Material Properties

“Are the material properties the same between regular Strong & Flexible and Premium Strong & Flexible?”

Yes. The same material and printing process is used for Premium as our regular Strong & Flexible plastic material.

Appearance

“But how different is it from regular Strong and Flexible? Do you have any comparison photos?”

Premium adds a sheen to your product, giving it a more finished look. Due to the way it is processed, Premium will also have more color consistency across the geometry of the part. We know that there’s nothing like seeing the product in person, but hopefully these pictures provide a bit more detail.

Orchid Bracelet by Collected Edition

Black Strong & Flexible (left) and Premium Black Strong & Flexible (right)

Bracelet Bluups ORIGAMI R by Bluups

Black Strong & Flexible (left) and Premium Black Strong & Flexible (right)

Black Strong & Flexible (left) and Premium Black Strong & Flexible (right)

The sheen is more subtle for White. However, if you do any post-processing on your own, such as dyeing for your own custom color, your product will have much better color consistency with Premium. Additionally, you can expect the product to have a bit of sheen, as shown with the Black.

Feel & Surface Roughness

“How much smoother is Premium?”

Just saying Premium is smoother is vague. We get it. To quantify how much smoother Premium really is, we did some surface roughness tests.

A surface roughness tester quantifies the texture of a surface by measuring the distance between the peaks and valleys. The larger the distance and the higher the value, the rougher the surface. Small values indicate a smoother surface.

Surface roughness is measured by its Ra value. Ra is the average of these distances between the peaks and values on the surface to its “mean line.” You can think of the mean line as center line between the peaks and values.

We took 6 measurements on each sample. The averages of these values can be seen in the table below.

But so what? What does this mean?

Looking at the values in the table above, the Ra of Premium measured around 5 micrometers whereas regular Strong & Flexible measured around 10 micrometers. This means that in comparison to Strong & Flexible, Premium is about twice as smooth.

Dimensional Accuracy

“Is the dimensional accuracy different for Premium Strong & Flexible?”

We also tested the effect of our Premium finishing on the dimensional accuracy of the part by measuring multiple dimensions both before and after post-processing. Six measurements were taken on six different parts.

On average, the parts decreased in size by 0.9mm. The maximum material removed was 0.1mm.

We recommend slightly scaling up your design to account for this difference if dimensional accuracy is important for your product’s application.

Detail Level

“Do you lose more detail with Premium?”

Although the dimensional accuracy changes slightly with Premium, we did not notice any visible difference in details. Both embossed and engraved details looked very similar before and after finishing.

PremiumWhite S&F (Left) and White S&F (right)

Painting

“How is the surface for painting?”

We had a suspicion that Premium Strong & Flexible would be better for painting. After all, the surface is smoother and less porous.

After a quick test using acrylic paints, no noticeable difference was seen between Strong and Flexible and Premium Strong and Flexible. The paint seem to apply about the same and there was no noticeable visual difference. The picture below shows the surface with one layer of paint. However, we encourage you to test it out for yourselves!

Bracelet Bluups ORIGAMI R by Bluups
Black Strong & Flexible (left) and Premium Black (right)

We hope this was informative and answered your most pressing questions. Now, go test it out and tell us what you think!

The post Your Questions Answered: Premium Strong & Flexible Nylon Plastic appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

This finish will elevate your designs by offering a smoother, glossier surface. Premium Strong and Flexible is perfect for functional parts like phone cases and interlocking mechanisms to jewelry, art, and home decor that are designed to be durable, yet soft to the touch.

Design by Kasia Wisniewski

Premium is finished with a multi-step tumbling, polishing and dyeing process to create a consistent color and surface finish, while removing the grainy feel and layered look of 3D printed parts. Although it is available in both Black and White, we recommend Black for products you’ll carry or wear, like necklaces, rings, bracelets, phone cases, money clips, keychains, eyeglasses, and other personal accessories.

try it now

Design by Michiel Cornelissen

As a designer or shop owner, this new finish will empower you to deliver on your most discerning customers’ expectations – to design products that equal injection-molded finishes. The added smoothness and eggshell sheen of Premium will meet the quality expectations of high-end consumers, enabling you to offer unique, customized products with a finished look and feel.

Premium Strong and Flexible was developed in response to your demand for top-quality wearable and touchable products, in collaboration with members of the Shapeways community. Your feedback has been invaluable through this development process. We are proud to deliver this next-generation offering as a result of your generous participation.

To try out Premium on your own designs, upload here.

To find out how to help Shapeways test future product developments, click here.

print in premium

The post Our Best Material Finish Ever appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

If you haven’t read the first and second posts, I would highly recommend that you do. I’m assuming you know some of the concepts introduced there.

To understand the costs involved in 3D printing using SLS, lets have a look at the process, which can be broken down into the following steps:

• Checking the design
• Planning the printing trays
• 3D printing
• Extracting the parts
• Cleaning the parts
• Sorting the parts
• Postprocessing (tumbling, dyeing, sorting)
• Shipping

Each of those steps has associated costs in labor involved in the process, machine cost and material cost. Let’s go through the steps and have a look at the cost drivers.

Checking. At checking, we need to evaluate every new file ordered to see if we can make it. We use automated checks, but a final human check is still required to get the best results. It’s actually not every file, but we check every part in a file since we are printing physical products and each file may contain multiple parts. As discussed earlier, some files contain hundreds of parts and you can imagine the amount of work involved. The cost involved here is labor, namely the time spent checking each part.

Individually checking the 55 parts in KidMechanos “New! ModiBot RhinoNychus: Reptobeast”

Planning. After checking, we need to plan all checked parts in the 3D printer trays. We want to plan as many parts as possible in a tray, since the cost to run a printer is pretty much fixed regardless of the amount of parts. Today, we run over 20 printers every day and each print on average has over 100 parts per tray, so you can see how packing becomes a challenge. However every extra part we can cram in the tray, reduces machine cost. The packing process itself requires an hour or two of of work and some 10-20 minutes of computer calculations to optimize.

The cost involved in planning is labor, or the time spent selecting the right parts for each tray

62 models packed into a single tray of our smallest printer

3D printing. Step 3 is the printing process. When a printer finishes it’s previous job,we make sure we are ready to quickly remove the ready tray, clean the machine and refill the powder. Ensuring the printer starts running as soon as possible after it’s previous job is complete reduces cost further. The printer costs money whether you use it or not (from a business perspective this is called depreciation), so running it all the time and thereby maximizing the amount of products made every month is the only way to reduce cost. The complexity of the products or the size has almost no impact on the print time. The most important driver of the time a build needs is the height of the tray. The machines can print roughly 1cm (or 0.4″) per hour. To limit the time it takes to print we try to build trays that are no higher than 25cm. This conveniently means we run the printers with 1 job every day.

Another element of the print cost is the amount of powder used. If the printer is completely empty it would still build layer upon layer of powder. As the powder is heated it ages. The industry standard is to run each build with 50% new and 50% old powder. Each tray has roughly 5% of volume in parts so after each build you are left with 95% old powder. Of this old powder you can re-use 50% in the next build. The material cost is the new powder. Obviously using more old powder reduces material cost, but the problem is that too much old powder will cause the parts to look less defined and sometimes they discolor (orange peel). We (everyone using SLS) need to figure out how to make it possible to reuse all powder since this is the most wasteful part of the process. The cost involved in 3D printing is some labor to clean the machines before each run and mostly machine and powder cost. To calculate actual cost per part is quite difficult, since it depends on the other parts in the tray. Amazingly, if we print a part one week, and then again the next week, it can cost twice as much the second time only because of the other parts in the tray along with it. One of the reasons that we’ve never charged for machine space before is that we had to build up a huge amount of experience to properly control for this and charge you the right price.

Cooling, Cleaning & Sorting. After printing, the tray needs to cool as much time as it has printed (again typically 24 hours). And then the break out, cleaning and sorting starts. The costs here are mostly part based since every part needs to be dug out of the powder, cleaned and then made sure it goes into the right box. The cost involved is labor per part. Each part needs to be broken out of the powder, cleaned and then sorted.

Models with many similar looking parts are among the hardest to track and sort properly

Post Processing. The polishing and dyeing process again are mostly labor. The tumbler is fast and can polish many parts a time, so there is almost no machine cost involved. The cost involved is mostly labor. To put the parts in the polisher, remove them and then sort. Or dyeing the parts for a few minutes, remove, let the parts dry and re-sort. Much of the cost of post processing isn’t the processes themselves, but constantly combining and re-sorting the parts at each step.

As you can see, the cost in making a product using SLS can be broken down into 4 main categories:Fixed cost like utilities and rent of the factory; Labor cost to do the actual work involved; Machine cost to pay for machine depreciation; and material cost, based on how much is used.

It’s our challenge to reduce these costs by automating certain parts of the process, make sure the machines are always running, and are run at close to maximum capacity, and that we re-use as much powder as possible. It’s also clear that our cost is based on labor per part, cost of the amount of space the part utilizes in the machine and the amount of actual material consumed.

Next week I will cover how our current price model covers these costs and how we can optimize.

As always, let me know if you have questions or suggestions. In general I like to hear from you!

Pete / CEO Shapeways

The post 3D Print in Nylon with Selective Laser Sintering – Part 3 appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Looking at the images they are still early on in the process, using a round piston as a print bed (round pistons are easier, ask Andreas Bastian with his Open SLS project) and a fairly small build area.  With the industrial 3D printers Shapeways uses for SLS 3D printing made by EOS, we heat the Nylon powder to just below melting point, then the laser raises the temperature only slightly to sinter the material from powder to solid.  Sintering the Nylon without pre-heating may cause greater thermal shock to the parts, and increase the power required of the laser, but it may also make it faster to cool down which could be a huge advantage to getting prototypes out faster.

To get some insight from someone who has actually experimented with ‘cold SLS’ I asked Andreas Bastian to see if he could see an advantage over ‘pre-heated’ SLS.

I would be hard-pressed to list the performance advantages of cold SLS– while it saves on energy and BOM cost, the thermal gradient the material is subjected to is significantly larger (possibly leading to material degradation) and the curling/warping due to the massive thermal contractions of the material require support (really restraint) structures.  It’s the heated chamber in SLS that allows such freedom of form and geometry– an unheated SLS machine will have nearly all the same geometry constraints as an FDM machine, including the necessity of adhering the print to a build surface.  That being said, support/restraint structures for SLS are new territory and there may be viable options there.  As many of the low-cost FDM machines have demonstrated, it may not be necessary to fully replicate the process used at the industry level (heated chambers).  That being said, I would like to see some ASTM D638 tensile testing data before I print any functional parts on their system.

Sharebot are pitching the SnowWhite SLS 3D printer to sell for under $26,000 USD when it hits the market to join the Ice 1 & Ice 9 by Norge Systems  in the first wave of relatively low cost SLS 3D printers that may spread in a similar manner as FDM 3D printers have over the past 4 years.

The post SnowWhite a Low (ish) Priced ‘Cold’ SLS 3D Printer Currently in Development in Italy appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Take a look first at our most popular material, 3D printed Nylon (WSF).

It does catch fire fairly easily but seems to extinguish itself after a short time based on this geometry.  The Nylon melts into a hot, smelly napalm type form then cools and hardens fairly quickly.  Do not try this at home. Do not expose your Nylon 3D prints to fire.

Next we set fire to the 3D Printed Metallic Plastic (Alumide) which is a Nylon and Aluminum powder based 3D printing process.  It does catch fire very easily and stays alight, dripping a really nasty powdery, smelly hot napalm type goop, literally dripping fire.  You should really keep your Metallic Plastic (Alumide) 3D prints away from exposed fire. Really.

Setting fire to Shapeways 3D Printed Full Color Sandstone (Gypsum Powder, Binder, Ink and Cyanoacrylate) which is a powder based 3D printing process developed by Zcorp.  It does catch fire quite easily and stays alight, burning slowly and steadily.    The smell is not to noxious, smelling a little like burnt paper or cardboard.  After 6 minutes the 3D print was still burning so I blew it out to save the boredom.

All three of these 3D printed materials should definitely be kept away from naked flames.

The post More Videos of Shapeways 3D Printed Materials Torture Testing with FIRE appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

As you may remember from my first post, which covers the process of 3D printing, checking is the first step and it also presents the biggest challenge. We want to ensure that the final product looks like the design on the computer screen and that we can reliably make it. Within checking we see four main categories of problems: Thin walls, thin wires, disappearing details, and fragile parts.

Let’s talk about thin walls and thin wires first. When the walls of your design are extremely thin or the design has very thin wires (see example below) our 3D printers might not be able to print them. If we find a problem during the checking process, we make screen shots to indicate what the problem is. But, in some cases it is difficult to assess whether there is a problem. Let’s say you’ve designed something like the edge of a wing that gets thinner and thinner. The thick edge of the design might certainly be printable, whereas the thin edge might not be. The only way to know is to try it. Since we like to push what is possible, we sometimes print the design to see whether it looks great or not. If we then find out that the product fails during printing or post-production, we still have to tell you, and this will already be a few days after ordering, which is not great for either of us. Together we have lost time, we lost machine capacity and some powder, but hopefully we learned something.

An example of extremely thin wires 3D printed using Selective Laser Sintering

Another design issue we see is when parts are too fragile. We can’t always predict which product will be strong enough and which product is not strong enough. In this case especially we often take the gamble and 3D print it because we want you to get your product. Sometimes this leads to a suboptimal result or we find out after trying that we simply cannot 3D print the design.

The last challenge in checking is disappearing details. A little car might have an antenna, which looks great on the computer, but the printer can’t make it. A ring might have an engraving (see picture) so small that after printing the engraving is invisible or unreadable. Sometimes these issues are clear and sometimes it’s right on the edge of what’s possible.

Almost unreadable engraving made using Selective Laser Sintering

As a result of all these checking challenges we launched a massive internal effort to make sure we optimize the experience for you, our customers. The effort resulted in new features like “Print It Anyway” and visualization tools. We also refined our internal processes. The result is that we have been able to reduce the amount of rejections in the checking process by a factor of three!! Also, we learned that making sure we clearly communicate to you about our concerns or reasons for rejecting your design helps you a lot.

Print orientation of a product is another challenge. Depending on how the product is placed in the machine the result varies. The most obvious solution is to give the designer the freedom to orient the part, but s/he might not know what is best, and it also limits us in optimizing the packing of the print tray. Reducing optimization causes the printing to be more expensive. Since it totally depends on other parts in the same tray, estimating how much more it costs to fix orientation is very hard or perhaps impossible. Otherwise an increased price to set print orientation would be another solution.

The last topic I would like to address is multiple products in a single file. Since we started Shapeways, we always assumed that a design file would hold one (interlocked) part. This is not always the case in reality and we understand why. How else would you easily make puzzles (see picture below), chess sets and earrings available in your shops or organize them neatly? For us on the other hand, having multiple parts in a single file presents a substantial issue. As you may remember from my first post, we need to sort all parts (and sometimes multiple times). If there are multiple parts in a file (sometimes over 100!) that sorting becomes very hard. We first have to figure out how many parts there are in the file, and then individually separate them if they are all different. Since we have standardized our processes on files this is not easy. One solution is putting all parts in a file into a “sinter box”, a small mesh box around the parts. This makes the sorting super easy, BUT since the box is square and large it is suboptimal to fill trays with. It is much better to put the small parts into other parts than have them sit together in an encased volume. The trade-off here is more work in sorting versus higher machine and material costs. Neither option is great.

Design of twisty puzzle for 3D printing – “Rhomdo Transformer“

Next week in my last post, I will talk about the cost of Selective Laser Sintering. Please let me know what you think by commenting and leave suggestions on what else I should address in next week’s post!

Pete / CEO Shapeways

The post 3D Print in Nylon with Selective Laser Sintering – Part 2 appeared first on Shapeways Blog.