Tom Bakker is a talented engineer who has worked in LPBF, custom machine building, and on semiconductor equipment. Now he wants to make LPBF metal printing cheap. With Metal Base, Tom is developing a low-cost system that will make LPBF accessible. He has already sold 6 to beta testers, and the systems are running there.
Many dynamic, interactive objects change their appearance through the use of electronics, like LEDs and screens. But if the object is squished, twisted, or pressed too hard, or exposed to chemicals or water, those electronics won’t work properly anymore. Surface optics can change the appearance of an object without delicate electronics, but their interactivity is
We’re starting with business in this weekend’s 3D Printing News Briefs, then moving on to defense. We’ll move on to young 3D printing entrepreneurs, and finish with some research out of MIT. Kind Designs Raises $10 Million in Pre-Series A Financing Round Living Seawalls. Image courtesy of Kind Designs Miami-based climate resilience company Kind Designs
Eplus3D has worked with UCL Rocket on liquid rocket engines. Right now, they’re working on a regenerative liquid oxygen (LOX) and isopropyl alcohol (IPA) liquid-cooled architecture. These rockets use IPA as a coolant before igniting it along with the liquid oxygen in the combustion chamber. The cryogenic engine (because the LOX is cooled to under
The latest earnings reports from Xometry (Nasdaq: XMTR), Protolabs (NYSE: PRLB), and Lincoln Electric (Nasdaq: LECO) suggest manufacturers are still spending. All three companies reported solid results, although each tells a slightly different story about where the 3D printing market stands today. Digital manufacturing platform Xometry and on-demand manufacturing company Protolabs both posted record quarterly
Other than workforce development, materials qualification is perhaps the greatest existing barrier to the scale-up of metal additive manufacturing (AM). Moreover, improving access to data on metals qualified for the most widely used AM processes could help address both challenges: validating the underlying technical processes removes a meaningful portion of the risk associated with an
Essentially, I used a cutting-edge stealth-mode AI tool that goes far beyond the capabilities of commercially available LLMs to conduct deep research into the desktop 3D printing filament market. I then sliced and diced the data using Notebook LM. I wanted to update you on this market while simultaneously showcasing the pitfalls and opportunities in
Japanese companies are really good at internal diversification and spin-outs, and this seems to be true even in cases involving foreign subsidiaries of Japanese multinationals. Ricoh USA recently demonstrated this with its sale of Ricoh 3D for Healthcare, which the former spun off as a standalone enterprise last year. Ricoh USA sold the company to
The US additive manufacturing (AM) industry faces a turning point in terms of its approach to R&D. As has been the case for aggregate R&D in the US economy at least since World War II (especially when it comes to manufacturing activity), the AM industry seems overly dependent on money from the US military and
If you’ve been to the grocery store recently, you’ve probably noticed shrinkflation. A cereal box looks the same. The price may even be the same. But when you get home, you realize there’s, well, less inside. Consumers eventually gave that phenomenon a name. Then came another term that started simmering: skimpflation. Instead of reducing quantity,
