Cimquest Receives New HP 580 Series 3D Printer
We are excited to be one of the first five companies in the US to receive our new HP 580 Series 3D Printer! The machine is fully installed, and we have started to build parts. Tailored for small/medium-sized development teams, design firms, and universities, HP’s new printer is a compact solution for producing injection mold quality parts. This automated system integrates material mixing and loading, printing, and reclaiming material in one machine. Teams can accelerate their design cycle by producing prototype iterations or functional parts without tooling, at a faster pace compared with traditional 3D printing technologies. Learn more about this machine here.
Solidworks Slicing Tool
This post will explain the new functionality in SolidWorks 2019 called Slicing. Scanning is becoming more and more prevalent in the engineering world. Whether you want to scan geometry just to back up your design or scan to recreate and make modifications, it's becoming more and more easy to start from a scan. Once done, you export the scan as an STL. The challenge comes when trying to utilize an STL file as graphics bodies in SolidWorks. You are not able to select anything on the body, nor can you trace or work off of the geometry. Although there are different workarounds for this, SolidWorks 2019 came up with yet a new way to be able to leverage and trace Graphic Bodies, Mesh BREP geometry, and SolidWorks BREP geometry. This new tool is called Slicing. In the example below, we have a Graphics Body of an impeller, which was scanned and then imported as an STL. To start the Slicing Tool, go to Insert > Slicing. At that point you select your base Slicing plane, the number of additional slicing planes that you would like to create, and the offset distance between. Once you click on the green check mark, SolidWorks creates 2D sketch [...]
The Process of Importing Organic Shapes
In this article, we go into more details about the process of importing organic shapes into CAD. We will explain how we created a custom coffee pod holder by scanning a human hand and including it in the CAD design. The first step involved capturing the geometry. There are many different 3D scanners out, all of which vary in accuracy, resolution, and light technologies. In order to facilitate the scanning of the hand, we used a structured white light scanner, which does not require positioning targets. Once the data was acquired, the second task involved data clean up. Using mesh editing software like Geomagic Wrap, we were able to easily post-process the data, optimize the mesh quality, and thicken it, and then align it to a World Coordinate System. We needed to ensure that we had a water-tight mesh and then we needed to take that data and convert it to something manageable and useable in CAD. Instead of exporting each of the thousands or millions of triangles into CAD, we used Geomagic Wrap to create B-Rep surfaces, group the triangles into surface patches, and create a solid body. At this point, we exported this body as a non-parametric neutral CAD file, like [...]
Autodesk Netfabb Lattice Assistant and Lattice Commander
Today we are going to cover how to use Autodesk Netfabb to create lattices with two of Netfabb’s internal tools, Lattice Assistant and Lattice Commander. Autodesk Netfabb is Additive Manufacturing software that allows you to repair, prepare and build your parts. Lattice Assistant and Lattice Commander are currently available as tech previews, and included in Netfabb Premium and Ultimate. The first tool we will discuss is Lattice Assistant, which combines hollowing, lattice generation and merging with tools to generate perforation and the matching plugs for drainage of unused material. Shown below is a connecting rod used for one of our Mastercam events. It is fairly thick, and you can see the various options from the thickness of the skin to size and shape of the lattice cells in the dialogue box on the left. In this example, we selected a simple X cell and hit calculate. With the part hollowed and latticed, we have to add perforations in order to be able to remove the unfused powder which can be reused in the HP JF 4200. The second tool for latticing is Lattice Commander, which can be used to create and modify the individual lattices and wall sections, or skins, for a project. With this [...]
Startup Businesses Can Claim Cash Rebates
We want to share this information because the window is soon closing on the opportunity to get up to $250,000 in cash rebates for startups purchasing new equipment. This equipment includes 3D printing equipment, materials, and service providers. The following article was written by Charles Goulding & Raymond Kumar of www.rdtaxsavers.com. 3D printing is poised to become an integral component of production in a variety of industries, ranging from traditional manufacturing and food processing to laboratories and architectural design. Reasons for integrating 3D printing include cost-reduction, increased efficiencies, and better methods for prototyping. Startups not only developing 3D printers but also utilizing the technology in operations have a unique opportunity to claim up to $250,000 annual in cash rebates as part of the Federal R&D Tax Credit program. To timely monetize the payroll tax credit, startups must file their 2018 income tax returns by the end of Q1 2019. The Research & Development Tax Credit Enacted in 1981, the now permanent Federal Research and Development (R&D) Tax Credit allows a credit that typically ranges from 4%-7% of eligible spending for new and improved products and processes. Qualified research must meet the following four criteria: Must be technological in nature Must be a component [...]
RIZE’s Hybrid AM Helps Solve Complex Warfighter Problems
SI2 Technologies, Inc. produces functional parts for the Department of Defense with their RIZE ONE 3D printer up to 6X faster and at a cost savings of $2K per part. They wanted one machine that could combine 3D printing and inkjet printing capabilities. SI2’s core mission is to ‘make things smart’ by pushing the boundaries of where antennas can be placed and how they can be made. SI2’s mission requires the latest technology and innovation in the additive manufacturing field to deliver an advantage to the warfighter. Much of the development work that SI2 does happens in their state-of-the-art facility. Among their collection of modern equipment, SI2 has 3D printers ranging from entry-level consumer 3D printers to much more expensive and complex wide-format inkjet equipment. Although SI2 had a range of 3D printers and wide format inkjet printers, they didn’t have a single machine that could combine these two capabilities. RIZE’s patented hybrid Augmented Deposition process solved this problem, simultaneously extruding engineering-grade thermoplastic and jetting functional inks precisely where they are needed in the part. Airflow Chamber Apparatus One recent application where SI2 used their RIZE ONE 3D printer was to produce an end-use airflow controller for an airflow chamber apparatus. The apparatus [...]