Objective3D | BLOG

If your business needs 3D printed or additive manufactured parts. You have two options: invest in 3D printing equipment or order parts through a 3D printing service provider. Each has its benefits, and often companies will use both for different reasons. In a recent Stratasys survey of 700 professional 3D printing users, we examined the top reasons why companies outsource 3D printing, top benefits of having 3D printers in-house, what processes they would want to outsource and what processes they plan to take in-house. The most common responses to the benefits of outsourcing 3D printing to a service provider were: Access to advanced equipment and materials Over the last few years 3D printing service providers have evolved from rapid prototyping with a few plastic 3D printing technologies to contract manufacturing with a broader service offering. Customers don’t just need plastics anymore; their 3D printing applications have evolved. They need a wide variety of materials fr...

Additive metals, laser sintering, extruded filament, powdered plastics, alloys, photopolymers – the list goes on and on. Today there are a plethora of 3D printing processes and materials to choose from and it’s only growing. The dynamic additive manufacturing market is often difficult to navigate, especially if you’re still learning about the processes. At the Objective3D Service Bureau, our project and applications engineers try to learn as much as they can about customer’s part application to accurately guide them to the best technology and materials. To help you start to filter out certain processes and materials, we put together a selection methodology: Application – What is the purpose of the end product? You may need to build a small volume of complex end-use parts which would require strong materials, dimensional accuracy and repeatability. Whereas a sacrificial investment casting pattern is one-time use and needs to burnout clean. Function – What does the part nee...

Objective3D Service Bureau is transforming the manufacturing landscape through revolutionary 3D printing and custom manufacturing solutions that allow organizations to innovate rapidly, move to market quickly, and compete in a dynamically changing world. Powered by Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, we cemented ourselves as a powerful technology leader, encouraging designers and engineers to challenge conventional approaches to manufacturing. Additive manufacturing allows for new approaches to design—something our team of engineers has spent more than a decade perfecting. With 16 commercial grade machines providing the widest range of 3D printing technologies and materials and together with the help of our manufacturing capabilities and expertise, our customers are able to produce complex designs, previously impossible via conventional manufacturing methods, which in turn result in more advanced and higher performing products. With more than 1500 orders recei...

Canberra para-athlete Scott Reardon has sprinted his way to gold at the IPC Athletics World Championships in Doha with victory in the T42 100m for leg amputees. The fastest qualifier coming into the finals, Reardon, using a 3D Printed Spike Plate, got his nose in front to stop the clock in a time of 12.13 seconds - a mere one-hundredth of a second in front of Russia's Anton Prokhorov. It was sweet revenge for Reardon, the 25-year-old having to share the gold medal two years ago at the world championships in Lyon in 2013 with Germany's Heinrich Popow​. "You come to championships to win championships and that's the most important thing," Reardon said. "I probably didn't get the time I wanted, but when people look back, how I got there won't matter. "It will just show me as world champion, and that's so exciting." The result is the culmination of more than a decade of determination and training. The Spike ...

The 3D printed plastic material that can kill 99% of bacteria could revolutionise dental implants Scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have invented a type of 3D printed plastic that can kill 99% of bacteria that touches it, which could pave the way for a multitude of medical, dental, food hygiene and child safety applications. The researchers took the dental resin polymers that are used to make artificial teeth implants and embedded antimicrobial quaternary ammonium salts inside the polymers. The salts are positively charged, which causes negatively charged bacterial membranes to burst and die. The polymer was then put into a 3D printer and used to print out a range of dental items, including replacement teeth implants and orthodontic braces, with the objects hardened using ultraviolet light. When the objects were coated in a mix of saliva and Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium that causes tooth decay, the researchers found that the new mat...

Matthew Garnett, owner and MD of Merseyside-based orthodontic dental laboratory, Thermadent Ltd, has something to say about the future of digital dental technology. "Let's get digital..." Matthew has 25 years experience in dental technology, beginning as an apprentice in 1990. he went on to Liverpool Community College where he qualified in 1996 with distinctions and won the "Student of the Year Award for Excellence" in dental technology. His passion for perfection remains undimmed and he believes we must never rest on our laurels. Before launching Thermadent in 2011 he worked in a number of laboratories right across the North West as an orthodontic technician, gathering valuable experience in all aspects of the craft. He took a lot of pride in his work and he made every appliance to the best of his ability, preparing each one as if it was for one of his own children. This level of commitment runs through the work of every member of the Thermad...

When 4 year old Anthony of Shelbyville, Kentucky lost his vision after an operation to remove a brain tumor, Wayne Whitworth, a family friend and former United States marine, offered a solution to help the little boy regain his independence. Whitworth turned to 3D printing to develop a customized spoon on the Stratasys uPrint SE Plus 3D Printer at UPS store 0830, located in Louisville, Kentucky. Simple daily functions like self-feeding posed frustrating challenges for Anthony and his family. “Anthony is blind so finding a spoon that he liked was a real challenge,” said Anthony’s mother, Cierra Brettnacher.   Anthony celebrated his 4th birthday last month using his Stratasys 3D printed spoon to eat a piece of birthday cake Anthony was drawn to a particular spoon he encountered during physical therapy. The special curvatures and features help visually impaired children like Anthony adapt to feeding themselves. Reproducing a utensil with a unique shape would require a...

Acclaimed artist and designer Daniel Widrig collaborated with Stratasys to create a futuristic 3D printed art collection. The collection, entitled Descendants, was unveiled at the ‘GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution’ exhibition, at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, on October 30. DESCENDANTS by Daniel Widrig in collaboration with Stratasys produced using Stratasys’ PolyJet 3D printing technology. Size: 1751 x 452 x 292mm (Female), 1848 x 627 x 342mm (Male). Photo credit: Yoram Reshef Exploring a futuristic context where technological development and computational capacities continue to spiral, Descendants addresses the increasing possibility of superior artificial intelligence and technological singularity, and how future synthetic bodies might look and feel. “With advanced technologies, such as 3D printing, already facilitating the customization and enhancement of the human form, the concepts of a post-human era of non-biological intelligence is now much more conceiva...

Jay Leno has a lot of old cars with a lot of obsolete parts. When he needs to replace these parts, he skips the error-prone machinist and goes to his rapid prototyping 3D printer. Simply scan, print and repeat. Learn the benefits of 3D Printing for the classic car industry. Come visit Objective3D at stand 107 at the Motor Classica and you stand a chance to win $300 worth of 3D Printed Parts One of the hardships of owning an old car is rebuilding rare parts when there are simply no replacements available. My 1907 White Steamer has a feedwater heater, a part that bolts onto the cylinders. It's made of aluminum, and over the 100-plus years it's been in use, the metal has become so porous you can see steam and oil seeping through. I thought we could just weld it up. But it's badly impregnated with oil and can't be repaired. If we tried, the metal would just come apart. So, rather than have a machinist try to copy the heater and then build it, we decid...

ICON Aircraft is betting on a future where private recreational planes are as popular as powerboats and motorcycles. Its ICON A5 is a giant step toward that goal: A plane that “will handle like a sports car with the top down,” according to the Discovery Channel. To speed this beauty onto the runway for a major air show, they came to Stratasys Direct Manufacturing. We not only saved ICON time and money, our approach enabled complex features that other manufacturing methods could not. ICON Aircraft recently took flight with the unveiling of its ICON A5, a small, recreational plane that its founder, Kirk Hawkins, hopes will revolutionize a market already enamored with powerboats and motorbikes. He calls the two-seat ICON A5 “the ultimate recreational vehicle,” able to reach speeds up to 120 miles per hour. Speed was important when it came to creating some of the aircraft’s parts, too. The unveiling of the plane at the Experimental Aircraft Association Air Venture in Oshkosh...

Doctors at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute utilize 3D printing technology from Stratasys Direct Manufacturing to recreate accurate models of their patients’ hearts before performing surgery. As the physicians at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute (TCAI) can attest, the heart is an enormously complex organ; no two human hearts are exactly the same. In fact, because of the organ’s complexity, it is virtually impossible for even the most brilliant physician to diagnose a heart condition without extensive imaging of the patient’s heart. While CT scans, echocardiograms, and ultrasounds, among other technological advances, have made incredible progress for doctors in the field of cardiology, the study of heart conditions, there’s no comparison to being able to see an actual model of the human heart in question—one the physician can hold in his or her hands. Dr. Vikram Devaraj, director of solid materials research for the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Research Foundation h...

When the automobile moguls at Toyota Motor Corporation decided that they wanted to produce a prototype for a car seat that was as lightweight as possible, they found themselves face to face with a complex project that was meant to be handled by 3D printing technology. How would the Toyota team possibly design, build, and manufacture such a complex and sizable 3D printed car seat? That’s where Belgium-based 3D printing service bureau and software developer Materialise and their enthusiastic engineering team came in. Using a specialized method of topology optimization, Toyota and Materialise were able to assign various levels of density to the car seat design before transforming it into a 3D model. The lower density areas were then populated in Materialise’s 3-maticSTL software, which allowed for design modification, repair, and simplification of the car seat’s 3D files. The 3-maticSTL method was also utilized to remove unnecessary print material and add comfort to the seat thro...

A 3D-printed windpipe has been used to practise delicate surgery before an operation on a six-year-old girl at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital. It meant doctors could pick the correct tools needed to wash her lungs. And as a result, Katie Parke, from Northern Ireland, needed to spend less time under anaesthetic and being ventilated. Doctors at the hospital say the technology could also be used to train other doctors. Katie has pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, which means grainy deposits build up in the microscopic air sacs in her lungs making it hard to breathe. Regularly washing the lungs with saltwater is the only way to remove the deposits. During Katie's operation one of her lungs needed to be ventilated while the other was cleaned. Normally, surgeons waste time on the operating table trying multiple combinations of different-sized tubes in order to perform the delicate surgery. The team at Great Ormond Street Hospital used a CT scan of Katie to pri...

The next phase for 3D printing: Coming out of rapid prototyping and moving into the assembly line for end-use production. Airbus has produced more than 1000 flight parts on  Stratasys 3D printers for use in its A350 XWB aircraft. New 3D printing processes have reduced the time it takes for designers and engineers to conceptualize, create, and test prototypes. But for 3D printing to catch on the rapidly changing manufacturing industry, it will have to be seen by companies less as a fascinating technological upgrade and more as an everyday business decision. That’s the conclusion from a report published in August by Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, the service arm of the global 3D-printer manufacturing company Stratasys. SDM provides advanced manufacturing and prototyping services to manufacturing companies who might need a 3D-printed prototype or part, but lack the in-house equipment or staff expertise. “Today 3D printing is still perceived as a technology solutio...