As engineers, we should be willing and able to indicate whether or not a fabrication technique is feasible for the intended end use application. When we do this, our clients will trust us and we will be educating them so they can be informed customers. I try to convey to my engineering students that they should be life learners so they can be competent advocates of the best technique to achieve a goal, and that they should strive to be open to all possibilities. Open-mindedness in this way is a technical skill that is as vital as any other in an engineer’s skill set.
With the cheap availability of FDM and resin printing, engineering students are getting experience with this tech in school, much more experience with mechanical fabrication than students usually got in in the past.
I would like to hear more about why consumer machines aren't well suited for industrial production. I am really curious about what problems you encounters and how you solved them with in house machines. Heck, even just hearing the problems without the solutions is fascinating, if you wanted to keep the solutions secret for some reason.
I would rather buy large spools than the tiny 1kg ones that are so wasteful with the plastic spool itself. I bet you would sell out if you made large spools too! I will disagree with the landfill comment as I worked in an injection molding factory (its where I was hurt and disabled....anyway) we ground up EVERYTHING that we possibly could to use back into the mix. It depends on the plastic and part on how much recycled could be used but we had very little actual garbage. Side note - those grinders are awesome and LOUD. One other thing for people to think about is the mold has to be moved with a forklift so there is even more added cost. I still want to see and hear about YOUR machines! You keep saying you want tons of printer farms to pop up but still being a bit proprietary with the technology ;)
Really curious about what your in-house printers improve on in terms of hardware for reliability and what kind of customizations you look for beyond just auto-ejection and your in-house production software. Also your thoughts on why no-one is producing "off-the-shelf" printers of this kind, perhaps specifically marketed to production farms, or even businesses wanting to do some significant amount of production in-house. It seems like most of the needs of production farm printers would align fairly well with those of prosumers - longevity, reliability, print quality, easy/low maintenance, etc. Actually, even some basic production software like batching, build queues for a set of printers, etc. It seems like an underserved market, no?
38:55 An even better example is wood. It's only strong in one direction, and the difference between long grain and cross grain is much greater than the layer lines in 3D prints. But it has the advantage that you can join multiple pieces with grain oriented differently to compensate. Adding longitudinal reinforcements in 3D prints is not so easy.
If you guys started releasing 2-2.5kg spools like ColorFabb has on offer for some of their filaments (like their VarioShore TPU), I'd definitely buy it. I find 1kg spools inefficient many times, too, even though I'm just a small-time prototyper. Every third print or so, I'm stressing about being nearby for a filament change due to a 1kg spool ready to run-out. I wish more manufacturers offered larger spool size options.
I would be interested in a "reacts" video about things with rigid constraints on appearance. For example, most of my personal 3D printing is the recreation of movie props; I *cannot* change the final appearance when trying to make something easier to print. I know this isn't your normal wheelhouse, but I think it would be interesting to hear how you would combine your knowledge of designing for 3d printing with that utterly unalterable final appearance. Regarding the injection-molded "crates" for supermarkets: I have two thoughts. First, that sentence could be interpreted as "crates filled with products" being shipped, rather than "crates *as* the product." However, I work in grocery delivery in Alberta and here at least it's been a rapidly growing business area. Grocery delivery needs reusable packaging, and the forms that seem to have become standardised are 20 litre plastic bins or totes and collapsible plastic crates. These are large items, but also in high demand (currently) so I suspect they still fit into the category of "bottlecaps" - a mature item that doesn't need to be iterated and is in sufficient demand that the injection molding volume is cost-efficient. And that makes me wonder just how many such items there are? A toy certainly isn't one of them; neither is a Warhammer miniature. But Blueray cases? Tupperware? Sharpies? Pop rivets? Rulers? Okay, yeah, half of what I just said is arguably "packaging," but I think we're a lot further away from 3d printing entirely replacing injection molding than 20 years. I *do* think that the next 10 to 20 years will see 3D printing become the dominant manufacturing method for *new* designs, but I suspect there's a *lot* of high-volume, stable items that will stay injection molded for the next half-century. Though I acknowledge, it's possible that 3d printing will hit the point where it's cheaper to redesign a bottlecap for 3d printing than to cut a new mold, once the old one wears out. (Basically, I do think it will happen, I just disagree on the time-scale.) Oh, and as for 3d printing being weaker in one axis? So is wood, and yet 90% of the people in Canada and the United States and Australia are there because their ancestors got on ships made from wood.
41:05 - You replied to my comment! We're definitely playing at the low end of the volume spectrum and 3D printing is great for what we're doing, and getting better all the time. It would be great for our primary product if a material such as TPU could be printed with a smooth surface finish comparable to molded or extruded parts, and even better if it was significantly lower durometer than 95A without stringing or other issues. We don't advertise that the new version of the product is now 3D printed but the layer lines are a dead giveaway on a product that our customers are accustomed to being smooth. By far the most dissatisfaction is from customers who have 3D printers and view the new product as "just a cheap 3D printed part". I need to update the website after the latest product improvement, with the hope that better communication with the customer improves customer satisfaction. Certainly shipping a product that is different from what is advertised is an e-commerce cardinal sin that's going to lead to dissatisfaction, no matter how much better the new version is. My goal for 2023 is to develop new products that are designed to take advantage of the strengths of additive manufacturing. We're doing low volume 3D printing of products tweaked to optimize them for 3D printing in a very product specific way, but I love seeing Slant 3D doing high volume 3D printing and optimizing for 3D printing more generally. I'm excited to see what's next from Slant 3D as you guys innovate to push the technology forward.
@@Reddkomet Vapor smoothing, epoxy coating, UV resin coating, sanding. All affect the dimensional accuracy. Vapor only works on ABS. Epoxy is brittle and doesn't adhere strongly so can break off if the print flexes. Sandblasting could work. Spray finishes might work, but would need some R&D to find what adheres well. Shellac might help as an adhesion promoter.
I look forward to next year's video when you announce you're designing a new filament material that will be easier to produce at a low cost, but still work in existing printers as you continue your quest to change the face of 3D printing.
phenomenal info here. I do think part finish is a strong consideration when comparing processes. Hopefully future developments will improve finishes for 3d printed parts
This is an interesting discussion regarding the economics of 3d printing vs IM. I think one important caveat is the maturity of the company. If you are large established 8+ figure revenue company, you are not going to iterate the product every 10k parts. you want to order one mold and buy millions of them, and forget it. Move on to the next product thing. The least iterations on a product the better. your big box retail buyers will love not having to update revisions for products. The less they need to do, the better. If you are a new company cant take the risk with IM tooling and still want to be able to sell in the thousands as soon as possible, 3d printing makes a lot of sense. There is probably a lot of volume overlap that causes this discussion to be nuanced due to size of company and amount of risk that can be taken on.
Thanks for making these videos. I am not in the industry (other than using my personal 3d printer for fun), but I appreciate the view into what is happening in large scale 3d printing. I have a couple of questions, go when you have time. 1) what methods do you see for making the 3d prints with PLA more durable and able to stand up to the environment ? Heat treat, chemical treat? 2) do you see a better material to use to replace PLA as the default? 3) where do you see multi colour printing in your environment? Like Bambu printers with multiple filaments in parallel. 4) how about mixed materials? Ie metal, wire, ceramic, electrical and electronic components. The goal being to print complex items that cannot be just PLA or ABS. Thanks.
I still can't understand why 3D printing requires high tolerances, you could simply add a filament diameter measuring sensor somewhere in the toolhead and make the firmware compensate for the inconsistency...
25,000 is the minimum number of cars of a single model Toyota will generally sell, not the number of a single part they need. They may use millions of a single part in multiple models across multiple years. That part will likely never be 3D printed for numerous reasons. 3D printing will replace injection molding in many areas. Exceptions are true large scale production, when specific surface finishes are desired, when more uniform strength is desired as in layer lines are not acceptable, and there are many more situations. It's fine to say 3D printing will replace injection molding in many cases, but not without caveats. You even said yourself, design for the process. There are many cases in which 3D printing will not be the appropriate process. In that case, it won't replace the other process.
Quick examples where 3D printing will likely never replace injection molding: Tools and tool bodies Brushes of any kind Disposable razors Bottles, caps, cups Lights, transparent items
Another issue: Fiber filled injection molding. FDM simply can't replicate glass fiber reinforced polymers, for example. One more: Silicone parts. Incredible difficult to 3D print silicone. Also any material which is injected at extremely high temps.
I'd be interested to hear more about what differentiates Slant 3D's printers and surrounding processes from consumer 3D printers. (Although if some of this is a trade secret, that'd be understandable) I think this would probably help big-time in convincing people that 3D printing in viable for higher volumes than they may at first believe. It's clear that Slant 3D has a vision that others, myself included, do not fully understand. As far as SLA, I think it'd be possible to automate the post-processing somehow which would make it a more viable option for mass production than it currently is. That being said, it would be a more complicated process than FDM. Especially when FDM parts are properly designed for minimal post-processing. As well, it'd definitely be a much bigger investment to build up the supply chain as mentioned. I think Slant 3D is smart to not bother with trying to make SLA work. In a previous video, the philosophy of focusing on one thing (FDM) and doing it really well was mentioned. An absolutely massive company may be better off diversifying such that a poorly performing market segment won't sink their ship as others will keep them afloat. But that's because they have crazy resources to still do everything very well that most business do not have. Trying to diversify normally can lead to sub-par performance in everything which means no competitive advantage in anything.
That's extremely difficult to do effectively when you are melting a material. It's hard to control a liquid, so you have to control the process where you can do it better, and that's in the cool rigid state of the material
@@masterbick2 That's what he's saying. Measure the filament as it goes into the printer's extruder, and continuously adjust the extrusion rate so a known volume is pushed into the melt zone even if the filament cross section varies significantly. You'd need at least two perpendicular sensors since filament is not perfectly round, and maybe more since it may not be perfectly centered in the measuring area due to stiffness and curvature. And you'd be assuming that the gripper pushes a constant length of filament per revolution regardless of the cross section variation, but I think that will be true in most cases. So I think it will work.
@@dekutree64 that will stop working as soon as you introduce retraction, pressure advance and input shaping. Very common things in modern 3d printing. The consistency of the filament diameter is very important. Compensating for a problem will never be as good as not having the problem in the first place
@@masterbick2 Reverse moves would follow back up the record of filament cross section, so should remain symmetrical. I agree it's better not to compensate for a problem, but this is just deciding where in the total sequence from pellets to 3D print is the best place to put the solution. Making super precision filament seems kind of stupid when you're just going to melt it down again anyway.
Can the filament cooling channel be circular, sort of like a retractable tape measure or sea shell? Is there some special reason why it has to be cooled in a straight line? A circular bath would save on the space.
I feel like we need to revisit how to use "High" and "Low" tolerances. I was rewatching parts of "Filament Production is too slow" and "We want to fix it". Low tolerances is atleast in my environment considered to be very tight tolerances. So +/- small amount and High tolerance is +/- a lot.
In a way, the _problem_ sounds like making paper in paper mill. There you squeeze water-pulp-mixture through several meters wide gap to a mesh to be dried and pressed and control mixture, pressure, gap width along the width and whatever else to get correct thickness at the end product - at up to 45mph. Would it be possible to push plastic as a wide band, and while still malleable-hot, cut it to narrow slightly over-sized slices and pull through sort-of-calendar (cylinders with 1.75mm grooves between them + enough tons of pressure to keep in-between areas from letting any excess material through) which would guarantee dimensional accuracy? Filament could be hexagon (making Prusa April fool reality) if it made any practical sense 😅 Does fishing line production share any problems or solutions with filament production? I'd guess spooling needs to be fast, but the line is very flexible.
It’s a lot of rambling about how 3d printing will replace injection moulding but there was one good sentence in there about how it’s not demand for the product that determines the production rate it’s often the manufacturing process itself which determines how many units need to be produced and that is certainly inefficient. You know what will be a real kicker, 3d printed tools for injection moulding
Maybe I missed it but don't forget the one great strength AM has... Complex geometry in parts, sure you can do it in IM, but then you have to weld the halves or thirds... together. Glad you mentioned the obvious. AM can't match the millions scale.
A bit of constructive feedback/way to improve is to get a pop filter or pop sounds cleanup in post. Don't think it has been an issue before as I watch all your videos. Only mention it because it looks like you appreciate feedback.
Regarding Prusa and printing on consumer machines, something is currently changing. At Formnext, they presented the latest version of their automatic print farm. Presumably, in-house production will move from consumer machines to these print farms.
@@Nick_-Nick- I wasn't comparing anything. I just wanted to point out that Prusa is obviously making the transition from consumer machines to specialized machines for serial production.
I really love 3d printing design my own parts and sell stuff. My major issue is we live in a molded, cintered and machined world. When making a product I need to design around parts that have no thought to the viability of 3d printed accessories. The transitional lag time will take much longer than you expect. Look at nuclear power its more efficient in every way and cleaner yet barely used because of public perception issues.
Fascinating 3d production insights. Great myth-busting. For filament production, ability to continuously cool at higher speeds will likely be the bottleneck. Have you considered using a heat pump to chill the water bath? Doing so should help shorten bath and allow faster pull-through. Heat removed could be used to pre-heat beads, to reduce amount of heating the extruder needs to apply. (not melting, just below pre-phase transition) Water-to-water heat pump systems already exist, and could be used a supplemental warehouse heating initially. Setting up a high speed filament production line is definitely a challenging thermodynamics engineering problem. A fun one to solve.
You are spot on with your manufacturing philosophy. I am a retired Industrial engineering consultant and have worked with all kinds of companies over the years, quite a few in the automotive components sector. Lots of injection molded parts and they all have big $$ in slow moving and obsolete inventory in their warehouses due to over production, mainly driven by long set-up times and or staffing required to increase the number of changeovers. The companies are on the hook to the OEMs to provide spares for X years. If they could fill this requirement with 3d printing it would free up a boatload of capital and warehouse space. Have you ever seen /timed a Mold change on an injection molding machine?
I remember seeing a video of someone dismantling a Tesla and he found a 3D printed part in there. The way it was done, it clearly wasn't the original intention, but it worked. But it also shows what place 3D printing has in mass production. Tesla makes millions of cars, it makes little sense to 3D print all the plastic parts, but sometimes, there is something wrong with the injection molded parts. Maybe bad design that needs a quick fix, maybe something happened with the supplier, whatever. In this case you can have 3D printing as a backup. This way, you get the best of both worlds: the mass production capabilities of injection molding and the flexibility of 3D printing.
PCB's have been 100% digital designs for DECADES. Automated parts loading is still a painful process to setup, but the board everything mounts to is stupid easy to revise and reorder. (assuming nothing triggers repeat certification testing...) PCB's are one of the products that kicked off the inexpensive low friction prototype industry.
Concerning the cooling system of the filament production line, you may look in to a similar technology that goes into making ice cream. They have a system that uses liquid ammonia to rapidly freeze the extruded product before it has time to melt. They can't get any water in their product or it would taste terrible. Just a thought.
Thank you for the reaction! Please buy something relative large and cheap like a noodle strainer from China that costs like nothing and quote that like a customer would need 25000 pcs of it. I doubt it gets close to the selling price. But maybe I get surprised. On the other hand I frequently beat the price of injection molded PU seals with CNC cut ones at quantity, which shouldn't be possible as well
Hi there! I’ve been binging your videos. They have been so helpful for some recent designs of my own products. Question: for some of your biggest clients what material do you most often print in? I assume PLA is not suitable for most clients’ needs?
Your face in the thumbnail is very accurate to many comments sections, unfortunately.. fortunately your production sense doesn't seem to match that, so I'm confident your plans to increase it will go well. Will be interested to see what you come up with for faster filament production, would like to see update videos on that if it's not too much hassle to make them
i would also like to know about the difference between consumer machines and industrial machines. im only familiar with stratysys machines which definitely are not for volume
what should a 3d printer be like for a farm? at the moment I am not going to produce a DIY printer, but I would like to understand what I need to pay attention to when buying a serial printer
Video idea- Could you make a video about the slant 3D printers and what features were implemented to make them more robust? I want to design my own printer and have CAD and print farm experience but I don't know where to start with designing a printer. Thanks!
I want to see how to design a remote control for 3D printing. For some reason, in my head, that will really convince me that FDM will replace injection molding.
Do you mean remotely controlling 3D printing? Cause that... already exists.. and if you're talking about making parts for like a TV remote, that wouldn't be terribly difficult either 🤷🏿♀️
One of the last comments you responded to talked about how you can't change electrical enclosures easily, and that they're pretty wrong about, 3d printing is obviously better than moulding there. However, it did bring an interesting question to my mind. What about UL testing and other certification? Does that kind of thing really hamstring the iterative design advantage printing has over traditional manufacturing.
hmmmmm... may be difficult but instead of squirting out filament via one hole, use many nozzles on one screw-driven plastic pusher! that way you can make several spools of one type/color at once. as for tolerance, change winding speed to stretch it hot and use nozzles a bit oversized deliberately.
Two things. 1. The 3D Printing Nerd just did a short video on,I believe it was Nexa3D’s new invention machine that I think has the potential to change injecting molding. 2. I honestly can’t remember seeing any 3D printed products in stores or online, except if I really looked for something specifically made that way. I love the idea of 3D printing and even own a printer that I have yet to use. But I can’t see commercially used products for the average person in large scale yet.
The Nexa3D mold inserts are cool, but niche. It solves a problem for injection molding, but 3D printing the final product solves it much better in most cases.
Note about #2: I think that's largely because of the newness of 3D printing. It takes a long time for an industry shift to happen, especially for physical products. I have been seeing more 3D prints "in the wild" recently, but I do agree it's still rare. What we really need are more farms at Slant 3D's scale - they need competition. Not only for the regular reasons for competition, but also because the industry as a whole needs to scale up, and I don't think just Slant alone will be enough.
Is there anyway to Invest in the 3d printing space? and what is the best way to capitalize on the increasing popularity of 3d printed products. This coming from someone with limited knowledge of consumer based 3d printers and their operation and not a lot of capital who also works 40 hours a week. Thank you for all your insights!
38:47 I hope you do! Food safety was a thing I wanted to look into more but it kept stemming back to check the PLA, not to apply heat onto it like tea or into a dishwasher, etc. But there's a tonne of variables involved.
You should totally switch from using filament in your production to direct pellets in your 3d printers. Also, if you want a big extruder, you might want to contact Kodak. I do think, that they have a few not in use anymore for their film production.
He can't because you can't FDM a ball bearing. You could do gears but the load at the contact point means you are limited to gear geometry. A traditional root fillet on a spur gear designed to reduce load concentration doesn't help with FDM since you are dealing with the layer lines. For low production consider an ABS like material with an SLA process. You will have much better friction properties and technical accuracy than with an FDM process.
Would love to see a video comparing a typical consumer grade printer and what you guys had to do to yours to make them suitable for large scale farm manufacturing. I assume an amount of reliability and accuracy upgrades.
@@slant3d anything specific? I'm thinking of a comparison between printers in the $750-1500 range. Prusas are supposed to be fairly reputable (although the XL seems to have problems at launch) and a lot of people use them for their own farms. I understand not using shitty Chinese printers that are going to need a lot of tinkering for anything worthwhile. Just curious
@@willofthemaker I have a Prusa and I love it and it's plenty reliable - but I imagine at Slant's sheer scale, even tiny things that most makers (or even mid-size print farms) don't encounter are scaled up to become big problems.
10:20 Maybe look at wire spooling machines, since that will also kink. It's also made to very high tolerance, although I doubt you could directly copy the method of achieving it with plastic filament.
Why not offer 3-5kg Tangled spools as well, and use that to work down on pricing? 1kg is very little, just couple of prints. Kinda amazed it's "the standard" -- more like a sample.
Infact for synergy benefits you should push mostly the same size spool you use, exactly like you like to use, as you use it. Exactly same product. Over time when it's easy you could add touch retail touches.
Yeah there are no good 3-5 KG spools available. It’s basically cheaper to buy 1kg’s since they are so common, but bigger is so much easier to use. My P1P’s eat through 1 kg rolls.
I'd like to know what you're printing if you're using 500g for most prints. Pretty sure my average print is probably ~60g or so, although there is a lot of variability. Looking at a couple of my larger prints, I'm not even sure I've ever done 500g. The largest one I think I've made - one that fills a significant part of the bed of my Mk4 - is 373g worth of material. But that's an exception, I don't make something that large on a regular basis.
I'd say... "man, somebody should start work on a pellet printer for home." But I saw one at a Rep Rap Festival. The hot-end was a monster. And good luck swapping colors.
3dp bonus... if you product fails, well, at least you didn't waste hundreds of thousands of fails and a huge metal mold... more funds to do you next idea!
I have a very hard time seeing AM (especially FFF) becoming the dominant manufacturing method. I have been in the industry now for 6+ years and working with peers which have been in it for many more. While all of us are super excited about 3D printing, we all agree that mass manufacturing will continue to be done via conventional manufacturing methods, especially injection molding. Experts and reports claim that AM could capture up to 5% of the global manufacturing market. Compared to where the AM market is at right now, at about 0.1-0.2%, the growth potential remains huge with a factor of 25-50, but this will happen over the next 20+ years. Big limitations remain cost, material properties (ex. filled materials are not as good) as well as surface quality and tolerances for highly functional parts. Beyond that, with a mega trend being sustainability most passive parts which have been 3D printed have a terrible CO2e footprint compared to traditional manufacturing.
I'm gonna disagree a little bit on the tolerance argument. While I agree that many applications don't require high tolerance, however, quite a lot of printers won't eat 1.9mm filament. In the country where I live, there's filament for ~10$ per kg, but the varience of the filament is about 0.2, which produces a lot of problems with clogging and blobs. Moreover, the filament itself isn't very high quality, and requires much higher temperatures to print, while still being quite unstable. So in the end, instead of 9-10$/kg filament, I chose to buy 13$/kg, but with excellent quality and no spool-related issues with the prints. It saves so much time and troubleshooting, knowing your filament will be stable in color, in dimensional accuracy, and printing settings.
The things I make basically 24/7 don't require accuracy (most of the time), btw. But I still opt for using higher quality filament to save time, even though the filament is quite a bit more expensive
Larger faster extruder means that when something goes wrong you have more scrap and it'll be harder to recoup your lost revenue from the downtime. I wish you the best, but just like throwing more engineers at a problem doesn't solve it faster, a bigger faster extruder doesn't necessarily mean less expensive filament.
The problem all companies have had in extrapolating the future is myopia. Knowing what you know is not enough, A new process and technology can come out of nowhere and you just spent a fortune on huge new horseshoe or typewriter..or filament extruder factories,
There are so many things wrong with this video that I just can't cover them all but will try to hit a bunch of them. This is mostly for people watching this video as I know you won't read it and respond with anything meaningful other than making some quip about "yeah we already do it" or just passing it off. I don't generally watch your videos but often times I get sent the links and asked my opinion on them. This one i just have to comment on and it will be the last video of yours that I do so. I think that you have a responsibility to either state what you are saying is your opinion, or provide some facts behind your claims. Stating you worked in engineering for 15 years designing molded parts in the hundreds maybe thousands. So in 15 years you worked on thousands of parts to production? If that were true you would have a better general knowledge around the price and turn around time of rapid molds vs full production molds. First is your attitude. ESPECIALLY when you read comments that oppose your opinion. Yes your opinion, not fact. You make a silly voice and act so full of yourself essentially demeaning the person making the comments. That is a bad way to approach your comments especially from prospective customers. How about you approach negative comments or ones that oppose your opinions with an open mind and maybe sprinkle in some facts to back up your position? When I see someone making fun of a person who opposes their opinion it tells me they don't have facts to back up their claims and resort to trying to demoralize the person making the comments. I am going to try and pick out some spots in the video where you make a statement or claim without backing it up. Spoiler the list got kind of long before I tapped out.... @16:40 "There's a number of engineering reasons why 3D printing will replace injection molding" to which you go on to say that FDM has fewer inputs than molding however you neglect a few facts here. You count the mold as the 3rd input but you don't count the printer. The mold cavity is a piece of the machine that gets swapped out. And on top of that you gloss past the fact that injection molding pellets that are melted and shot into molds are only melted once in a molded application. For FDM you have to melt them to make a spool which adds ANOTHER input to your process, the machine that takes that plastic and turns it into a spool of material. Then it gets melted again at the machine. Again you pick out bits of an argument that seem to paint FDM as the winner but neglect to look at the entire process. If you really want to show this argument you should look at floor space, power requirements, produced parts (number, quality, strength) and present that information. In this statement you also say that the mold requires volume which is not true. You can get 1-500 part molds for very little money (or build molds off SLA parts). You can get 1-10k part molds for very little money( a few thousand dollars). The cross over point for this vs FDM is in the hundreds of parts. Between 250 and 500 parts is where molded parts become more economical in quality of parts, price, and turn around time for the size parts you would print. And the turn around time for these molds is days, not months. Yes you generally wait until all the parts are run vs shipping a small batch out in a few days, but that isn't always a negative thing either. Maybe someone assembling parts at home might want a few at a time vs an order of 10k. But in production you want your process to be fed and all the parts on hand. A true production mold for millions of units might take months to machine and refine, but not the low production molds up to 10k units which seems to be the number you like to use for how many pieces of a product are made. In this part of your rant you also say that molding machines are so large that you just can't put them in your warehouse. It seems like you are comparing a mold that makes car bumpers to your 250mm cube print farm printers. I would point you to this video of the 3d printing nerd talking with Nexa at formnext th-cam.com/video/4kIeqTK5iao/w-d-xo.htmlsi=ay_pFx2VQCMMvsqd They have a mold machine right there and are using dissolvable 3d printed tooling. They mold a part while you watch on a machine that is no bigger than my desk. Is the mold machine size vs part size much larger than say 3d printer, yes. But that one mold machine could spit out parts much faster for the same footprint even without an automated process. In the same section you also state that the 3d printer is more efficient. It isn't faster. the parts aren't mechanically better or cosmetically better. So what metric makes it more efficient if you have to melt the input plastic 2 times. run a machine to turn that into a spool of material and run a 3d printer for hours to make a part that a mold can do in seconds? You also state the reason 3d printing has not been more affordable is because of the labor. Where is your evidence to this? There are a lot of factors here but I have never heard labor as one. Time, quality, cost have all been on the list but labor for FDM vs molding? @18:06 "A company survives and grows based on how quickly it can evolve its product". Says who? The evolution of a product is not a factor. The quality and affordability of that product is. You also state that "molding has a cycle time of years, create this years product and move onto the next one. that isn't viable" and "when printing is available that is a stupid business model". and then you go on to make the false equivalency to software stating that software is constantly updating. Yeah and this sucks BUT you buy the software and the updates are free (in most cases). That doesn't work with a physical product. You aren't going to give everyone v2 of something when it comes out. Software that is rushed to market is buggy, has problems and often times tarnishes the reputation of the company. We see this in CAD software as well as everything else. Products that are rushed to market (samsung zflip phone im looking at you!) are bad for business. They capitalize on the hype but ultimately have a large return and support bill to go with it. I don't think the software model is something physical products should follow. And more to that point you have a whole network of things that are affected from barcode/sku, to packaging, to inventory management, to product pricing, to managing stock shipping and receiving to on and on and on. I also have seen you quote something about Toyota claiming 25k is mass production. Where are you getting that from? Please provide a resource and don't say "you can find it". Toyota sells 7 to 8 million cars a year. They have 12 pillars of their production process including JIT - just in time manufacture and "Heijunka" meaning to smooth production to facility their JIT. Toyota has led the conversation on lean manufacturing because they customize their process based on projected consumer demands. But you know what, they can swap tooling to stamp a fender in 3 minutes in their factories. So they can say "make 10 4runners" then with a matter of minutes reconfigure their factory to begin producing parts for a corolla. To the best of my knowledge the 25k number was a buffer value they keep on hand in case there is a production problem with their JIT suppliers. See 2020 and the PCB crisis. They controlled their own PCB production and was one of the least impacted vs say Ford who had lots of vehicles just waiting for electronics. Toyota also use Hansei in their production philosophy which means to recognize a mistake and take appropriate action so that it doesn't happen again..... just saying. @33:18 "FDM is going to outrun every process for production scale". Again your opinion, so cool, but where is your proof to this? Other types of printing like SLA you can build an entire layer of parts in the same time as a single part. SLS is similar and self supporting. Both of those are better at batching parts than FDM. If one SLS machine could print 50 parts stacked in 3d in its volume in 1 hr. you would need 50 FDM machines printing each part. FDM would be slower part for part but even if we said it could do that in 1hr each. How can you say that 50 FDM machines (with their reduced mechanical and cosmetic properties) making 50 parts in 1 hr is better than 1 SLS machine making all 50 parts in that same time? Yes SLS has more labor involved but its 1 person. I didn't even finish the video because I just couldn't take the way you were mocking the people making comments. You can have an opinion right or wrong but in all the videos I have been asked to watch I have yet to see you present any facts for your claims. You just say "we have been doing it" or make statements like "its stupid to think otherwise". You own your opinion and that is totally fine, but FDM doesn't have to be THE solution. If FDM isn't right for every application that is ok. that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place. FDM is already an overhyped thing and your videos and approach are not helping it at all. You are overselling the technology in its current form and making claims about its future which you could have no way to know. Your opinion is your opinion and I have no problem with that, but please give your viewers some facts to back them up.
32:00 3D Printing can produce fully functional and strong M3 threads. BEAT THAT INJECTION MOLDING! -- and that's "basic" FDM printing, on a 100$ printer (Ender-3). FDM gets to like what 0.01mm precision these days in best case? Hell, maybe even less. Should try to push boundaries in this regard too. I do regularly 0.05mm layer height prints myself. That's near resin printing on a cheap Ender-3 lol
Again the non answers. Smooth parts? A: Deal with it. Food Safe? A: It is food safe (in very specific cases like one time use). Supports? A: Design better.
Water cooling seems like a bad idea. Wet filament is not good. What about a cold chamber? Maybe even using liquid nitrogen. Reducing the length of the cooling section would be useful.
Great video. You are absolutely correct - 3d printing will replace injection molded parts. I have watched your videos for some time now, and rarely comment. You provide an invaluable product design and business know-how. I have over 20 years of experience designing and manufacturing low and high volume products.
I think you're wasting too much time repeating the same answer to the same group of intentionally ignorant group of people. They are not asking with the possibility of changing their minds.
I'm in an awful situation where I need the optical properties that I don't think (?) 3d printing can solve. I want to make a total internal reflection (TIR) optic which can't be done with 3d printing due to layers. I also need the optical properties of a specific silicone to do what I want. However, I don't want to be spending $30k+ on molds and a small run of several thousand 🥲
As engineers, we should be willing and able to indicate whether or not a fabrication technique is feasible for the intended end use application. When we do this, our clients will trust us and we will be educating them so they can be informed customers. I try to convey to my engineering students that they should be life learners so they can be competent advocates of the best technique to achieve a goal, and that they should strive to be open to all possibilities. Open-mindedness in this way is a technical skill that is as vital as any other in an engineer’s skill set.
With the cheap availability of FDM and resin printing, engineering students are getting experience with this tech in school, much more experience with mechanical fabrication than students usually got in in the past.
@@robmacl7 Agreed.
I would like to hear more about why consumer machines aren't well suited for industrial production. I am really curious about what problems you encounters and how you solved them with in house machines. Heck, even just hearing the problems without the solutions is fascinating, if you wanted to keep the solutions secret for some reason.
I would rather buy large spools than the tiny 1kg ones that are so wasteful with the plastic spool itself. I bet you would sell out if you made large spools too! I will disagree with the landfill comment as I worked in an injection molding factory (its where I was hurt and disabled....anyway) we ground up EVERYTHING that we possibly could to use back into the mix. It depends on the plastic and part on how much recycled could be used but we had very little actual garbage. Side note - those grinders are awesome and LOUD. One other thing for people to think about is the mold has to be moved with a forklift so there is even more added cost. I still want to see and hear about YOUR machines! You keep saying you want tons of printer farms to pop up but still being a bit proprietary with the technology ;)
Please break down the shortcomings of mass production with consumer printers vs what you are using!
Really curious about what your in-house printers improve on in terms of hardware for reliability and what kind of customizations you look for beyond just auto-ejection and your in-house production software. Also your thoughts on why no-one is producing "off-the-shelf" printers of this kind, perhaps specifically marketed to production farms, or even businesses wanting to do some significant amount of production in-house. It seems like most of the needs of production farm printers would align fairly well with those of prosumers - longevity, reliability, print quality, easy/low maintenance, etc. Actually, even some basic production software like batching, build queues for a set of printers, etc. It seems like an underserved market, no?
38:55 An even better example is wood. It's only strong in one direction, and the difference between long grain and cross grain is much greater than the layer lines in 3D prints. But it has the advantage that you can join multiple pieces with grain oriented differently to compensate. Adding longitudinal reinforcements in 3D prints is not so easy.
Is there the possibility that you will make your printers open source? I would be interested in building one
I've been trying to get the Mason printer they have a video about it and a website but the link to the website leads nowhere
If you guys started releasing 2-2.5kg spools like ColorFabb has on offer for some of their filaments (like their VarioShore TPU), I'd definitely buy it. I find 1kg spools inefficient many times, too, even though I'm just a small-time prototyper. Every third print or so, I'm stressing about being nearby for a filament change due to a 1kg spool ready to run-out. I wish more manufacturers offered larger spool size options.
I would be interested in a "reacts" video about things with rigid constraints on appearance. For example, most of my personal 3D printing is the recreation of movie props; I *cannot* change the final appearance when trying to make something easier to print. I know this isn't your normal wheelhouse, but I think it would be interesting to hear how you would combine your knowledge of designing for 3d printing with that utterly unalterable final appearance.
Regarding the injection-molded "crates" for supermarkets: I have two thoughts. First, that sentence could be interpreted as "crates filled with products" being shipped, rather than "crates *as* the product." However, I work in grocery delivery in Alberta and here at least it's been a rapidly growing business area. Grocery delivery needs reusable packaging, and the forms that seem to have become standardised are 20 litre plastic bins or totes and collapsible plastic crates. These are large items, but also in high demand (currently) so I suspect they still fit into the category of "bottlecaps" - a mature item that doesn't need to be iterated and is in sufficient demand that the injection molding volume is cost-efficient.
And that makes me wonder just how many such items there are? A toy certainly isn't one of them; neither is a Warhammer miniature. But Blueray cases? Tupperware? Sharpies? Pop rivets? Rulers? Okay, yeah, half of what I just said is arguably "packaging," but I think we're a lot further away from 3d printing entirely replacing injection molding than 20 years. I *do* think that the next 10 to 20 years will see 3D printing become the dominant manufacturing method for *new* designs, but I suspect there's a *lot* of high-volume, stable items that will stay injection molded for the next half-century. Though I acknowledge, it's possible that 3d printing will hit the point where it's cheaper to redesign a bottlecap for 3d printing than to cut a new mold, once the old one wears out. (Basically, I do think it will happen, I just disagree on the time-scale.)
Oh, and as for 3d printing being weaker in one axis? So is wood, and yet 90% of the people in Canada and the United States and Australia are there because their ancestors got on ships made from wood.
41:05 - You replied to my comment! We're definitely playing at the low end of the volume spectrum and 3D printing is great for what we're doing, and getting better all the time. It would be great for our primary product if a material such as TPU could be printed with a smooth surface finish comparable to molded or extruded parts, and even better if it was significantly lower durometer than 95A without stringing or other issues. We don't advertise that the new version of the product is now 3D printed but the layer lines are a dead giveaway on a product that our customers are accustomed to being smooth. By far the most dissatisfaction is from customers who have 3D printers and view the new product as "just a cheap 3D printed part". I need to update the website after the latest product improvement, with the hope that better communication with the customer improves customer satisfaction. Certainly shipping a product that is different from what is advertised is an e-commerce cardinal sin that's going to lead to dissatisfaction, no matter how much better the new version is.
My goal for 2023 is to develop new products that are designed to take advantage of the strengths of additive manufacturing.
We're doing low volume 3D printing of products tweaked to optimize them for 3D printing in a very product specific way, but I love seeing Slant 3D doing high volume 3D printing and optimizing for 3D printing more generally. I'm excited to see what's next from Slant 3D as you guys innovate to push the technology forward.
If there was an automated way to do post processing on 3D printed parts to give them a nice surface finish, you guys would explode in popularity
THere are a number of different solutions
@@slant3d the number is zero, right?
@@goury😂😂😂😂😂
@@goury there are a number but he can't name one
@@Reddkomet Vapor smoothing, epoxy coating, UV resin coating, sanding. All affect the dimensional accuracy. Vapor only works on ABS. Epoxy is brittle and doesn't adhere strongly so can break off if the print flexes. Sandblasting could work. Spray finishes might work, but would need some R&D to find what adheres well. Shellac might help as an adhesion promoter.
I look forward to next year's video when you announce you're designing a new filament material that will be easier to produce at a low cost, but still work in existing printers as you continue your quest to change the face of 3D printing.
Will printers of the future just be pellet based? Seems like filament becomes an issue as things scale up.
That’s been tried a few times. It does work, but hasn’t really taken off for public consumption.
Pellets are not viable for mass production
phenomenal info here. I do think part finish is a strong consideration when comparing processes. Hopefully future developments will improve finishes for 3d printed parts
This is an interesting discussion regarding the economics of 3d printing vs IM. I think one important caveat is the maturity of the company. If you are large established 8+ figure revenue company, you are not going to iterate the product every 10k parts. you want to order one mold and buy millions of them, and forget it. Move on to the next product thing. The least iterations on a product the better. your big box retail buyers will love not having to update revisions for products. The less they need to do, the better.
If you are a new company cant take the risk with IM tooling and still want to be able to sell in the thousands as soon as possible, 3d printing makes a lot of sense.
There is probably a lot of volume overlap that causes this discussion to be nuanced due to size of company and amount of risk that can be taken on.
Thanks for making these videos. I am not in the industry (other than using my personal 3d printer for fun), but I appreciate the view into what is happening in large scale 3d printing. I have a couple of questions, go when you have time. 1) what methods do you see for making the 3d prints with PLA more durable and able to stand up to the environment ? Heat treat, chemical treat? 2) do you see a better material to use to replace PLA as the default? 3) where do you see multi colour printing in your environment? Like Bambu printers with multiple filaments in parallel. 4) how about mixed materials? Ie metal, wire, ceramic, electrical and electronic components. The goal being to print complex items that cannot be just PLA or ABS. Thanks.
what is the environmental impact of 3d printing compared to injection moulding?
Video coming this week on that.
cool, can't wait@@slant3d
I still can't understand why 3D printing requires high tolerances, you could simply add a filament diameter measuring sensor somewhere in the toolhead and make the firmware compensate for the inconsistency...
25,000 is the minimum number of cars of a single model Toyota will generally sell, not the number of a single part they need. They may use millions of a single part in multiple models across multiple years. That part will likely never be 3D printed for numerous reasons. 3D printing will replace injection molding in many areas. Exceptions are true large scale production, when specific surface finishes are desired, when more uniform strength is desired as in layer lines are not acceptable, and there are many more situations. It's fine to say 3D printing will replace injection molding in many cases, but not without caveats.
You even said yourself, design for the process. There are many cases in which 3D printing will not be the appropriate process. In that case, it won't replace the other process.
Quick examples where 3D printing will likely never replace injection molding:
Tools and tool bodies
Brushes of any kind
Disposable razors
Bottles, caps, cups
Lights, transparent items
Another issue: Fiber filled injection molding. FDM simply can't replicate glass fiber reinforced polymers, for example.
One more: Silicone parts. Incredible difficult to 3D print silicone. Also any material which is injected at extremely high temps.
I'd be interested to hear more about what differentiates Slant 3D's printers and surrounding processes from consumer 3D printers. (Although if some of this is a trade secret, that'd be understandable) I think this would probably help big-time in convincing people that 3D printing in viable for higher volumes than they may at first believe. It's clear that Slant 3D has a vision that others, myself included, do not fully understand.
As far as SLA, I think it'd be possible to automate the post-processing somehow which would make it a more viable option for mass production than it currently is. That being said, it would be a more complicated process than FDM. Especially when FDM parts are properly designed for minimal post-processing. As well, it'd definitely be a much bigger investment to build up the supply chain as mentioned. I think Slant 3D is smart to not bother with trying to make SLA work. In a previous video, the philosophy of focusing on one thing (FDM) and doing it really well was mentioned. An absolutely massive company may be better off diversifying such that a poorly performing market segment won't sink their ship as others will keep them afloat. But that's because they have crazy resources to still do everything very well that most business do not have. Trying to diversify normally can lead to sub-par performance in everything which means no competitive advantage in anything.
Why not loosen the tolerances and put a sensor on the printer to adapt to irregularities?
That's extremely difficult to do effectively when you are melting a material. It's hard to control a liquid, so you have to control the process where you can do it better, and that's in the cool rigid state of the material
@@masterbick2 That's what he's saying. Measure the filament as it goes into the printer's extruder, and continuously adjust the extrusion rate so a known volume is pushed into the melt zone even if the filament cross section varies significantly.
You'd need at least two perpendicular sensors since filament is not perfectly round, and maybe more since it may not be perfectly centered in the measuring area due to stiffness and curvature. And you'd be assuming that the gripper pushes a constant length of filament per revolution regardless of the cross section variation, but I think that will be true in most cases. So I think it will work.
@@dekutree64 that will stop working as soon as you introduce retraction, pressure advance and input shaping. Very common things in modern 3d printing. The consistency of the filament diameter is very important. Compensating for a problem will never be as good as not having the problem in the first place
@@masterbick2 Reverse moves would follow back up the record of filament cross section, so should remain symmetrical. I agree it's better not to compensate for a problem, but this is just deciding where in the total sequence from pellets to 3D print is the best place to put the solution. Making super precision filament seems kind of stupid when you're just going to melt it down again anyway.
@@masterbick2 What's funny, is that is exactly what pressure advance and input shaping do, compensate for mechanical problems.
Can the filament cooling channel be circular, sort of like a retractable tape measure or sea shell? Is there some special reason why it has to be cooled in a straight line? A circular bath would save on the space.
I feel like we need to revisit how to use "High" and "Low" tolerances. I was rewatching parts of "Filament Production is too slow" and "We want to fix it". Low tolerances is atleast in my environment considered to be very tight tolerances. So +/- small amount and High tolerance is +/- a lot.
In a way, the _problem_ sounds like making paper in paper mill. There you squeeze water-pulp-mixture through several meters wide gap to a mesh to be dried and pressed and control mixture, pressure, gap width along the width and whatever else to get correct thickness at the end product - at up to 45mph.
Would it be possible to push plastic as a wide band, and while still malleable-hot, cut it to narrow slightly over-sized slices and pull through sort-of-calendar (cylinders with 1.75mm grooves between them + enough tons of pressure to keep in-between areas from letting any excess material through) which would guarantee dimensional accuracy? Filament could be hexagon (making Prusa April fool reality) if it made any practical sense 😅
Does fishing line production share any problems or solutions with filament production? I'd guess spooling needs to be fast, but the line is very flexible.
It’s a lot of rambling about how 3d printing will replace injection moulding but there was one good sentence in there about how it’s not demand for the product that determines the production rate it’s often the manufacturing process itself which determines how many units need to be produced and that is certainly inefficient. You know what will be a real kicker, 3d printed tools for injection moulding
Maybe I missed it but don't forget the one great strength AM has... Complex geometry in parts, sure you can do it in IM, but then you have to weld the halves or thirds... together. Glad you mentioned the obvious. AM can't match the millions scale.
A bit of constructive feedback/way to improve is to get a pop filter or pop sounds cleanup in post. Don't think it has been an issue before as I watch all your videos. Only mention it because it looks like you appreciate feedback.
Regarding Prusa and printing on consumer machines, something is currently changing. At Formnext, they presented the latest version of their automatic print farm. Presumably, in-house production will move from consumer machines to these print farms.
@@Nick_-Nick- I wasn't comparing anything. I just wanted to point out that Prusa is obviously making the transition from consumer machines to specialized machines for serial production.
I really love 3d printing design my own parts and sell stuff. My major issue is we live in a molded, cintered and machined world. When making a product I need to design around parts that have no thought to the viability of 3d printed accessories. The transitional lag time will take much longer than you expect. Look at nuclear power its more efficient in every way and cleaner yet barely used because of public perception issues.
Fascinating 3d production insights. Great myth-busting.
For filament production, ability to continuously cool at higher speeds will likely be the bottleneck. Have you considered using a heat pump to chill the water bath? Doing so should help shorten bath and allow faster pull-through. Heat removed could be used to pre-heat beads, to reduce amount of heating the extruder needs to apply. (not melting, just below pre-phase transition) Water-to-water heat pump systems already exist, and could be used a supplemental warehouse heating initially.
Setting up a high speed filament production line is definitely a challenging thermodynamics engineering problem. A fun one to solve.
You are spot on with your manufacturing philosophy. I am a retired Industrial engineering consultant and have worked with all kinds of companies over the years, quite a few in the automotive components sector. Lots of injection molded parts and they all have big $$ in slow moving and obsolete inventory in their warehouses due to over production, mainly driven by long set-up times and or staffing required to increase the number of changeovers. The companies are on the hook to the OEMs to provide spares for X years. If they could fill this requirement with 3d printing it would free up a boatload of capital and warehouse space. Have you ever seen /timed a Mold change on an injection molding machine?
I remember seeing a video of someone dismantling a Tesla and he found a 3D printed part in there. The way it was done, it clearly wasn't the original intention, but it worked. But it also shows what place 3D printing has in mass production. Tesla makes millions of cars, it makes little sense to 3D print all the plastic parts, but sometimes, there is something wrong with the injection molded parts. Maybe bad design that needs a quick fix, maybe something happened with the supplier, whatever. In this case you can have 3D printing as a backup. This way, you get the best of both worlds: the mass production capabilities of injection molding and the flexibility of 3D printing.
PCB's have been 100% digital designs for DECADES. Automated parts loading is still a painful process to setup, but the board everything mounts to is stupid easy to revise and reorder. (assuming nothing triggers repeat certification testing...) PCB's are one of the products that kicked off the inexpensive low friction prototype industry.
Concerning the cooling system of the filament production line, you may look in to a similar technology that goes into making ice cream. They have a system that uses liquid ammonia to rapidly freeze the extruded product before it has time to melt. They can't get any water in their product or it would taste terrible. Just a thought.
Thank you for the reaction! Please buy something relative large and cheap like a noodle strainer from China that costs like nothing and quote that like a customer would need 25000 pcs of it. I doubt it gets close to the selling price. But maybe I get surprised. On the other hand I frequently beat the price of injection molded PU seals with CNC cut ones at quantity, which shouldn't be possible as well
multiple videos on the channel about this
Hi there! I’ve been binging your videos. They have been so helpful for some recent designs of my own products.
Question: for some of your biggest clients what material do you most often print in? I assume PLA is not suitable for most clients’ needs?
Your face in the thumbnail is very accurate to many comments sections, unfortunately.. fortunately your production sense doesn't seem to match that, so I'm confident your plans to increase it will go well. Will be interested to see what you come up with for faster filament production, would like to see update videos on that if it's not too much hassle to make them
i would also like to know about the difference between consumer machines and industrial machines.
im only familiar with stratysys machines which definitely are not for volume
what should a 3d printer be like for a farm? at the moment I am not going to produce a DIY printer, but I would like to understand what I need to pay attention to when buying a serial printer
Video idea- Could you make a video about the slant 3D printers and what features were implemented to make them more robust? I want to design my own printer and have CAD and print farm experience but I don't know where to start with designing a printer. Thanks!
I want to see how to design a remote control for 3D printing. For some reason, in my head, that will really convince me that FDM will replace injection molding.
On the list
Do you mean remotely controlling 3D printing? Cause that... already exists.. and if you're talking about making parts for like a TV remote, that wouldn't be terribly difficult either 🤷🏿♀️
One of the last comments you responded to talked about how you can't change electrical enclosures easily, and that they're pretty wrong about, 3d printing is obviously better than moulding there. However, it did bring an interesting question to my mind. What about UL testing and other certification? Does that kind of thing really hamstring the iterative design advantage printing has over traditional manufacturing.
hmmmmm... may be difficult but instead of squirting out filament via one hole, use many nozzles on one screw-driven plastic pusher! that way you can make several spools of one type/color at once. as for tolerance, change winding speed to stretch it hot and use nozzles a bit oversized deliberately.
Two things.
1. The 3D Printing Nerd just did a short video on,I believe it was Nexa3D’s new invention machine that I think has the potential to change injecting molding.
2. I honestly can’t remember seeing any 3D printed products in stores or online, except if I really looked for something specifically made that way.
I love the idea of 3D printing and even own a printer that I have yet to use. But I can’t see commercially used products for the average person in large scale yet.
3D Printed products have been sold in retail for over 5 years.
The Nexa3D mold inserts are cool, but niche. It solves a problem for injection molding, but 3D printing the final product solves it much better in most cases.
Note about #2: I think that's largely because of the newness of 3D printing. It takes a long time for an industry shift to happen, especially for physical products. I have been seeing more 3D prints "in the wild" recently, but I do agree it's still rare. What we really need are more farms at Slant 3D's scale - they need competition. Not only for the regular reasons for competition, but also because the industry as a whole needs to scale up, and I don't think just Slant alone will be enough.
Is there anyway to Invest in the 3d printing space? and what is the best way to capitalize on the increasing popularity of 3d printed products. This coming from someone with limited knowledge of consumer based 3d printers and their operation and not a lot of capital who also works 40 hours a week. Thank you for all your insights!
38:47 I hope you do! Food safety was a thing I wanted to look into more but it kept stemming back to check the PLA, not to apply heat onto it like tea or into a dishwasher, etc. But there's a tonne of variables involved.
You should totally switch from using filament in your production to direct pellets in your 3d printers. Also, if you want a big extruder, you might want to contact Kodak. I do think, that they have a few not in use anymore for their film production.
Could you comment and give some suggestions on moving parts such as gears, and ball bearings for custom toys in low production volume?
He can't because you can't FDM a ball bearing. You could do gears but the load at the contact point means you are limited to gear geometry. A traditional root fillet on a spur gear designed to reduce load concentration doesn't help with FDM since you are dealing with the layer lines.
For low production consider an ABS like material with an SLA process. You will have much better friction properties and technical accuracy than with an FDM process.
Let's keep talking, we learn all the time, Thanks!
Thanks for being here
Would love to see a video comparing a typical consumer grade printer and what you guys had to do to yours to make them suitable for large scale farm manufacturing. I assume an amount of reliability and accuracy upgrades.
Off the shelf machines are not viable for mass production. Wrong design goals
@@slant3d anything specific? I'm thinking of a comparison between printers in the $750-1500 range. Prusas are supposed to be fairly reputable (although the XL seems to have problems at launch) and a lot of people use them for their own farms. I understand not using shitty Chinese printers that are going to need a lot of tinkering for anything worthwhile. Just curious
@@willofthemaker I have a Prusa and I love it and it's plenty reliable - but I imagine at Slant's sheer scale, even tiny things that most makers (or even mid-size print farms) don't encounter are scaled up to become big problems.
@slant3d do you see this changing? Large scale metal manufactures don't build there own CNC machines. They buy from manufactures.
10:20 Maybe look at wire spooling machines, since that will also kink. It's also made to very high tolerance, although I doubt you could directly copy the method of achieving it with plastic filament.
Wire wire processing is too different than filament
Topic request: strategy for marking revisions. Like embedding barcodes or similar.
3D printed parts should include recycling information too, so a revision number could be placed in the same area.
Why not offer 3-5kg Tangled spools as well, and use that to work down on pricing?
1kg is very little, just couple of prints. Kinda amazed it's "the standard" -- more like a sample.
Infact for synergy benefits you should push mostly the same size spool you use, exactly like you like to use, as you use it.
Exactly same product.
Over time when it's easy you could add touch retail touches.
Yeah there are no good 3-5 KG spools available. It’s basically cheaper to buy 1kg’s since they are so common, but bigger is so much easier to use. My P1P’s eat through 1 kg rolls.
I agree. Filament cost is only an issue if you're using a significant quantity of it, and then larger spools are more convenient.
I'd like to know what you're printing if you're using 500g for most prints. Pretty sure my average print is probably ~60g or so, although there is a lot of variability. Looking at a couple of my larger prints, I'm not even sure I've ever done 500g. The largest one I think I've made - one that fills a significant part of the bed of my Mk4 - is 373g worth of material. But that's an exception, I don't make something that large on a regular basis.
I'd say... "man, somebody should start work on a pellet printer for home." But I saw one at a Rep Rap Festival. The hot-end was a monster. And good luck swapping colors.
Sidestream master batch colors or use ink based colors
My new favorite podcast.
Thank you
3dp bonus... if you product fails, well, at least you didn't waste hundreds of thousands of fails and a huge metal mold... more funds to do you next idea!
I have a very hard time seeing AM (especially FFF) becoming the dominant manufacturing method. I have been in the industry now for 6+ years and working with peers which have been in it for many more. While all of us are super excited about 3D printing, we all agree that mass manufacturing will continue to be done via conventional manufacturing methods, especially injection molding. Experts and reports claim that AM could capture up to 5% of the global manufacturing market. Compared to where the AM market is at right now, at about 0.1-0.2%, the growth potential remains huge with a factor of 25-50, but this will happen over the next 20+ years. Big limitations remain cost, material properties (ex. filled materials are not as good) as well as surface quality and tolerances for highly functional parts. Beyond that, with a mega trend being sustainability most passive parts which have been 3D printed have a terrible CO2e footprint compared to traditional manufacturing.
Please Can you make a design for the process for
Small electronics enclosures/ boxes?
Thanks
3+ videos on the channel
I'm gonna disagree a little bit on the tolerance argument. While I agree that many applications don't require high tolerance, however, quite a lot of printers won't eat 1.9mm filament.
In the country where I live, there's filament for ~10$ per kg, but the varience of the filament is about 0.2, which produces a lot of problems with clogging and blobs. Moreover, the filament itself isn't very high quality, and requires much higher temperatures to print, while still being quite unstable.
So in the end, instead of 9-10$/kg filament, I chose to buy 13$/kg, but with excellent quality and no spool-related issues with the prints. It saves so much time and troubleshooting, knowing your filament will be stable in color, in dimensional accuracy, and printing settings.
The things I make basically 24/7 don't require accuracy (most of the time), btw. But I still opt for using higher quality filament to save time, even though the filament is quite a bit more expensive
you know... maybe you should buy a vacant high-rise somewhere and go super vertical LOL!
I thought i was the only one who's hands look like they actually work with em.
Not a question of numbers, injection moulded parts are stronger. Eyeglasses cannot be printed and be as strong and light by your printers.
Incorrect
Larger faster extruder means that when something goes wrong you have more scrap and it'll be harder to recoup your lost revenue from the downtime.
I wish you the best, but just like throwing more engineers at a problem doesn't solve it faster, a bigger faster extruder doesn't necessarily mean less expensive filament.
The industry needs to stop thinking small. Economies of Scale
oooo! get a water chiller! make that water sooooo cold its about to freeze (1C!!!). now you can shorten the bath.
The problem all companies have had in extrapolating the future is myopia. Knowing what you know is not enough, A new process and technology can come out of nowhere and you just spent a fortune on huge new horseshoe or typewriter..or filament extruder factories,
There are so many things wrong with this video that I just can't cover them all but will try to hit a bunch of them. This is mostly for people watching this video as I know you won't read it and respond with anything meaningful other than making some quip about "yeah we already do it" or just passing it off. I don't generally watch your videos but often times I get sent the links and asked my opinion on them. This one i just have to comment on and it will be the last video of yours that I do so. I think that you have a responsibility to either state what you are saying is your opinion, or provide some facts behind your claims. Stating you worked in engineering for 15 years designing molded parts in the hundreds maybe thousands. So in 15 years you worked on thousands of parts to production? If that were true you would have a better general knowledge around the price and turn around time of rapid molds vs full production molds.
First is your attitude. ESPECIALLY when you read comments that oppose your opinion. Yes your opinion, not fact. You make a silly voice and act so full of yourself essentially demeaning the person making the comments. That is a bad way to approach your comments especially from prospective customers. How about you approach negative comments or ones that oppose your opinions with an open mind and maybe sprinkle in some facts to back up your position? When I see someone making fun of a person who opposes their opinion it tells me they don't have facts to back up their claims and resort to trying to demoralize the person making the comments.
I am going to try and pick out some spots in the video where you make a statement or claim without backing it up. Spoiler the list got kind of long before I tapped out....
@16:40 "There's a number of engineering reasons why 3D printing will replace injection molding" to which you go on to say that FDM has fewer inputs than molding however you neglect a few facts here. You count the mold as the 3rd input but you don't count the printer. The mold cavity is a piece of the machine that gets swapped out. And on top of that you gloss past the fact that injection molding pellets that are melted and shot into molds are only melted once in a molded application. For FDM you have to melt them to make a spool which adds ANOTHER input to your process, the machine that takes that plastic and turns it into a spool of material. Then it gets melted again at the machine. Again you pick out bits of an argument that seem to paint FDM as the winner but neglect to look at the entire process. If you really want to show this argument you should look at floor space, power requirements, produced parts (number, quality, strength) and present that information. In this statement you also say that the mold requires volume which is not true. You can get 1-500 part molds for very little money (or build molds off SLA parts). You can get 1-10k part molds for very little money( a few thousand dollars). The cross over point for this vs FDM is in the hundreds of parts. Between 250 and 500 parts is where molded parts become more economical in quality of parts, price, and turn around time for the size parts you would print. And the turn around time for these molds is days, not months. Yes you generally wait until all the parts are run vs shipping a small batch out in a few days, but that isn't always a negative thing either. Maybe someone assembling parts at home might want a few at a time vs an order of 10k. But in production you want your process to be fed and all the parts on hand. A true production mold for millions of units might take months to machine and refine, but not the low production molds up to 10k units which seems to be the number you like to use for how many pieces of a product are made.
In this part of your rant you also say that molding machines are so large that you just can't put them in your warehouse. It seems like you are comparing a mold that makes car bumpers to your 250mm cube print farm printers. I would point you to this video of the 3d printing nerd talking with Nexa at formnext th-cam.com/video/4kIeqTK5iao/w-d-xo.htmlsi=ay_pFx2VQCMMvsqd They have a mold machine right there and are using dissolvable 3d printed tooling. They mold a part while you watch on a machine that is no bigger than my desk. Is the mold machine size vs part size much larger than say 3d printer, yes. But that one mold machine could spit out parts much faster for the same footprint even without an automated process.
In the same section you also state that the 3d printer is more efficient. It isn't faster. the parts aren't mechanically better or cosmetically better. So what metric makes it more efficient if you have to melt the input plastic 2 times. run a machine to turn that into a spool of material and run a 3d printer for hours to make a part that a mold can do in seconds? You also state the reason 3d printing has not been more affordable is because of the labor. Where is your evidence to this? There are a lot of factors here but I have never heard labor as one. Time, quality, cost have all been on the list but labor for FDM vs molding?
@18:06 "A company survives and grows based on how quickly it can evolve its product". Says who? The evolution of a product is not a factor. The quality and affordability of that product is. You also state that "molding has a cycle time of years, create this years product and move onto the next one. that isn't viable" and "when printing is available that is a stupid business model". and then you go on to make the false equivalency to software stating that software is constantly updating. Yeah and this sucks BUT you buy the software and the updates are free (in most cases). That doesn't work with a physical product. You aren't going to give everyone v2 of something when it comes out. Software that is rushed to market is buggy, has problems and often times tarnishes the reputation of the company. We see this in CAD software as well as everything else. Products that are rushed to market (samsung zflip phone im looking at you!) are bad for business. They capitalize on the hype but ultimately have a large return and support bill to go with it. I don't think the software model is something physical products should follow. And more to that point you have a whole network of things that are affected from barcode/sku, to packaging, to inventory management, to product pricing, to managing stock shipping and receiving to on and on and on.
I also have seen you quote something about Toyota claiming 25k is mass production. Where are you getting that from? Please provide a resource and don't say "you can find it". Toyota sells 7 to 8 million cars a year. They have 12 pillars of their production process including JIT - just in time manufacture and "Heijunka" meaning to smooth production to facility their JIT. Toyota has led the conversation on lean manufacturing because they customize their process based on projected consumer demands. But you know what, they can swap tooling to stamp a fender in 3 minutes in their factories. So they can say "make 10 4runners" then with a matter of minutes reconfigure their factory to begin producing parts for a corolla. To the best of my knowledge the 25k number was a buffer value they keep on hand in case there is a production problem with their JIT suppliers. See 2020 and the PCB crisis. They controlled their own PCB production and was one of the least impacted vs say Ford who had lots of vehicles just waiting for electronics. Toyota also use Hansei in their production philosophy which means to recognize a mistake and take appropriate action so that it doesn't happen again..... just saying.
@33:18 "FDM is going to outrun every process for production scale". Again your opinion, so cool, but where is your proof to this? Other types of printing like SLA you can build an entire layer of parts in the same time as a single part. SLS is similar and self supporting. Both of those are better at batching parts than FDM. If one SLS machine could print 50 parts stacked in 3d in its volume in 1 hr. you would need 50 FDM machines printing each part. FDM would be slower part for part but even if we said it could do that in 1hr each. How can you say that 50 FDM machines (with their reduced mechanical and cosmetic properties) making 50 parts in 1 hr is better than 1 SLS machine making all 50 parts in that same time? Yes SLS has more labor involved but its 1 person.
I didn't even finish the video because I just couldn't take the way you were mocking the people making comments. You can have an opinion right or wrong but in all the videos I have been asked to watch I have yet to see you present any facts for your claims. You just say "we have been doing it" or make statements like "its stupid to think otherwise". You own your opinion and that is totally fine, but FDM doesn't have to be THE solution. If FDM isn't right for every application that is ok. that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place. FDM is already an overhyped thing and your videos and approach are not helping it at all. You are overselling the technology in its current form and making claims about its future which you could have no way to know. Your opinion is your opinion and I have no problem with that, but please give your viewers some facts to back them up.
Zeus: extremely precise tubing.
As far as 3d printing taking over i sure hope they do something with the layer lines otherwise please take over to make things cheaper lol
32:00 3D Printing can produce fully functional and strong M3 threads. BEAT THAT INJECTION MOLDING! -- and that's "basic" FDM printing, on a 100$ printer (Ender-3).
FDM gets to like what 0.01mm precision these days in best case? Hell, maybe even less. Should try to push boundaries in this regard too.
I do regularly 0.05mm layer height prints myself. That's near resin printing on a cheap Ender-3 lol
Again the non answers.
Smooth parts? A: Deal with it.
Food Safe? A: It is food safe (in very specific cases like one time use).
Supports? A: Design better.
Water cooling seems like a bad idea. Wet filament is not good. What about a cold chamber? Maybe even using liquid nitrogen. Reducing the length of the cooling section would be useful.
How can we help?
Thanks for your wisdom. I enjoyed the rants.
Enjoyed this! Interesting times going forward. Given the adaptability of 3d printing in general, I think it's inevitable.
Agreed!
Why don't you sell your machines?
Bc they're using them
Bro is the defenition of confirmation bias
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Skip 1K rolls and go straight to 2K.
Check out our filament roadmap
would like to see more about the machine information
Injection molds are ridiculously expensive.
But they got much cheaper and some work with inserts into a mold frame.
If you are developing anyway why not skip filament in itself?
There are already examples of people who made systems that print directly from pellets.
Not viable
@@slant3d tumakers in spain will beg to differ 🙃 you are a great salesmen.
And they are not the first.
Great video. You are absolutely correct - 3d printing will replace injection molded parts. I have watched your videos for some time now, and rarely comment. You provide an invaluable product design and business know-how. I have over 20 years of experience designing and manufacturing low and high volume products.
I think you're wasting too much time repeating the same answer to the same group of intentionally ignorant group of people. They are not asking with the possibility of changing their minds.
I'm in an awful situation where I need the optical properties that I don't think (?) 3d printing can solve. I want to make a total internal reflection (TIR) optic which can't be done with 3d printing due to layers. I also need the optical properties of a specific silicone to do what I want. However, I don't want to be spending $30k+ on molds and a small run of several thousand 🥲