Cimquest has teamed up with the State College, Pennsylvania-based Xact Metal to bring their low entry cost and small footprint, laser powder bed fusion metal 3D printer to budding enterprise shops and manufacturers without sacrificing quality or accuracy.
For a number of years, Metal Laser Powder Bed Fusion technologies have been somewhat out of reach to small to mid-size machine shops due to cost, space, or inaccurate perceptions about what it takes to adopt the technology. LPBF has been highly popular in industries like medical device and aerospace who are looking for highly complex metal geometries that may be difficult or near impossible to machine, for the benefit of weight reduction, component consolidation, efficiency, and reducing cost in low volumes of highly specialized parts.
The founders and engineers of Xact Metal saw an opportunity to create an easy to use, space-saving, and most importantly a low-cost point of entry into this capability with the XM200C. Driven by the patent-pending Xact Core™, a high-speed precision X-Y gantry system, as opposed to traditional galvanometer ones, that allows light and simple mirrors to move quickly, consistently, and always perpendicular to the powder bed to maintain accuracies down to .002”. The 125in³ volume is big enough to tackle large handheld parts, and Praxair delivers quality metal powders to build highly dense parts. In the recent past, most would expect to be into a quarter of a million dollars to have LPBF technology in house, where the Xact system all-in price starting at $140k, without sacrificing accuracy and reliability, reduces total cycle time by about 50% without the need for debind and sintering steps found in earlier low-cost 3D metal printing systems.
Cimquest views this addition of Xact Metal to our 3D printer line-up as a gateway for those customers who have been hungry to move out of using plastic prototypes. With this new affordable option, they can move to useable, weldable, complex components in stainless steels, super alloys, copper, and even aluminum and titanium if their facilities allow. This can meaningfully democratize the metal 3D printing space for so many more businesses that were out of reach of it, just a few years ago.
For more information on the Xact metal laser powder-bed fusion (LPBF) please click the button below.
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