Hello dear reader!

We are a small, European team of 3D printing enthusiasts, from various fields of expertise.

Why did we start an enterprise?

During our adventures over the years, we faced many interesting challenges related to additive manufacturing.

Some were slight annoyances, like how does one grease the linear guides without properly designed lubrication locations? Some printers make it hard to remove the build plate from the chamber, so cleaning it is not easy. The magnetically attached build platforms have alignment issues, so if it is textured, mass produced parts will have texture differences. Most printers don’t have automated nozzle cleaning, or if they do have it, it works on one direction, and leaves some debris on…

Some of them were more than annoyances: the maintenance intervals are not tracked properly, or not tracked at all. Imagine running ~70 3D printers parallel, in serial production, where deadlines have to be met. If one can’t prepare for maintenance, then hours of delays can occur. If something has to be changed (for example an extruder drive gear has worn because of CF filament) one has to remove the carriage, disassemble the extruder, change the gear, reassemble the extruder, put back the carriage, and continues printing. In the meantime the machines is idling, not producing, then the part that was scheduled starts printing at 13:00 instead of 8:00, and finishes at 20:00instead of 16:00., but there is no one in the farm to start the new print, so a whole cycle is missed.

Then there is the scheduling… How does one plan manufacturing capacity for different parts, different materials, on different 3D printers?For a few printers that is not an issue. for 50-70 printers that is two hours of work a day. For 1000 printers? There are either a lot of filament swaps, a lot of idling on the 3D printers, or a lot of manual scheduling involved.

We also faced challenges with filament handling: for 10 filament spools, one uses a shelf, and maybe a scale from the kitchen. For 100 spools, one uses a rack, with labels, and a scale. Then puts things into excel. For 10000 spools, one uses a warehouse, with a scale that can withstand the abuse, employs a guy to keep track of everything, and has an ERP running. Then some entropy walks into a bar (that usually being an engineer who is in a hurry to deliver, and cannot be arsed with proper checkout in the ERP), moves a filament to a different location, and boom, chaos.

There are countless other examples, but no one likes to read an endless river of tears.

Onward to a great future!

We have plans for building 3D printers, and 3D printer accessories, such as air filters, maintenance tools, or filament handling systems -that are more than a plastic box with a heating element-, and of course we have an idea about how the ideal industrial/professional 3D print farm should look like. Of course we plan these things to function in an ecosystem, so the users can have a turnkey solutions to all of their 3D printing related challenges.

Because every seconds spent on maintenance, calibration, and preparation is a second not spent on 3D printing.