the same as shooting the molten plastic into a mold at high pressure. A mold machine can spit out small and medium sized parts so fast, but with FDM if you go from a small 1in cube to a 2in cube, the amount of time difference to print is big. You are solving the problem by adding more machines, which don't have the mechanical properties nor cosmetic appearance of molded parts. BUT even if they were the same you are dealing in false equivalencies. Lets say you entered a car race. The winning car runs a lap in 1min and this is a 10 lap race. Could you solve the problem by entering 10 cars that do a 10min lap. Your "team" did 10 laps in 10 minutes, but you did it with 10 cars instead of 1 and each only going 1 lap before the race was over. You did not win that race with a slower process by adding more cars because they each only did 1 lap in the race. Lets reconfigure the problem. Lets say instead of a speed race that you have to deliver 10 items to a location. The items start at your warehouse and have to all go to the same location. You have 10 cars delivering 1 item to the same location because that is all they can carry vs 1 car that can carry all 10 items at once. Which of those makes sense? All can drive the same speed limit. And if you say 10 cars taking 1 part each to the same location you are loco. My recent video and quote for FDM vs Injection molded parts looked at actual numbers. The molded parts were delivered sooner and much cheaper than FDM quoted from Fictiv. 10 days to make a mold and 7 days to make enough parts to produce 250 game controllers. FDM had a 22 day turn around and was 4x more money to meet the same goal. Now I did quote around and get lower FDM numbers but the break even for Molding vs FDM was still in the hundreds of units (between 250 and 500) even with the best quotes I could find. Now I already know you are going to say Slant would be cheaper and quicker. It was 2000 parts in total and even if you ran 2000 machines and printed everything in a day there is no way it would be cheaper or match quality, surface finish, and function of molding. FDM has its place and print farms are fine, but this constant and blatant dishonesty is going to reflect negatively on your business. You can see the comments on this video as proof of that. Stick to getting the most out of FDM, showing how you can improve parts and orientations optimized for FDM, and talk about your business. But don't intentionally lie and make bold claims about things that are provably false.
Walmart alone has over 10k stores. So if you want to sell a product to Walmart you need to create enough parts to stock each store. Even if that's only 100 of one item then yeah that's a million parts. Do you have any references for most injection molded parts don't make more than 5k parts. I love 3d printing but it has limitations and there will always be a market for both. You even made a video showing how you can make a water bottle with 3d printing but actually only made a water bottle carrying case. You'll never have smooth surfaces or large parts made in mass (a slide) or food safe parts made out of 3d printing.
Hi! I enjoyed your video! One of the points was that the whole piece price is affected by the tooling cost but injection molding suppliers nowdays only take around 5% of profit rate (automotive industry). This means raw material is 35% of the whole piece price. They are being very competitive. i myself am a big 3D printing nerd but at the same time i run moldflow analysis at work. Even if the 3D printers program time gets faster than plastic injection cycle time, Sadly filament material is more expensive than the the whole piece price of plastic injection molded parts.
This might work in a few niches. But components that contain a circuit board and other electrical components cannot be changed so easily. The rest of the design also needs to be adjusted and, if necessary, tested. Which then drives up the costs. I work in the aerospace industry as an NC programmer and we also use 3D printed parts there. The rework (fits and surfaces) is not without its problems, as the parts are very delicate and therefore difficult to clamp (process reliability). Even if one 3D part can replace several machined parts, the overall production costs for 3D printing are no better than for machined parts. The only justification for the parts is the weight savings in the finished product. And in aerospace the numbers produced are not particularly high. The potential of metal cutting machines is far from exhausted. This could also apply to the injection molding machines.
You should make a video that is "what 3d printing is not good at" every technoligy has strengths and weaknesses. I truly believe 3d printing has a huge growth curve in front of it. taking market share from other manufacturing methods. But saying its better at everything all the time is just wrong. I am in sales and if you say our product is the best at x but not y people believe you. If its the best at everything they stop believing you because they realize you are selling.
@@slant3d this is such a lame straw man argument. You choose different manufacturing methods for different parts. If I need a hundred thousand of the same part I’m going to use injection molding. During the prototyping phase and early development of course I’m going to 3d print. But jeez this is seriously childish, you choose the tool for the job not this “my thing is best”
@@christianedelmann6880this guys an idiot. His example for injection molding was 5k parts. Most injection molds makes hundreds of thousands to millions of parts quickly without excessive support material. Also the plastic pellets used in injection are wayyyyyyyyyy cheaper than filaments. 3d printing has the chance to revolutionize manufacturing I don't understand why this guy has to make such bold claims and strawman arguments when 3d printing is already impressive as it is. Any article about injection molding will tell you why it's not going away and that is the more parts you make the less the cost. So if you need a million bottle caps you're nor going to 3d print them. Also I'd really like to see a 5-10 year old printer that was used day in day out be able to hold. .001 .002 or even .005 true position.
3D printing is to slow, or you need to many printers and space for an output of thousand part a day. In handling time 3D printing is expensive. All those printers have to be maintained, parts collected and filament replaced. With injection molding you need only a few machines and everything is automated. Now you can print metals with laser sintering, you also can print molds. This is way cheaper than the traditional way molds are made. 3D printed molds are not as strong as the old molds, but for small molds the cost is only 5% of the cost. A 3D printed mold has a lifespan of about half a year to 8 month. Iterations are not that costly any more and in many cases iterations are not needed for many years. If even 3d printer manufacturers like Prusa starts making parts with injection molding, injection molding still has a strong place in manufacturing plastic parts.
3D printing has numerous advantages as mentioned, but the poor surface finish, highly anisotropic material properties, and low cycle time per machine makes it incompatible with most products. Stick to making the most of 3D printing and stop lying about its limitations.
the cycle time of 3d printing will never touch the cycle time of injection molding, ever. technology improving won't change this. i removed this channel from my recommendations based solely on this incredibly short sighted video.
@@slant3dwhat are you talking about 😂 Show me a piece that you can match the injection speed with. I'm all aware of 3d printing advantages, and they are there, they exist and are useful for a set of purposes. But you cannot extrapolate that to all production lines.
He is likely building a single machine for 1k to 2k dollars. For the price of one molder he can make/buy hundreds if not thousands of printers. He is looking at his factory as a single machine compared to a single molder.
@@gonzalomartindelavegacarre6108 While I do agree that 3d will not replace injection in EVERY production line as each one has its pros and cons, slowly more and more plastic pieces on the streets are 3d printed maybe we don't notice because most are little pieces that we don't pay attention to but they are there But I believe you are stuck with the stigma that when we talk about 3d printed product you may imagine a guy with a single printer on his bedroom (like I am), and yes that is far slower than injection molding, but when he talks about mass production with 3d printers he means a industry like Warehouse with hundreds and hundreds of 3d printers working at the same time, so yeah one to one a 3d loses against an injection molding machine but they can easily match at mass scale Also, when designing a product many little features and dimensions can go wrong, having the capability to change the design with little to no cost is huge, and I mean it as someone who designs and prints spare parts for my workplace
Dude is trolling, moulds are such low cost, high speed at volume. No chance fdm replaces this. Especially as molds can have costs lowered by additive manufacturing.
@@slant3d so if I am designing a part like an enclosure for automobile electronics or the world of electrical fixtures in homes do you really think 3d printing could replace that? Light fittings for example are massive volume? Also love the video, just got a k1 max used to be into this decade ago with anet a8 so much has changed!
I get your points, but "replace" is way to strong world. Went to see how Coca-Cola bottles are made. One injection mold machine made 14 bottles per second running 24/7 in farm of many-many machines. I'd like to see bottle that looks like Coca-Cola one with same properties (transparent, thin, strong, light) made with any form of 3D printing It's good clickbity conversational starter for sure
Your math isn't mathing. Assuming everything is in house If I need to produce 1000 parts, I can easily print them. If I need to produce 10,000 parts, I can use a resin mold and a small injection machine If I need to produce 100,000 + parts, I can use a industrial grade molding machine. Under what circumstances would dedicating 40,000 sq feet to a print farm be the most efficient way to produce parts quickly and consistently... Cramming 50 printers into the same volume as a single injection machine is still gonna have longer cycle times. If space is unlimited, then you can throw more printers at the problem until the win the total output metric, but I am not convinced that its cheaper, just more flexible at the expense of maintenance/complexity of scale.
@@slant3d Again another empty reply with no actual data or proof behind it. You are just spurting out your opinion with nothing to back it up here. Why bother replying to the comment if you are not going to even address it? There are applications for FDM but saying that putting 1000 machines in a large building is the same as injection molding isnt even talking about the elephant in the room man.
@@slant3d Being based out of Boise is massively tainting your perspective. Most places can't just dedicate more space to more printers because of the cost per sq foot of workspace. You are in one of the cheaper markets and trying to extrapolate your success to Tokyo.
That is possible, and likely will be used more in the future, but injection molds will always require some machining for the tighter tolerance parts that no 3D tech can make yet.
There's a good bit being done in hybrid manufacturing being used to make metal moulds. Printing the main bulk of the mould and maching back the final surface. This also allows internal cooling channels in the mould to speed up the throughput.
3D print won't replace injection mold, FDM 3D print that is. if 3D print can replace injection mold, it'd be resin 3d print, once we figured out how to turn plastic waste into resin.
This is absolutely one of the worst videos ever made on this topic. This is beyond misleading and since you are representing a company you have a responsibility to be honest to the public.
The iteration and ability to pivot is the key and will carry 3D printing further until it has the materials ability to replace more current industrial processes at scale. The example of digital testing is the prescient point - digital is physical too, and the line between both will continue to blur. There'll always be a crossover to traditional methods, but that point will continue to get pushed out.
Doesn't know much about molding. At quantity molding is unbeatable. Molds aren't as expensive as they were in the past. Go in the next supermarket and try to beat the price of cheap molded household product with 3D printing....what can you print for $1-2
I wouldnt want 3d printing to replace injection modeling for the fact it would be a surplus in things being made. I would say great if it was aiding the process. Oh yes and cutting cost seem like a good ideal.
I'm an injection molding process technician who also has several 3D printers..... As someone that's very familiar with both ends of the spectrum this is a flat out lie. I'm currently on a 4400 ton machine right now typing this waiting for the 119 zones of hotrunners to heat up. there's not a 3D printer on Earth that could come close to matching this performance or speed.
I was going to say something similar. I can't see a 3d printer ever being able to spit out pieces at the capacity and speed injection molding does. Like Bic pens, that's never, ever going to be more efficient than injection molding.
That holds true if the high unit volume object is NOT required to iterate, or change frequently, say for example plastic ball point pen barrels, plastic lighter housings, or plastic disposable utensils, or other such items. For those applications injection moulding is unbeatable. Where 3D printing beats injection moulding is for small to medium runs of many similar, but non-identical objects. It would be prohibitively expensive to have 10 different moulds machined for 10 objects of medium volume production runs instead of producing the objects with 3D printers.
Let's compare dollar for dollar though. An injection molding machine might cost the same as a farm of 100 printers. The printers can print anything in any quantity on demand.
@@stevenmcculloch5727 Injection molding can stamp out arbitrary complex pieces at the rate of 10s of thousands an hour. 100 3d printers can't come close to that. How much would a pen cap be if it was 3d printed? It's such a simple piece and yet 3d printing it would be a pain, maybe print 500 of them in an hour with 100 printers. Then you have to check for errors, fix broken prints, keep the print heads maintained, and so on. And in all that time a factory in France has spat out 10k Bic pen caps and the die mold has paid for itself a million times over.
@@stevenmcculloch5727 also, show me a hundred 3d printers that could print one precision Lego brick in 3 seconds. I'll show you a production die that can make 500 in 3 seconds.
Now show me a polypropylene chair seat made in 10 seconds. The list goes on.
I work with a lot of the largest injection mold manufacturers in the world and have single molds producing millions of parts a day. I can't even fathom how big a 3d printing operation would need to be to keep up with one mold.
Completely untrue. Most 3dprinted materials cant mimic real world enginnering plastics for mechanical performance
Not a chance, scale is absolutely a factor for a wide variety of plastic parts, and the design does not change or need to change once it is established. The last injection molding shop that I worked at we had three 64 cavity molds running 24/7 365 days a year to keep up with demand. In a single day we could produce over 1.5 million parts from these 3 machines alone.
You're talking about a specific subset of the consumer market and ignoring a large portion of the injection molding industry. Most injection molding shops aren't making little trinkets to sell on Etsy.
ever heard combination injection mold combine with SLA print ?
FDm is a choice, as long as you know what you are going to print. Right technology for the right object.
I can assure you there are plenty of things that just dont hold up as 3d prints where injection molding is the answer.
Something you sorely missed here: sure with 3D printing you can change something quickly and test it out, but you are only gonna 3D print it to see it in physical form. Once you've 3D Printed the piece you consider final, the design THEN goes to injection. Not try to keep changing and testing molds.
3D printing will complement Injection molding nicely, not replace it. (At least not in its current state.)
Missed points here is isotropic vs anisotropic. Molded parts are isotropic. Second missed point is that 3d printed molds are an option to bring the cost of injection molded parts way down and allow for rapid change because the mold costs are cheap and they wear out faster.
Small brain: 3D printing will replace injection molding
Big brain: 3D printing will enhance injection molding
A metal-printed mold for large scale production can be produced faster and cheaper than traditionally milled one already, and for small iterative batches resin-printed injection molds are fast and cheap enough even for hobbyists. Between mass production scalability, better mechanical properties and wider material choices, injection molding will be around for a while.
You’re funny, I had an entire paragraph written about how over half the points you made are straight up wrong.
“You can change it” are you doing technical drawings or just “guessing” when making your designs? Like there’s a massive difference between prototype and production.
If you’ve ever worked with injection moulding you would know that it’s light years faster than 3D printing. Also injection moulding can provide stronger parts than in 3D printing. I seriously have no idea where you’re getting your information other than making it up.
We do it every day
It's pretty easy to tell that this YT personality doesn't have any actual experience with injection molding or engineering. Lmao.
Comparing 3d printers and injection molders is very much like comparing vans to trains.
Injection molders are like Trains, which carry a lot of cargo at once and are fuel efficient, but also constrained by the railroads, which cost a lot to build.
3D printers are like vans, which have the flexibility of not being constrained by railroad tracks, but they also have a significantly lower cargo capacity and poor fuel efficiency.
Both serve a very similar purpose, yet the one you pick ultimately comes down to the size of the workload. It makes as little sense to run a train that has the van's capacity's worth of cargo on board as it does to use a van to ship the whole train's capacity
this is the smartest and wisest analogy I've ever heard
Volume vs development time. Different business cases
I definitely wouldn’t say that 3D printing will REPLACE injection molding, but I understand that your argument is that in most cases it will prevent small businesses from needing to take the extreme step that is injection molding
Yeah - no.
FDM and resin processes have an important place in prototyping, but there are some glaring shortcomings in the material properties of the parts produced. As for mass production, its hard to beat the volume and low cost of injection molding. The part's mechanical properties are better (uniform) with IM as well. And, highly precise parts are probably still going to be machined from billets, (can't tell you how many acetal and nylon gears I had to make during my machining career).
All the products of engineering are compromises. Its always a case of whether the choices made will meet the mechanical needs of the application.
As much as I do like 3d printing,it feels like some people have prematurely hyped it up as the Star Trek replicator come to life. It isn't.
Injection molding is cheaper if you're making a lot of parts
Incorrect
@@slant3dNope you're wrong, on a manufacturing stand point when mass producing parts or toys, btw over 300 million units of those star wars figures were sold in the 80s not thousands.
As optimistic as I am about the concept of the shelves producing the parts, there are some things that cannot be *FDM* 3D printed, at least with our current machines.
Take Lego. They cannot, and will not, change their design to make it more easily mass producible using printing. Changing the design would effectively strip them of all brand identity. Also, Lego will never accept the surface quality that FDM produces, even with the tiniest nozzle and the smallest layer height. Sadly, this isn’t an isolated case. Syringes, as someone else mentioned are in the same boat. Sure, you could insert some kind of plastic bladder inside to make it reliably watertight, but does cost allow it? Probably not.
Then there is the problem of large objects. Make them out of several small parts? That will result in seams which are sometimes unacceptable. (I doubt 3D printing will ever get to EDM levels of zero tolerance precision.)
With future technology advancements, something like powder bed fusion could maybe work how you are describing. No need for bed adhesion, no need for supports (in sls at least). These processes run into their own challenges of post processing and expensive materials, though.
What Slant3D is doing is truly awesome. The number of products that can be mass produced (after tweaks) using FDM is huge. As technology advances constraints such as simple first layers and overhangs will become things of the past. Maybe one day we will even see multi-material (or at least multicolor) mass production. This will make even more products fit for FDM mass production.
You make many claims which seem valid. The concept of reducing development costs and eliminating long distance shipping in particular.
My suggestion, with admittedly no experience in the field of mass production, is to stop diluting valid, thought provoking ideas, with what I think is hyperbolic misinformation. False claims will make it more difficult to convince people to trust the true ones, so take care.
They already are. Legos started shipping 3D Printing products 1-2 years ago.
@valeriyproklov2868 Wholeheartedly agree. I love many of the videos/ideas I get from this channel but they constantly dilute their content with these desperate, half-baked, zero-research, low effort videos. And for what? The sake of releasing a video? To convince some birdbrain client that will believe anything without any evidence? Idk just seems WAY too forced sometimes. Which is unfortunate because they would easily be my favorite 3D printing channel since they actually make unique content and don’t just bow down to the BambuLords like everyone else nowadays. Just wish they did their due diligence more consistently.
The very fact that we exist is the proof. We are mass production 3D Printing company. We do it every day
@@slant3d The fact that you exist is proof to the argument that no one is debating. There is no doubt that there is a massive number of products that are mass producible using 3D printing. There is no doubt that 3D printing mass production is a valid method and has its own place. This isn’t what we are discussing.
The fact that you run a mass production 3D printing company, and “do it every day” is in no way proof to your claim that injection molding will be completely displaced by 3D printing.
In your video you state that most products do not reach the production volumes necessary to make injection molding economically favorable to 3D printing. But the term “most” means you acknowledge that there are products that do. I agree with that. There are, and in my opinion always will be, products that have volumes so large as to demand injection molding. Injection molding and 3D printing will coexist. Each has their own application.
@@slant3d I could only find a wooden duck replica that was handed out at The LEGO House event in 2022 as a limited edition item. Is that what you're referring to, or are there more than just that one product they've sold?
I'm starting to see why this video upset so many people. It really did seem like you were trying to claim that injection molding will become obsolete and/or completely taken over by FDM printing. But I think the issues about quality, durability, and surface finish speak for themselves. I think I, and nearly every commenter here, would just like an admission that there will, as far as anyone can see, always be a place for injection molding, even while 3D printing farms like yours take some market share and expand its own market share.
We all appreciate how down to earth and realistic your videos are. We come to see how you creatively overcome novel engineering restraints to design products with this new process, this new way of thinking about designing for mass manufacturing. We all want to see you succeed. Don't double down on this takeover narrative. Please address the surface finish and large part size advantages that injection molding has.
This is an uninformed take on manufacturing that resembles the hype around 3D printing 10yrs ago. A better video would discuss the drawbacks (strength, accuracy, time, etc) of printing and theories on how they could be overcome to eventually compete with the efficiency of molding.
not until you can print intricate overhangs within .001
we have 3 molds where i work that produce 48 parts every 5.24 seconds and a robot pulls them and sorts each one by cavity and bags them. and it runs 24/7 for 3 months at a time with very little downtime and zero flow lines. that's not even the peak of what injection molding can do. For 3d printers to replace that, it will be a long time
Dude, I respect your perspective, I've learned a ton (even for my comparatively miniscule small-scale printing) from watching you, but... I think you missed the bus on this one.
Injection molding is a different way of doing things than 3D printing, much like it was a different way of doing things than making parts out of cast (or machined) metal, and each of those approaches has their respective 'sweet spot' (you'll notice that there are still both machined and cast metal objects out there). You're absolutely right that 3D printing is a threat to injection molding on the 1k-10k production runs, but there are a lot of parts out there (literally hundreds of them under the hood of any modern car, and upon occasion, I've bought boxes of 1k from a supplier for surprisingly little money from industrial suppliers) where the volume is there to make injection molding absolutely crush 3D printing on production costs. And (with some, not all, materials) injection molding can have mechanical properties that are far superior to anything I've seen out of 3D printing (for example, quote me 1k 16oz 'throw' cups to be screen-printed for a Mardi Gras float, preferably ones that won't leak when loaded with alcohol).
He does clickbait titles for rage-bait engagement. It's pretty pathetic.
@@dumpsterdave3710 yeah, it's insincere and so common these days. I have started blocking accounts that do this hoping the algo punishes the behaviour instead of rewarding it.
This has to be bait for clicks and your business right? An injection molding nachine can quite literally bury a 3d printer in parts before it ever finishes one print. A hammer isnt a screw driver. Lets use the correct tools for the correct applications.
This guy only cares about pushing his printing business and doesn't care that he's doing it by spreading lies and general bs. 3d printing will never replace injection molding...
This is complete bull. You're shilling your business and blatantly lying. Your point is basically "you can run a print shop instead of producing a unique product efficiently at scale with an injection mold." Implying that innovators use injection molds for their prototyping is unhinged. Your conclusion that, because 3d printing allows you to iterate on and develop a design better/more quickly, 3d printing should replace injection molding is a delusion with zero basis in reality. Reported for misinformation.
Let me guess, you have some financial interest in 3d printers? They are good for rapid prototyping and that is it. Injection moulding is orders of magnitude cheaper in quantity. You just can't expect a print head to move through three axes in the time molten plastic under pressure can fill a mold (blink of an eye). Like for like 3d printed parts are usually weaker in use too.
If you are making 100,000 piece your should be using 3D Printing for sure
@slant3d Can you explain your point a little bit? A company can have multiple molds that all have multiple cavities. If the product didn't have a long cooling time after each injection, the tool can eject parts several times a minute. That would be awfully hard to keep up with.
I'm gonna have to pile on with the other naysayers. I just dont know where to start, so I'll begin with the claim that most injection molded products are manufactured in the thousands. This is utterly false. Most injection molded parts we encounter range from food containers, plastic utensils, disposable medical devices, electronic/electrical connectors, etc. These products are produced in the tens of millions yearly with very complex molds and processes to optimize the bottom line. I wonder how many people have seen 128 cavity stack molds spitting out bottle caps -- millions!
Further, 3d printed parts cannot approach injection molded parts for appearance, precision, and mechanical/physical properties.
The argument that injection molds cant be changed or iterated just doesnt hold up. Most molds are made to fit in standard mold bases. The cores and cavities themselves are made from separate components that are easily modified to suit engineering changes.
It's almost like somebody with a calculator has already thought about this.
These are my thoughts too. Another thing that injection molding can do far better than 3D printing, is over molding/two shot molding. Think durable lettering keycaps with white and black plastic or rubber bumpers molded onto tools.
@@boomermatic6035 Good points. Add to that the variety of plastics -- PEEK, PEI, PAEK, LCPs, and other high performance materials that can't be 3d printed (practically).
As CEO of ErectorBot ultra large format 3d platforms. No way, they both have their own place in industry... I have many years in the injection industry aside of the additive scene. Also one of the originals that invented 3d metal direct deposition.
Massive 3D printing hobbiest here. This is just a flat out lie. It's basic economy of scale. 3d printing is great for small business, very specific needs or hobbiests but on large scale production it just does not keep up at all with injection molding
Incorrect. Largest 3d Printing Farm in the World Here. We do it every day.
@@slant3d Congrats on doing something far less efficiently for much more cost then if you are running enough printers to compete with industry level injection molding production capability
But we are not talking that scale. When companies want to make hundreds of thousands of a product very quickly 3d printing does not scale to that at lest not as a efficently as injection molding. Prints would need to take 1-2 minutes to get close to compete with how large injection molding setups can make millions of parts a day.
Congrats on your small business but please don't try and lie to people all of the comments are tearing you apart
@@slant3d i would love to see the cost per unit in your farm compared to something injection molded , its probably like 10x
@@kaymcmullen9521at some point speed does not matter for products. Sure you can injection mold in a week what would take 3d a few months. You now have to store all those parts that will take years to sell through. That costs money
@@kyletaylor6942 Again that only applies at smaller scale. Hasbro isn't going to 3d print toys because they need to have them shipped out to thousands of retailers across the world who are going to be the ones handling and storing them and it's far cheaper to injection mold in a factory than 3d print. Certainly, if you only have a limited amount of demand and are not selling to other retailers 3d printing is going to be beneficial provided storage is an issue. For a lot of small businesses it isn't much of a cost due to having spare space to store things e.g store rooms in offices, garages in home business.
3d printing becomes less efficient and more expensive the bigger the scale becomes in the overwhelming majority of scenarios.
'Most products fail' this is probably the single biggest takeaway from this video, unfortunately so many missed it. Though I don't see 3D printing totally replaces molding any time soon, when you already have the winning design, and need to produce hundreds of thousands of them, molding is the better option. But again, you can afford to go that route by that point. 3D printing reduces the cost of failure, allowing you to try more things and eventually have a higher chance of success. And as 3D printing gets faster, I'm sure the threshold where molding overtakes printing is also going to get higher.
No one missed the point except the author of the video that said "3D printing will *obviously* *replace* injection molding". That statement just isn't true and it clickbaited me into the comments.
3D printing is great for fast iterations and personalized products.
But we will never 3d print syringes. They will be injection molded - alongside many other products that we do demand millions of.
3D printing has it's place, injection molding has it's place.
3D Printing Printing will effectively replace tradition in effectively all product ranges. We still use horses today because cars can't walk. Doesn't mean horse are "better"
@@slant3d I definitely agree with you for 95% of the types of products that are currently injection molded.
3D printing cuts into that low, medium, and even high volume. But not extremely-high scale.
Plus, I'm a software developer, the personalisation aspect is ideal as you said, but it's extremely hard to do and going to take a lot of IP to get there. Plus some tools (Like LIDAR, which are being added to modern flagship smartphones, so that's not too far away).
I'm not sure where you got your expertise on either process but it's pretty clear that you are misinformed.
Nah. We just do it every day
@@slant3d 👌making videos about 3d printers does not make one an expert in anything, especially not mass manufacturing or injection molding...
1 injection molding setup can produce thousands of parts an hour. For any high rate production 3D printing cannot keep up with that pace. For a small simple model you would need thousands of printers to produce thousands of parts an hour. If anything stands a chance it’s resin. If we get to the point where we can resin print in seconds it stands a chance.
Correct you do need Thousands of printers (Like in our Megafarm). But FDM already matches that rate.
@@slant3d Are 3D printing farms more space efficient than injection molding?
@@t1e6x12 thats something i will only believe if i see it myself. i dont think 3dp can do that...but it doesnt have to!
Obviously not.@@t1e6x12
I really like the thought process and have been convinced that 3d Printing is viable for mass production. But I disagree that it is a replacement for injection molding. They are different tools that are good at different things. 3d printing interestingly enough potentially opens up huge blue ocean market that molding can't touch. In that there are lots of small budget inventors and niche markets that would never end up with a molded product due to the up front cost. There are also impossible to mold shapes that 3d printing opens up. That said 3d printing is also terrible at reproducing some things that can be molded very easily. 3d printing may well end up the dominant manufacturing form over injection molding but it will never just replace it because it is good at different things.
In the past I thougt so as well. But there are many limits in 3d printing that can't be broken. I dont think it will ever be dominant manufacturing method, but imagine a quickly 3d printed moulds, they can be done now they only suffer problems related to 3d printing quality which should be fixed in time. Also imagine a mould that consist of thousands self setting small screws with just a flexible protectin sheet on top of them.... That mold could set itself quickly in any shape you program it into...
You make some good points, especially regarding niche markets and small budget inventors, but these are _not_ mass production markets as Slant3D describes them. His characterization of mass production as volumes in the thousands is ludicrous, and this clickbaity video is full of ridiculous presuppositions. If what he was saying were true, manufacturers would've replaced IM with 3d printing 20 years ago -- the core technologies and limitations of 3d printing haven't changed much since then, although cheap FDM and resin printers have exploded in the consumer and prosumer markets. "Obviously"? - this guy has zero credibility in my eyes.
I'm another with donkeys years of injection moulding experience, 2 decades of outsourced rapid prototypes and more recently, in house FDM. I admire your design for printing tips but this video completely misrepresents injection mouldings and the infrastructure that makes them possible. Injection moulded parts have better surface quality and mechanical properties, and they're more consistent part-to-part than FDM parts. Its true that tool costs have to be amortised but once they are, there's no tooling cost. The real benefit of 3D prints is in making low volumes of products that you probably couldn't demold in any case. If you want your FDM part to look like an injection moulded part, you need a skilled modelmaker to spend hours finishing it.
I recommend that you stick with what you know which, as I have said, is great. Your design for FDM tips are leading edge. Lets have more of that!
Flexibility does not equal scalability, and injection molded parts are foodsafe due to low porosity. We print containers to organize parts, not tupperware to put in our fridges. Surface finish is a huge contributor to why injection molding is the way it is, spend $$$ on a perfect mold to make perfect parts for a long time on a single machine, it eliminates the variability that is every printers calibrations, variables are scaled down and production is scaled up. I know you're smarter than this, extruding filament slowly in singular layers, is not a catch-all solution.
how about 3d printing moulds? This would give the advantages of 3d printing, and let you make large amounts of products once you have a design you're happy with.
Printing already produces as the same scale as molds. Printing molds is redundant and wasteful
Speaking with several years of product development experience, including iwth injection moulding manufacturing, this video is not realistic. Injection moulds for lets say a certain small part the same part can cost anywhere between $800-$12000 depending on the manufacturer, so you can get cheaper moulds as well, they will just have a lower lifetime like 10,000 units. The quality is still better than any 3D printer apart from MJF printing and possibly Polyjet. Many products like consumer electronics sell millions of pieces, such as game consoles, phones, etc. The material properties of injection moulded parts is superior to 3D printing in terms of strength, especially with small parts. There has been significantly higher research done with Injection moulding for material properties as well, and colour science with Pantone and RAL colours for example. None of that exists for 3D printing yet either. I know of a company that uses MJF 3D printing instead of injection moulding to produce parts, but it is only because they are producing small parts in high volume, and they were producing small internal components for headlights, so for them it was feasible. Otherwise 3D printing is more expensive, by a factor of ~10 in some cases, and I know because I did the cost quotation comparison for products I developed. So while 3D printing is s viable production method for very specific cases, we are far from a reality where it is usable for mass production to replace injection moulding. We have no printer that can produce the material properties, surface finishes, colour accuracy etc. that injection moulding machines can do. You made this video with barely any knowledge of product development, Industrial deisgn and injection moulding, and the comment section full of experts who have worked in this field calling you out is more telling than the opnion piece you made. Be realistic. 3D printing has many advantages.
You could not be more wrong. Get yourself educated
He's running a business. So of course he's going to ignore the cases in which injection molding clearly wins. Either that, or he doesn't understand fix vs variable costs in economical terms.
I can understand 3D printing replacing injection molding for many engineering products. But I don't understand how it will replace injection molding for most consumer products. I look around my computer table and I see lots of smooth parts with silk screen printing that I pick up and hold in my hands or touch with my fingers. Wireless phone, cellphone, keyboard, Sharpie, magnifying light, coffee cup, beer bottle opener, laser pointer... In general, I like things that I routinely pick up to be smooth and easily wiped clean, not textured to hide layer lines. There are parts of the electronic calipers that definitely benefit from texturing, but its got labeling on its buttons and a printed scale. And how can you make caliper jaws that measure down to 0.1 mm or 0.01 mm with 3D printing, without jumping through as many hoops as having the part be injection molded?
There are certainly some parts where 3d printing will replace a molded part but I think you are underestimating just how many parts are high volume. In my industry I’ve seen many parts moved from a machined metal process to 3d printed, but never a part that would have been molded to 3d printed. If the volume is high enough to justify the cost of a mold, then the volume is too high to justify 3d printing it, the space required and manpower needed to match the speed of the mold just doesn’t add up. One of the 4 molders in my facility makes 300k parts daily and very rarely ever stops due to over production.
I see 3d printing as far move of a threat to machining then to molding.
This is like comparing screen printing to something like dye sublimation or direct pigment printing. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages. 3D printing has its own of each as well as injection molding. For that reason i don't think 3d printing will completely take over injection molding, but it will definitely have it's own share of the market.
There is also a place for horses in a world of cars.
Are you deliberately trying to destroy your channel? This guy made an excellent case. High volume molds for high volume mfg won't be 3d printed. It will be interesting to see a 3d printed mold made out of a hardened tool steel that can with stand 50,000 psi of injection pressure last millions of cycles. Get your head out...
@@robertwiedeman5602 yeah i dont like that "i know it all" arrogant take in all well structured and argumented comments, its quite annoying actually.
@@robertwiedeman5602Honestly, comparing Slant's responses here to their other video's comments... Did someone have too much to drink then go on TH-cam for some flame wars? Slant's comments here are aggressive, full of hyperbole and weak analogies, and just come off as rude. WTF is going on at Slant? And all the claims made are just vaporware, they give no source to back it up. I'm becoming less interested in their cheap PLA subscription by the minute.
Disagree entirely. When you sell to a store and receive you are not at liberty to change it as you wish. I sold to a small music store first order was 8k pcs. When you mould 100k pcs the mould cost is negligible and the margin is such that you can dump the rest in a landfill.
I get that you’re trying to find arguments that align with your business but this premise is wrong and your smart enough that it comes off as disingenuous
Laughable, i make molds and inject inhouse, when injecting multi cavity molds (28pcs every 15sec) where you would need a SLA printer to make and be within tolerance of 10 microns on each part, good luck replacing injection molding at those speeds, but thats not to say that semi big parts can't be 3d printed and at a cheaper price especially if volume isn't there, but for me the average order on parts are at 25k parts so 3d printing is a no go in most industry's and volumes keep going up if with more and more consumers in the world so its not sustainable and will never bee with the world population going up consuming more and more, thats my 2cents on this matter
This, this is the video that made me hit the unsubscribe button.
I make injection molds.
Cnc and modern machine tool tech is continuosly making mold making much more efficient and 3d print has a very long way to go. Don't scrap your milling machines just yet. 😂
3D print bros are high on their own supply these days. Next they’ll be claiming they can replace the machining process.
High on the fumes, possibly. Bro is lying to shill his print shop.
lol if anhyhing 3d printers will be used to make injection molds
molds are actually a huge application for 3dp...only that its mostly sand-cores and lost castings...not injection molds.
Exactly. 👍
Yeah, no. Injection molding *cant* be replaced by FDM *maybe* by some form of volumetric SLA or SLS will come close but even then it has shortcomings with precision, finish, post processing, and such. Injection molded parts when designed correctly for the process are high precision, whatever surface finish you could ever want from grainy to mirror shine, comically inexpensive in volume, fairly low energy cost, and very fast to produce by virtue of being a volumetric process. That is an incredibly difficult combination of optimizations to beat. FDM certainly cannot and won't. It'll take an as yet unforeseen breakthrough in volumetric printing technology to make something close to competitive in the categories injection molding excels in, which is almost all but the upfront cost for low volume production. You can even get *desktop injection molding machines* for as little as 6K USD now that use aluminum molding plates if you do enough small production runs
Nope. As long as 3d prints are weaker in one direction (try to print a 1 mm tube that is 1 m long…. And I know it is extruded but…..), can’t offer smooth surfaces on all sides, are not food safe, cost more energy to produce (. 1 molder vs 1000 printers, especially if you consider other materials than PLA. ABS being the most used material).
And so on. Both technologies will coexist in the future till the point we have replicators able to “print” atom by atom….. and quickly.
The speed of inj molding is just on another level atm.
I enjoy your thoughts on filament and additive processes, but you don't need to pick fights with other manufacturing methods in order to hype up 3D printing. All it's done here is hurt your credibility.
In a perfect world, printers would be able to create high-precision molds, and the two technologies would be used side by side to create parts both quickly and flexibly. This should not be a competition. We should be looking for ways to incorporate all such processes into our toolkits.
@senorali there is actually someone who is trying this idea, don't know if u have seen it, but 3D Printing Nerd recently posted video with such idea, but the polymer used for mould is water-soluable, which enables to achieve structures and geometry unachievable or very costly for traditional mould.
I leave video here for anyone interested in this topic th-cam.com/video/4kIeqTK5iao/w-d-xo.html
I think you should see the actual injection moulding process. You dont have a clue what you are talking about. Do you actually believe this bs that you made up?
No. Just no. Not the same result. Not the same speed of production, or the same material properties. 3d printing may replace some limited scenarios, such as limited run, delicate parts, but will not replace plastic injection molding in general. Printed parts are weak and flawed. In some cases you can 3d print the molds vs cnc machining the molds though.
Printed parts can be made stronger than you might think. While they might have issues with layer lines, it's not so bad that they are delicate. I've made pieces where I'm pretty satisfied with the strength.
@@logicalfundy yeah, strong enough in some cases, but almost always inferior to injected part. And printing is slow as hell compared to casting or injection molding. It's ok for prototypes and one-offs. But if you need 5,000+ make a mold. And cost. Injection molding is way cheaper in materials and aluminum molds are pretty cheap now.
@@erikturner8005 printing at scale isn't done with a single printer though. Every business I know of that is trying to print large quantities uses a farm.
@@logicalfundy so? Even with farm you have to post process parts, vs injection mold drops finished parts into the hopper. I have a friend who prints a production product.. for that product resin printing is appropriate for the number he sells vs the hassle of making injection mold setup. But that's not commonly the case. The post process labor isn't worth it vs molding for anything approaching scale.
@@erikturner8005 Resin printing is not what you use for large scale 3D printing, and has more post processing than most other types of 3D printing because you have to handle a curing process as well as the print. What he is talking about in this video is FDM, which usually requires no post processing.
Injection molding can require post processing as well with complex enough shapes, in fact what Slant 3D often refers to as "impossible geometry" is basically complex enough geometry as to require post processing with injection molding, but no post processing with 3D printing.
I still see injection molding to be the prime packaging method to create consumer package goods like shampoo bottles, antiperspirant containers, etc. They are manufactured in the millions by CPG companies. I don't see 3D print farms replacing injection molding for those types of packaging.
Except... those are typically blow molded, not injection molded. It's a different process, but I agree, if you need millions of something, molding probably is still the way to go.
I'm starting to think your videos are purely made only for engagement.
Whoa. 3d printing is a very good low-volume test environment. Way different market than high-volume injection molding ie packaging products, food containers, construction, medical, etc... These markets often require millions of parts per day. It has its place but quality and product integrity still have a long way to go for printing. You might want to go visit a large molding plant and reassess those comments.
Not to be pedantic. But packaging isn't really a product. Molding can have it
Yeah 3D printing and injection molding do not share the same purpose at all. Injection molding is for making parts that are needed in massive quantities very quickly. Parts that you will need a lot of, for a long time.
3D printing is for prototyping, making drafts, being able to change the model being produced on the fly, and perhaps most importantly, being an accessible means of production to people who don't have dozens of thousands of dollars or more.
However, I'm not saying that print farms can't be effective ways to make money quickly. We wouldn't see print farms hardly at all if that was the case. Print farms can change their produced product in just 24 hours with little to no modifications. They serve a different purpose than injection molding, which is why they will not replace it.
@@slant3d Packaging is 100% a product. And how can molding have it if 3d printing will replace molding? I have had to design geometry for polystyrene for boxes to hold things during shipments. Molds are made, there are requirements for draft angles and radii etc. To think that packaging isn't a product just shows me that you haven't designed products. Thermo formed "blister packs" are designed. So if your smartphone came shipped in a sock vs a well designed box it would be the same thing? And you missed the point of the comment and focusing on one thing in it. To think some of the medical device projects I have worked on for clients would be end use FDM is laughable and it shows that you are in a bubble. Sure FDM print farm for etsy shops selling trinkets is fine, but to claim that it will replace injection molding is either something you are doing as click bait or you drank your own koolaid man. FDM can exist without waging a war on other manufacturing processes.
Some really interesting points here! But both have seperate places, FDM prints even from the best printers don't give the clean faces, consistancy or in some cases, strength required for quite a number of products to be marketable. The other 3D printing methods have quite a number of their own downsides also, such as high cost and limited material availibility, high machine cost, lengthy and labour intensive post processing etc...
Production 3D printing's best application in the commercial sector is likely with startups which have limited budgets and a need to start at a small scale then scale up exponentially with the demand.
The idea of marketing a product that is still very much in the iterative phase would probably not be a very liked idea by bigger industry players and wouls likely not be a wise aproach.
You can also not achieve the same results with 3D printing as are availible with injection moulding, such as overmoulding.
What about cars and legos? Where high volume, infrequently changing design, and a need for high surface finish quality are combined, I don't see even the most efficient print farm outcompeting an industrial plastic injection mold setup. I think you've made your point about scalability really well, but I'm curious how you think 3d printing could take on well established and steady markets like car parts and LEGOS. Thoughts?
Lego is testing 3D Printing today.
@@slant3d I didn't know that. Super cool! Well, thanks for the video and thanks for sharing your knowledge about industrial scale 3D printing 😁
Looking around me, there are not many plastic parts that I think would benefit from 3D printing passed the prototyping phase. What I see in front of me: keyboard, phone, computer monitor (large enclosure), pair of scissors (handles), pill box, shirt buttons, all sorts of cables and connectors, ... And I mean, look at 5:55 , these bins don't look 3D printed to me, and if a print farm doesn't print its bins, who will?
This guy is not an expert at all in manufacturing process to say that 😂. 3D printing is not the solution for mass production like we need for certain plastics parts... I have 9 years in industrial design experience and I know this is full of 💩
replace is a very strong word. stuff that are already there already have a process, this only works if you have new parts or new designs and the thing is complex enough.
Is 3D printing a viable option for power tool shells? Since they are under high stress,
Design is everything
I think it depends on the design and the (post)process. SLS/SLA might work as the parts are more or less homogenious, typical FDM might work aswell, depending on the used filament and postprocessing.
But overall I disagree that 3D printing will completely replace injection molding, it'll be taking some business away from injection molding, but not replace everything. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.
@@slant3d and physics too my friend.. just a reminder that you are not above of
I strongly disagree
I've been watching this channel for a long time and you produce great videos on 3D printing but I don't understand why you're insisting on this point so much. You'll never match the finish compared to injection molding which instantly disproves your point. At the extremes, you're not going to match the scale either, certainly when you take the floor area required for both processes into account.
Molding cannot match the surface textures from 3d printing
@@slant3d But in the majority of products a smooth surface is desired and 3d printing struggles to do this without further processing that also has its own problems.
you can do all kinds of finish in injection molding. its also important to have pressure for many plastics. it affects properties, just like humidity. thats why consistency is not that easy in fdm unless you nail down the parameters constantly
if you are trying to bait the discussion i think its a little cheap on your side but effective none the less lmao.
On the other side i think you are way too retail oriented on your business, at least that is what we see on youtube, it would be nice to see real industrial, well engineered parts on the videos and discussions on that front, at least imo. And it would be nice to see a little humility on the answer of real well argumented comments, and not take the "im too ahead of my time" kinda Steve Jobs take that you are having.
You are also reaally underestimating the possibility of cost reduction on the moulding machine side, at the end of the day it is a cheap block of aluminium or steel in most cases, so the cost is all industrial, that means potential cost reduction over time approaching material cost.
Check our library
@@slant3d Again, a well thought out and articulate comment and you can't be bothered to give them a real answer. Why respond at all if you aren't going to try and address the comment. "Check our library". You could provide links to relevant videos that address the comment, if they exist.
@@LearnEverythingAboutDesignbecause he's wrong and he knows it. This is an ad for his business. He doesn't really know what hes talking about when it comes to mass production of components. He also doesn't go over surface finish which is a massive drawback to 3d printing.
Very contentious opinion:
1.- Economics: do not underestimate the volume that certain industries require, for example automotive, one car will need thousands of different pieces and literally hundreds of thousand pieces of each, eventually your farm footprint, energy use and administration will be more expensive than the equivalent injection machine, and not every mold is a super expensive tool with slides and cooling ducts, some of the simpler ones can be made with a good CNC machine.
2.- Engineering issues: while 3d parts are improving injection molding is still generally tougher, less prone to quality concerns, while a 3d printed part can fail basically anywhere injection mostly fails at the seam or the sprue, which depending on the application isn't a big deal, yeah they can shrink or warp too but they are much less prone to do that, some parts are actually easier to inject than to 3D print because of support material which you will never be able to completely avoid and FDM printing should not be used in some industries like medical and food due to safety issues of having lots of small crevaces in your part. Also what about larger parts? It would be really tough to print a car dashboard or a large box with 3d printing, that would be a very wasteful application where you would need a very large 3d printer with lots of empty spacebor even specially designed, also what about transparent parts? I can go like this forever but I think those are enough.
I love 3d printing, I do it all the time and see the value of it but this is overselling it.
Toyota considered 25K mass production
@@slant3d that's a very unfortunate statement considering they sell just in the US around 250k Corollas per year. Most vehicle programs produce AT LEAST 50k units per year and the larger ones like the F150 sell around 750k units per year.
Tolerances are the main thing injection molding has going for it i.e. Lego ;) Sure we can print building blocks but not to the spec Lego has them set for. If we figure that out then life will dramatically change to the way you envision it but until we can get those tight tolerances AND reliability for say a million 1x1 blocks I don't think it will happen
Yeahhhhh I think a lot of people are going to (correctly) disagree with this.
Open up the scope of products you're thinking about. People aren't only using injection molding for toys at Walmart
Molding can have packaging. Everything else will be printed
This is flat out lies! As a person owning 50 professional 3d printers and CNCs and casting machines as well I can tell you this video is totally wrong. It only applies to customized products or under 500 pieces products and both of which must suffer worse quality. CASTING cost fraction per piece and takes a fraction of time to produce with a significantly higher quality. You would have to be insane to go for 3d printing if you can sell more then 500 pieces.
If you need it faster or cheaper then get 3d printers a bit better and 3D print the Moulds!
This will never change even in the future - and moulding have potential to get much better when using a variable self changing moulds.
I agree 3d printing will replace small volume injection molding.
If you need like 60,000 pieces injection molding all day.
Welp, I believe the comments section has captured it all.
While the upfront cost of injection molding tooling is high, we usually design in a way to share it with other products or future-proof it. The tooling manufacturer can also modify the tooling to accommodate certain dimensions. I appreciate 3D printing during the prototype stage, but it doesn't seem likely to completely replace injection molding in the near future. Each has its own place.
Looking at the part examples and your perspective, it seems that you have only been exposed to the consumer trinket and gadget market. That is fine, but that does not represent the world in it's entirety. There are many major industries where 3D printing flat out can't do the job. You ignore dimensional tolerances, surface finish, mechanical properties. Things that aren't acceptable in medical or aerospace...
Your claim that no products ever run in major quantities is simply false. If you truly looked around at the world and saw what was molded you would see the mass scale that printers cannot hit. Your expensive printer farm cannot hit mass numbers. Look at the food industry and the BILLIONS of molded food containers and bottles produced every single year. Your printer can't even make 1 of those parts let alone begin to match the scale.
And you provided zero evidence that you can match the speed of an injection mold. There is no printer on the planet that can match the speed of an injection mold. You have to build the part one tiny layer at a time vs a mold that is filled pretty much instantly.
Additive manufacturing is cool and has it's place. However, it is not a 100% replacement to any manufacturing process though. It surely will take some market share away from traditional manufacturing but not to any concerning extent and certainly not any total takeover like you claim. As you pointed out, the major benefit to additive is it's prototyping ability.
"Scale doesn't exist in the real world" wow that's some bias towards your buissness model if ive ever seen one... scale very much does exist... let's take one very small, common, and simple part... a zip tie... go ahead, print one... now print enough for a box of 1000, now print enough for a data center... I can throw our a dozen more similar products used in the hundreds of millions each year, but I think you see what I mean... now I do love 3D printing, I have a dozen printers... but every process has its place... you have to understand a niche when your in one, and your not doing that, you are trying to proclaim 3d printing can just replace something that can produce tens of thousands of parts per week at scale, with way less maintinence, moving parts, and both a better surface finish, and better strength to weight ratio... some stuff needs that, you can't just design a solo cup to be 3d printed as well as a real one, yes there are some things that don't need to be injection molded but some things, alot of things... really... really do
i know a lot about injectino molding, but i still like 3dp. its for different use cases. its never going to be one or the other.
@@simonschneider5913 yep
Imagine 3d printing a dashboard of a toyota car or truck XD
He is not right or wrong. I think people underestimate printing turn around on troubleshooting a design is super fast as for tooling the amount of engineering it requires to even consider a prototype and let alone the cost can be overwhelming making new products its not easy for everyone specially if it fails. I do see a future where 3d printer in certain areas will take over. But not in the following. Food, Medical, Aerospace etc. The tolerances that IM can give you cant replicate with 3d printing
To make it short and not argue about anything hospitals, military, Food industry, Drink Industry Blow molding, Car industry, anything aerospace. Will be really hard to replace. They expect plastic molecular and quality inspections will disqualify 3d printing for now. but who knows in the future.
I love my subscription, I don't think about filament anymore, I just make.
Finally getting value out of my Prusa mini that's been sitting around doing nothing for years now.
Thank you
This year I sold around 3k 3D printed parts in kits and kits consisted out of different parts. Yes, I could have injection molded the main part, but would have needed a way higher upfront investment and would have needed to match look and feel with the low volume "auxiliary" parts. What people ignore is how insane of a quality MJF nylon sintering produces and how well it scales especially for smaller parts. Those prints can even be chemically treated / vapor smoothed to be gas-proof or cerakoted, if need be. This way I could modularize the kits to better match customer needs. And I was able to order in two seperate batches according to customer demand all with less than two weeks of lead time.
That's all well and fine but it's not a replacement for injection molding and your own comment proves it. 3k parts is nothing for an injection mold. They can make that in a couple days depending on part size. Also you mentioned the need for post processing to improve surface finish. Something that isn't needed on injection molded parts. Also i checked the tolerance for mjf nylon and its .012" that's laughable in the injection molding world when a loose tolerance is .005" and a tight tolerance is .002" like come on now. So while 3d printing is a great tool for small batch and medium production it will never fully replace injection molding the way it is now. Another thing to think about as well is large components. Can you 3d print a lawn chair as fast and as cheap as molding it NO. How about car interiors. How about tool bodies with multiple materials. What about metalic components like a dead blow hammer. While I don't doubt that 3d printing has a lot of cool applications to save money and time mass production of parts is not one of them. End of story.......
Absolutely impossible, not now, not in the near future, not ever, unless the 3d printer start materializing the objects instantly, but then will be not a printer anymore :)
There is no 3d printer that can get even close to the quality of injection molding, and if we come to a textured surfaces the situation is even worse. But the surface quality is the least issue, the speed is something that no 3d printer may achieve. Even for large and complex details the cycle time is measured in seconds.
3d printers have their application, low volume production, prototypes, impossible for molding shapes, that's all, they always will be much more slower, low quality, more expensive parts.
We do it today
Plastic 3D printing replacing injection molding is a fantasy at best. You might as well buy a bread maker machine and go compete with Wonder bread 😅
Unsubscribed. This video is full of dishonesty. 3D printing is a great technology but it will never replace injection molding, not even in most applications. Wishful thinking from someone who is completely blinded by your own biases.
Already is. Check what we do for a living
@@slant3d Your company does 1000’s of parts. The global market for injection molded parts is billions of times that. 3D printing is not as scalable as injection molding due to the human labor component required to keep 3D printers running at capacity.
@@slant3d Yeah you have an FDM print farm and make false claims about FDM being equal to molding. Got it! You can promote your business and FDM and not try to make it some massive global take over. IF you were going to do that with 3d printing why on earth would you pick FDM as your horse in that race? MJF, SLA, SLS all have major benefits over FDM. The downside is the startup cost. So you picked the cheapest option, that most people have at home. An injection mold machine can spit out more parts in an hour than your print farm can spit out in a week. And that is fine. Just don't try and skew it. You are either lying to people so they use your service, or you are very out of touch with the entire industry of manufacturing. Not sure which is worse, but please back up your claims or state them as opinions so people know.
3D printing can only replace injection modling for low scale/low volume applications. You are not correct when saying that many products are made in tens of thousands only. My brother works at an injection molding factory in Europe and they can be pumping out tens of thousands crates of one design per day for months for some supermarket chain. 3D printing cannot compete with this scale at all.
I understand that you're promoting your business, but this video is not truthful at all. You should more clearly explain that 3D printing is for small scale start-ups which are trying to find their niche. Established industrial companies will continue to pump out millions of copies of the same product using injection modling for decades to come.
What in the heck was that clicking in the background dude?
Whomever told you you need music in the background was wrong.
I'm calling it now: 3DPaaS
the cost efectiveness of a product comes from the manufacturing scale, at the end of the video you talk about the objective of basically making custom products for each order... exactly how much do you plan on charging for an elon musk wearing a mickey mouse hat figurine? 200 usd? are you really considering the labor time of customizing orders? yes, you may find someone every once in a while that is willing to pay that, but do you really plan on having a business based on this niche market?
Customization is a dead end. Print on Demand is already cost competitive
Plus the ability to manufacture on demand. Inventory doesn’t exist and need to be stored somewhere if you can make it when it already has a destination. I’m still new, at a beginner hobby level, but I see the potential 3d printing can offer me at a small scale, so it’s exciting to see it grow on a large scale to democratize manufacturing. 👍
Here is what you forgot. injection molding machines produce more parts per sq foot of shop space.
If you measure output per sq foot, you immediately run into a wall of cheap space is in locations without skilled labor and skilled labor is in locations with high cost per sq foot.
That alone is a huge justification for injection molding.
And are you accounting for downtime as well as upfront costs?
@@SirSpence99 upfront costs are good to be exorbitant regardless. To some extent you can grow into a print farm, but you run into issues really fast like not having enough amps on the breaker. So now you have to remodel to turn your warehouse into a factory.
Molding to some extent requires you to just start with a factory, so slight advantage 3d printing, but we are comparing prototyping to production kinda by definition at that point. Anyone looking at either needs to deploy serious cash regardless.
Downtime is a more interesting conversation. Would you rather have 10 percent of your machines broken at any point in time or 100 percent of your machines broken 10 percent of the time? It would be the same total throughput, but the first requires way more labor to manage.
You’ll need be printing parts pretty quick to keep up with injection molding. Also, 3D printing creates “fake parts” as I like to refer to them currently, they have a long ways to go before the material properties match what injection molded products. Take PEEK parts for 1 of thousands of examples, hard to match. Does 3D printing have some advantages, YES of course, prototyping and testing out an idea/design concept, you can’t beat it. But this idea of 3D printing replacing molding anytime soon is laughable.
Just an expert opinion from a mold maker, mold designer, tooling engineer.
if you limit the scope of this video to small companies with very small scale production of many products then yes, MAYBE you have a point, but replacing injection molding in industry? even if we ignore the quality issues of current 3d printed parts, what is the plan exactly? a 1000 3d printers farm creating 10 parts an hour each? consider the space you would need for that, and the babysitting of the machines, and one power outage mid print will basically ruin 10 thousand parts at once, the electric consumption, the heat generated, the manual post processing of all those parts after each print...
a single injection molding machine can print thousands of parts a day, of better quality and surface finish, it requires minimal babysitting and depending on the part it may not even require post processing
and the excuse for this is "i dont want to spend 5k on a mold, and once i do im stuck with the product design"? how much money would you have to invest on 3d printers to match the production of a single injection molding machine? this is ridiculous
1000% agree with this comment! Injection molding machines can spit out up to thousands of parts per hour and run 24/7 without stopping. I just don't see how FDM or any 3d printing process can every compete with that speed and repeatability. The thought process is lacking for sure. 5000 FDM machines in a warehouse making 1 part per hour is not the same thing as 1 injection mold machine popping out 5000 parts per hour.
We do it every day
That right. The 5000 3D Printers are better. Better reliability. Better speed. Better Redundancy. Faster Part to Market
@@slant3d Either you are being intentionally dishonest or disconnected from reality. Just because you say something on the internet doesn't make it true. Do you work in the injection molding industry? Do you see issues with molds failing to produce parts once production starts? Do you have experience designing molded parts? Injection molding machines are highly toleranced, accurate and well oiled machines that have been running for years. A mold machine that can spit out 5000 parts in an hour is not some warehouse full of 5000 hobby reprap machine. No 3d printer is going to match the speed of a single injection molding machine ever. There are just physical limitations to squirting plastic out of a small nozzle layer by layer to build a part up in 3d. The difference as the part grows in the Z direction is drastic. Each process is different and building a part up layer by layer is not the same as shooting the molten plastic into a mold at high pressure. A mold machine can spit out small and medium sized parts so fast, but with FDM if you go from a small 1in cube to a 2in cube, the amount of time difference to print is big. You are solving the problem by adding more machines, which don't have the mechanical properties nor cosmetic appearance of molded parts. BUT even if they were the same you are dealing in false equivalencies. Lets say you entered a car race. The winning car runs a lap in 1min and this is a 10 lap race. Could you solve the problem by entering 10 cars that do a 10min lap. Your "team" did 10 laps in 10 minutes, but you did it with 10 cars instead of 1 and each only going 1 lap before the race was over. You did not win that race with a slower process by adding more cars because they each only did 1 lap in the race.
Lets reconfigure the problem. Lets say instead of a speed race that you have to deliver 10 items to a location. The items start at your warehouse and have to all go to the same location. You have 10 cars delivering 1 item to the same location because that is all they can carry vs 1 car that can carry all 10 items at once. Which of those makes sense? All can drive the same speed limit. And if you say 10 cars taking 1 part each to the same location you are loco.
My recent video and quote for FDM vs Injection molded parts looked at actual numbers. The molded parts were delivered sooner and much cheaper than FDM quoted from Fictiv. 10 days to make a mold and 7 days to make enough parts to produce 250 game controllers. FDM had a 22 day turn around and was 4x more money to meet the same goal. Now I did quote around and get lower FDM numbers but the break even for Molding vs FDM was still in the hundreds of units (between 250 and 500) even with the best quotes I could find. Now I already know you are going to say Slant would be cheaper and quicker. It was 2000 parts in total and even if you ran 2000 machines and printed everything in a day there is no way it would be cheaper or match quality, surface finish, and function of molding.
FDM has its place and print farms are fine, but this constant and blatant dishonesty is going to reflect negatively on your business. You can see the comments on this video as proof of that.
Stick to getting the most out of FDM, showing how you can improve parts and orientations optimized for FDM, and talk about your business. But don't intentionally lie and make bold claims about things that are provably false.
Walmart alone has over 10k stores. So if you want to sell a product to Walmart you need to create enough parts to stock each store. Even if that's only 100 of one item then yeah that's a million parts. Do you have any references for most injection molded parts don't make more than 5k parts. I love 3d printing but it has limitations and there will always be a market for both. You even made a video showing how you can make a water bottle with 3d printing but actually only made a water bottle carrying case. You'll never have smooth surfaces or large parts made in mass (a slide) or food safe parts made out of 3d printing.
Hi! I enjoyed your video!
One of the points was that the whole piece price is affected by the tooling cost but injection molding suppliers nowdays only take around 5% of profit rate (automotive industry). This means raw material is 35% of the whole piece price. They are being very competitive. i myself am a big 3D printing nerd but at the same time i run moldflow analysis at work.
Even if the 3D printers program time gets faster than plastic injection cycle time, Sadly filament material is more expensive than the the whole piece price of plastic injection molded parts.
Hopefully prototyping / 3D printing technology and CAE technology can help each other to achieve cheaper tool costs.
This might work in a few niches. But components that contain a circuit board and other electrical components cannot be changed so easily. The rest of the design also needs to be adjusted and, if necessary, tested. Which then drives up the costs. I work in the aerospace industry as an NC programmer and we also use 3D printed parts there. The rework (fits and surfaces) is not without its problems, as the parts are very delicate and therefore difficult to clamp (process reliability). Even if one 3D part can replace several machined parts, the overall production costs for 3D printing are no better than for machined parts. The only justification for the parts is the weight savings in the finished product. And in aerospace the numbers produced are not particularly high.
The potential of metal cutting machines is far from exhausted.
This could also apply to the injection molding machines.
What printers are being used to make the parts you are talking about?
@@SirSpence99 Eos, Trumpf and Nikon Slm are printer manufacturers that can do this.
You should make a video that is "what 3d printing is not good at" every technoligy has strengths and weaknesses. I truly believe 3d printing has a huge growth curve in front of it. taking market share from other manufacturing methods. But saying its better at everything all the time is just wrong.
I am in sales and if you say our product is the best at x but not y people believe you. If its the best at everything they stop believing you because they realize you are selling.
Cars are better than horses.
@@slant3d this is such a lame straw man argument. You choose different manufacturing methods for different parts. If I need a hundred thousand of the same part I’m going to use injection molding. During the prototyping phase and early development of course I’m going to 3d print. But jeez this is seriously childish, you choose the tool for the job not this “my thing is best”
@@christianedelmann6880this guys an idiot. His example for injection molding was 5k parts. Most injection molds makes hundreds of thousands to millions of parts quickly without excessive support material. Also the plastic pellets used in injection are wayyyyyyyyyy cheaper than filaments. 3d printing has the chance to revolutionize manufacturing I don't understand why this guy has to make such bold claims and strawman arguments when 3d printing is already impressive as it is. Any article about injection molding will tell you why it's not going away and that is the more parts you make the less the cost. So if you need a million bottle caps you're nor going to 3d print them. Also I'd really like to see a 5-10 year old printer that was used day in day out be able to hold. .001 .002 or even .005 true position.
3D printing is to slow, or you need to many printers and space for an output of thousand part a day. In handling time 3D printing is expensive. All those printers have to be maintained, parts collected and filament replaced. With injection molding you need only a few machines and everything is automated.
Now you can print metals with laser sintering, you also can print molds. This is way cheaper than the traditional way molds are made. 3D printed molds are not as strong as the old molds, but for small molds the cost is only 5% of the cost. A 3D printed mold has a lifespan of about half a year to 8 month. Iterations are not that costly any more and in many cases iterations are not needed for many years.
If even 3d printer manufacturers like Prusa starts making parts with injection molding, injection molding still has a strong place in manufacturing plastic parts.
We already do it
3D printing has numerous advantages as mentioned, but the poor surface finish, highly anisotropic material properties, and low cycle time per machine makes it incompatible with most products. Stick to making the most of 3D printing and stop lying about its limitations.
spot on, i have a couple years of 3d printing small business and i think here is being a bit oversold, as any business owner should of course
Incorrect. There is no engineering reason. Printing can't replace virtually every molded product
@@slant3dCan or can't? You are contradicting yourself in this comment
@@slant3d Your company makes 3D printed parts at a large scale. I know that. It’s also true that there are limitations to the technology.
the cycle time of 3d printing will never touch the cycle time of injection molding, ever. technology improving won't change this. i removed this channel from my recommendations based solely on this incredibly short sighted video.
Printing already matches the production rate of Molding. We do it every day
@@slant3dwhat are you talking about 😂
Show me a piece that you can match the injection speed with.
I'm all aware of 3d printing advantages, and they are there, they exist and are useful for a set of purposes. But you cannot extrapolate that to all production lines.
1 printer can't match 1 injection molding machine. I'm assuming he means 1000 printers somewhat can.
He is likely building a single machine for 1k to 2k dollars. For the price of one molder he can make/buy hundreds if not thousands of printers. He is looking at his factory as a single machine compared to a single molder.
@@gonzalomartindelavegacarre6108 While I do agree that 3d will not replace injection in EVERY production line as each one has its pros and cons, slowly more and more plastic pieces on the streets are 3d printed maybe we don't notice because most are little pieces that we don't pay attention to but they are there
But I believe you are stuck with the stigma that when we talk about 3d printed product you may imagine a guy with a single printer on his bedroom (like I am), and yes that is far slower than injection molding, but when he talks about mass production with 3d printers he means a industry like Warehouse with hundreds and hundreds of 3d printers working at the same time, so yeah one to one a 3d loses against an injection molding machine but they can easily match at mass scale
Also, when designing a product many little features and dimensions can go wrong, having the capability to change the design with little to no cost is huge, and I mean it as someone who designs and prints spare parts for my workplace
Dude is trolling, moulds are such low cost, high speed at volume. No chance fdm replaces this. Especially as molds can have costs lowered by additive manufacturing.
Already replaced it
@@slant3d so if I am designing a part like an enclosure for automobile electronics or the world of electrical fixtures in homes do you really think 3d printing could replace that? Light fittings for example are massive volume? Also love the video, just got a k1 max used to be into this decade ago with anet a8 so much has changed!
I get your points, but "replace" is way to strong world. Went to see how Coca-Cola bottles are made. One injection mold machine made 14 bottles per second running 24/7 in farm of many-many machines. I'd like to see bottle that looks like Coca-Cola one with same properties (transparent, thin, strong, light) made with any form of 3D printing
It's good clickbity conversational starter for sure
When are you opening a factory in Europe?
The EU is the biggest market in the world.
Your math isn't mathing.
Assuming everything is in house
If I need to produce 1000 parts, I can easily print them.
If I need to produce 10,000 parts, I can use a resin mold and a small injection machine
If I need to produce 100,000 + parts, I can use a industrial grade molding machine.
Under what circumstances would dedicating 40,000 sq feet to a print farm be the most efficient way to produce parts quickly and consistently... Cramming 50 printers into the same volume as a single injection machine is still gonna have longer cycle times. If space is unlimited, then you can throw more printers at the problem until the win the total output metric, but I am not convinced that its cheaper, just more flexible at the expense of maintenance/complexity of scale.
We do it everyday
@@slant3d Again another empty reply with no actual data or proof behind it. You are just spurting out your opinion with nothing to back it up here. Why bother replying to the comment if you are not going to even address it?
There are applications for FDM but saying that putting 1000 machines in a large building is the same as injection molding isnt even talking about the elephant in the room man.
@@slant3d Being based out of Boise is massively tainting your perspective. Most places can't just dedicate more space to more printers because of the cost per sq foot of workspace. You are in one of the cheaper markets and trying to extrapolate your success to Tokyo.
2:35 what are those printers? they look pretty cool
I believe their company makes their own printers meant for production at scale.
Why not 3D printed injection molds?
That is possible, and likely will be used more in the future, but injection molds will always require some machining for the tighter tolerance parts that no 3D tech can make yet.
You can for certain geometries and materials. The molds will likely wear out much quicker than a machined mold.
There's a good bit being done in hybrid manufacturing being used to make metal moulds. Printing the main bulk of the mould and maching back the final surface. This also allows internal cooling channels in the mould to speed up the throughput.
3D print won't replace injection mold, FDM 3D print that is.
if 3D print can replace injection mold, it'd be resin 3d print, once we figured out how to turn plastic waste into resin.
I mean "maybe".. it will require a resin that is as good and has all the properties of ABS..
This is absolutely one of the worst videos ever made on this topic. This is beyond misleading and since you are representing a company you have a responsibility to be honest to the public.
The iteration and ability to pivot is the key and will carry 3D printing further until it has the materials ability to replace more current industrial processes at scale. The example of digital testing is the prescient point - digital is physical too, and the line between both will continue to blur. There'll always be a crossover to traditional methods, but that point will continue to get pushed out.
Doesn't know much about molding. At quantity molding is unbeatable. Molds aren't as expensive as they were in the past. Go in the next supermarket and try to beat the price of cheap molded household product with 3D printing....what can you print for $1-2
I wouldnt want 3d printing to replace injection modeling for the fact it would be a surplus in things being made. I would say great if it was aiding the process. Oh yes and cutting cost seem like a good ideal.