Dungeons & Dragons Dice Tower: An ABS Story
Did you know that ABS is the most popular material for engineers in the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) category? ABS is strong and has great machinability and thermal stability. Usually, ABS is highly susceptible to warping and curling in desktop 3D printers which, before the MakerBot Method X, caused ABS to be too challenging and unreliable to print with, regardless of its great qualities. MakerBot has also created RapidRinse™, a support material for ABS that actually dissolves in tap water! No chemicals are required in order for RapidRinse™ to dissolve, offering your ABS prints unlimited geometries. For fun, we experimented by printing a Dungeons & Dragons dice tower made of ABS with and without the support material, RapidRinse™. In the photos, you can see the difference between the two. The tower printed with RapidRinse™ has crisp overhangs with no stringing or extra material hanging off. For personal projects, this may be less enticing as some prints can be created without support. However, for engineers or designers that are bringing innovative ideas to life, having access to RapidRinse™ offers endless possibilities. More Info on 3D Printing
New Ultimaker Metal Expansion Kit
3D print functional steel parts on your Ultimaker Ultimaker and BASF Forward AM are proud to announce that the Metal Expansion Kit is now available from our network of resellers – meaning it is now possible to print functional steel parts on your Ultimaker S5, at a fraction of the cost of other metal production methods. At the Ultimaker Showcase event back in April, we unveiled two new solutions that together deliver a breakthrough for 3D printer users. First came Ultimaker Cura 5 offering enhanced detail and print speeds. Now, the Ultimaker Metal Expansion Kit unlocks massive possibilities for Ultimaker customers. You can now take advantage of a new range of metal 3D printing applications by upgrading the Ultimaker S5 with the Metal Expansion Kit. Its seamless workflow makes creating stainless steel parts easier, more efficient, and affordable. From small series of small tools to auxiliary components. What’s included? You may be wondering how an expansion kit allows an existing printer designed for thermoplastic filaments to reliably print metal parts. There are two key elements. First, the kit includes Ultimaker Print Cores – including a new Ultimaker Print Core DD¹ – with nozzles specially optimized for printing metal and ceramic support materials. The [...]
Mastercam 2023 OptiRough Rest Roughing
Mastercam 2023 includes an exciting new upgrade of the OptiRough toolpath. Rest Material now supports enhanced stock awareness in the Z-axis. In previous versions, Rest Material would ignore some aspects of the defined stock, but now, the stock option makes OptiRough Rest milling far more stock aware. You will notice a new stock option under Steep/Shallow. This new option allows you to choose if you want to reference the material above or below the part along the Z-axis. By enabling this option, the defined stock will be checked to establish where the cut should start and end, based on the referenced stock model. If you define a hard maximum depth, it will override any stock reference. If you set it to automatically detect the depth, the defined stock will be used to calculate the cuts needed to reach the bottom of the defined stock. This new toolpath enhancement makes controlling your cutting depths in OptiRough much easier. Using these options in your programming is a great way to help reduce the number of toolpaths in your program. Please be sure to sign up for our 2 Minute Tuesday video series to receive tips and tricks like this one in video form every week. [...]
3D Printing Is Becoming Manufacturing Reality
A reprint from CNBC Additive manufacturing is on the cusp of being adopted more widely by industry, as large corporates Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and Boeing as well as small innovative start-ups prove it can work well at scale in manufacturing. Picture shows a non-pneumatic tire (NPT), an airless tire, during the presentation of the NPT tire of Goodyear in Colmar-Berg, Luxembourg, on May 17, 2022, where the tire manufacturer has a new plant where it is experimenting with 3D printing.Francois Walschaerts | Afp | Getty Images In May, Goodyear opened a $77 million plant in Luxembourg that centers on 3D printing and can make tires four times faster in small batches than with conventional production. Goodyear also is testing its new 3D printed airless tire technology on Tesla electric vehicles and Starship Technologies' autonomous delivery robots. It has been working for the past several years on improved manufacturing techniques at an R&D center near Columbus, Ohio. By 2030, Goodyear aims to bring maintenance-free and airless tires to market, and 3D printing is part of that effort for the Akron-based tire-making leader founded in 1898 and named after innovator Charles Goodyear. Currently, about 2% of its production is through additive [...]
Upcoming Desktop Metal Webinar
How Your Business Can Outperform the Competition During the Supply Chain and Labor Crisis with 3D Printing How long will the current mix of supply chain and labor issues last? How can your business outperform during this challenging time? Join Desktop Metal on August 24 at 2 PM EST for a special two-hour webinar event to discuss how 3D printing can help solve your supply chain and labor challenges. During this webinar, Desktop Metal assembles both company and industry experts to share up-to-date forecasts on how long the supply chain and labor crisis will last and show how machine shops and other manufacturers are carving out an advantage during this time with agile, turnkey digital manufacturing tools. In this webinar you will learn: How to use additive manufacturing to ease supply chain disruptions How Desktop Metal customers are using a digital inventory strategy and producing replacement parts on-demand with 3D printing How to identify parts in your inventory that could benefit from 3D printing production How to get started digitizing your data and what tools are available to help Which printers and materials are available for plug-and-play adoption Register Here
Mastercam 2023 Rollouts Now Online and Streaming On-Demand
In the event that you missed our live in-person Mastercam 2023 Rollouts, and you also missed our live Rollout webinars, you are in luck. We just posted the webinar on our website to be streamed on-demand. This means you still have a chance to learn all about the latest and greatest enhancements, including: Detecting Undercut Stock when Machining Consolidating Multiaxis Toolpaths New B-Axis Contour Turning Toolpaths Check Mesh Enhancements Appending Operations to Mastercam Simulator Adding Stock Awareness to Holder Checking New Workflow and Interface for Managing your Machine Groups Creating Consistent Flowlines with Loft Surface Creating Chamfers with Push-Pull And it couldn't be easier to access the Rollout content! Just click below and be taken straight to the streaming video. Watch the Rollout Here