The 3D printing industry has been inching closer to mass production for the past few years thanks to growing investor confidence, more user-friendly workflows, and increasing print reliability. The number of large-volume 3D printing facilities, or 3D printer farms, is growing rapidly and participants are finding what was once a risky venture only a few years ago to be gaining real viability. All of this has allowed more consumers to engage with 3D printed products than ever before.
But San Leandro, California-based 3D printer manufacturer Type A Machines is introducing a pre-networked cluster of 3D printers that they say can make sub-10,000 unit 3D printed manufacturing more affordable than standard injection molding. Their Print Pod system is a bundled set of their their Series 1 Pro 3D printers that can all be operated as a unit on a single screen. The Pod is being introduced at the RAPID 3D printing conference in Long Beach, California and the Type A Machines booth will be demonstrating a bank of 18 printers running at the same time from a single screen.
“This will affect anyone in the plastics market working to improve supply chains, launching product, or providing customized goods. We’re effectively bridging [a gap] between prototyping and manufacturing, making it faster, cheaper and less risky to go to market. We see the overall speed of the system as a big competitive advantage. It’s possible today to build large additive manufacturing systems capable of printing a custom phone case every 30 seconds, but for the million dollar capital equipment cost of such a system, we could sell you 50 of our Pods and print a phone case every 10 seconds,” explained Type A Machines CEO Espen Sivertsen at the RAPID 3D printing conference.
“Affordable 3D printing has reached a tipping point where it is not just a prototyping tool, but also a volumetric manufacturing tool. To support this, we built a backbone of modular, evolving and scalable hardware. Our Print Pods offer flexibility and scalability simply impossible with traditional manufacturing,” said Type A Machines founder and CTO Andrew Rutter.
The flexibility of mass production using comparatively low-cost equipment can virtually eliminate many of the financial risks involved in launching new or niche products. While injection molding for high-volume production is still the king, and that probably isn’t going to change for a while, it looks like for many products medium- and low-volume manufacturing done on 3D printing equipment is now a very real and affordable option.
While it is still a new area of manufacturing it should be interesting to see if other 3D printer manufacturers produce similar products and equipment bundles. What do you think about mass production using 3D printers? Come discuss it over on our Type A Machines High-Volume 3D Printing Print Pod forum thread at 3DPB.com.