Today, Formlabs announced they would be adding three new resins to their comprehensive library of Engineering Resins. They’ve been specifically designed for Formlabs’ printers by their in-house materials team. They’ve added new Durable, Tough, and High Temp Resins, and their Flexible Resin is as versatile as ever.

Introducing the Resins

Formlabs Engineering Resins simulate a range of injection-molded plastics, covering the full spectrum of properties required to conceptualize, prototype, test, and manufacture successful final products. With this lineup of resins, you can 3D print everything from functional prototypes to molds for final packaging right from your desktop.

Durable Resin

The Low Stiffness and Finish of Polypropylene. Another thermoplastic polymer, polypropylene (PP) is widely used for its low modulus and high-impact strength. PP is used for car bumpers, living hinges, plastic chairs, and food containers. Like PP, Formlabs’ new Durable Resin bends without breaking and is as smooth and glossy as everyday plastics.

This material is ideal for prototyping consumer products, packaging, and low-friction and low-wear moving parts. Use this wear-resistant, ductile material for parts where breaking would be the worst possible outcome, or for parts that need to deform multiple times.

**Durable Resin is under further development and will be available in January 2017. 

Durable Resin is perfect for prototyping products that will eventually be made of polypropylene, such as this container, which features a functional hinge and a snap-fit locking mechanism.

Tough Resin

ABS-Like Resistance to Stress and Strain. ABS is a thermoplastic polymer whose sturdy, shatter-resistant properties and resistance to stress and strain have made it a popular choice for functional prototyping and items like enclosures for consumer products, automotive trim elements, and household goods. Like ABS, our reformulated Tough Resin balances strength with elongation, so Tough parts absorb energy and begin to deform before they snap or shatter.

Tough Resin is more impact resistant than standard 3D printed parts, so it’s perfect for snap-fit joints, assemblies, and rugged prototypes. Use it for parts that need to resist breaking or deforming under a load and for its high geometric accuracy.

Tough Resin produces printed parts that are strong under tension, like when a strap is pulled tight.

High Temp Resin

The Highest HDT @ 0.45 MPa on the Market. Our new High Temp Resin has an HDT @ 0.45 MPa of 289 ºC–the highest on the 3D printing materials market. This material is great for static applications that will undergo higher temperatures.

High Temp Resin is ideal for testing hot air or fluid flow, static (no-load) applications, and production processes such as casting and thermoforming.

Moldmaking with desktop 3D printing allows engineers and designers to get much more functionality from their 3D printer, beyond prototyping alone. Download our white paper to learn more: Moldmaking with 3D Prints: Techniques for Prototyping and Production.

High Temp Resin can be used to print molds for molding and casting a wide range of thermoplastic materials.

Flexible Resin

Tactile and Compressible. Parts made with Flexible Resin can bend and compress, and are great for simulating soft-touch materials. Flexible is handy for parts that need to flex and bend, especially over time, and can be used to simulate an 80A durometer rubber. It’s great for prototyping grips and overmolds, cushioning and dampening, and wearables.

Flexible Resin is bendable, compressible, and impact-resistant.

The Development Process

This resin lineup emerged from a lot of research and consideration. “Basically every material that we launched for the first couple years was the first material of its kind available on the desktop. Now, we’ve had a couple years to see what use cases the materials are actually falling into,” said Formlabs Materials Scientist Alex McCarthy.

“We wanted to have a clear portfolio of resins. It should help people find the right resin for their applications,” added Materials Team Lead Max Zieringer.

What do You Look Forward to? 

“What’s exciting about working with 3D printer resins is that it’s such a quickly evolving application. You never really know what people are going to use it for. I’m really excited to see where people take our resins.” – Gayla Lyon, materials scientist at Formlabs

We’ve experienced lots of internal “aha” moments experimenting with these new resins, and one of the most exciting things about the development process is when we’re able to print something on the Form 2 that we couldn’t have created before. We’re even more excited to see what others do with our printers and this new lineup of materials.

Want to learn more about the new engineering resins? Contact our Additive Manufacturing Specialist for more information and to request a free sample part.

3D printing is changing the face of product design and manufacturing. The Form 2 by Formlabs allows companies to streamline their design processes with its user-friendly interface and low cost. Companies are no longer required to hire third party consulting firms to print a design and send it back– they can print it themselves in a matter of hours.

The Form 2 allows complete control at your fingertips. You can send prints over WiFi, re-print previous jobs, and manage your print queue through wireless connectivity. If you’re not nearby, not to worry, you can stay informed wherever you are by accessing your Printer Dashboard on your phone, tablet, or any other device. The printer will send you alerts when a print starts, finishes, or requires attention. The Dashboard will track previous jobs, resin usage, and manage multiple printers as you scale your operation.

One of our customers (that asked to remain nameless) experienced a dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in print costs after purchasing the Form 2. A primary concern of this company was project timeline compression. Their Form 2 purchase turned into a text-book example of cost and time-savings.

The client performed a study to evaluate the cost and time-savings associated with purchasing the Form 2 and printing designs in-house versus sending their prints to a third-party consulting company.

Here’s what they found.

Option A:

• Customer sends design to third party consulting company to print their design
• Cost: $300 per print
• Time: 3-4 business day cycle from ship to shop, print, ship back to customer

Option B:

• Customer sends design over WiFi to Form 2 3D printer
• Cost: $21 per print
• Time: 1 business day cycle

Which option would you choose? In this case, the Form 2 had the potential to pay for itself in a matter of prints, in less than two weeks. Think about how much money you pay third-party prototype houses. How does that number compare to the cost of putting a Form 2 on your desk? What are you waiting for?

For more information about the Form 2 contact our Additive Manufacturing Specialist here.

EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC), a leading provider of product development technology and services, is pleased to announce a partnership with Formlabs. This partnership allows EAC to bring professional quality SLA 3D printers and materials to commercial product development and education customers.

Burnsville, MN – May 5, 2016 — EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC) brings desktop SLA 3D printing to commercial customers through strategic partnership with Formlabs.

EAC has signed a partnership agreement to become a North American Channel Reseller for Formlabs. They will offer commercial, discrete manufacturing, and education customers the full line of Formlabs products. This partnership addresses increasing market demand for accessible additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping solutions. The Form 2 3D Printer will allow EAC’s customers to insert high-quality stereolithography (SLA) prototyping into their engineering and design workflows, for a fraction of the cost of competing technologies. The ability to minimize turnaround times by keeping prototyping in house is critical. Especially today, when development costs are scrutinized and time-to-market is more important than ever.

“We use the Form 2 to bring additional value to our engineering services engagements. I’m excited to bring the technology directly to our customers and look forward to sharing the knowledge we’ve acquired. These printers should be on the desk of every engineer. They have the potential to dramatically shorten design cycles and increase innovation. It’s amazing what happens when you enable an engineer to get their hands on a design idea.” — Allen Caldwell, senior mechanical engineer at EAC Product Development Solutions

Thane Hathaway, President and CEO of EAC said: “I built this company with a mission; to transform the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. Additive Manufacturing, or 3D Printing, is a transformative technology that’s changing the way organizations approach product development. The Formlabs printers and materials offer professional quality 3D printing at an incredible price point. I look forward to this partnership and helping our education and commercial customers embrace this technology.”

“With decades of experience, EAC pairs deep product development expertise with a strong background in technical design. This distinct expertise will accelerate Formlabs’ efforts in bringing accessible, powerful desktop 3D printing to the millions of professional engineers and designers worldwide.” – Luke Winston, head of sales and customer success at Formlabs.

About EAC:
EAC Product Development Solutions transforms the way companies design, manufacture, connect to, and service their products. For more than 20 years they have provided the services and technologies needed to innovate, optimize, and win in the complex and competitive world of product development.

About Formlabs:
Formlabs designs and manufactures powerful and accessible 3D printing systems for engineers, designers, and artists. Their flagship product, the Form 2 3D Printer, uses stereolithography (SLA) to create high-resolution physical objects from digital designs. The company was founded in 2012 by a team of engineers and designers from the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms. With its powerful, intuitive, and affordable machines, Formlabs is establishing a new benchmark in professional desktop 3D printing. Formlabs also develops its own suite of high-performance materials for 3D printing, as well as best-in-class 3D-printing software.

My name is Matt and I ride mopeds – I’m not talking about the scooters or step through motorcycles that you see cruising around cities and college these days, I mean mopeds. Small, typically old, motorized 2-wheeled vehicles that have moveable pedals allowing a person to pedal the moped like a bicycle if they a) run out of gas b) need to go ‘stealth’ c) don’t feel like push starting the ‘ped or d) feel like exercising. This post and hopefully a few more will follow my very own product development design process as I restore and customize one of my vintage mopeds – the Kreidler MP 19 pictured in the slideshow above and the image below. This post explains the process I went through after deciding the seat needed some attention.

I had planned to have the original seat reupholstered, but after removing the cover and the foam I noticed that there was a bit of rust on the metal seat pan as well as some cracks in vital areas.

The Design Process

After seeing the condition of the old seat pan I decided it was time for the old to become new.  Rather than purchasing a new seat, I decided to use what I do day-in and day-out at EAC. I would design one and the try to build it on my own. I like to think that I’m a pretty good engineer and I have all the Creo software tools, so the designing wasn’t going to be a problem, but this will be my first real metalworking project.

Step 1: Design

The first step in my design process was figuring out what I wanted my new seat to be. Do I want it hinged like the original or have it rigidly attached to the frame? Do I want to tuck the taillight under the rear fairing? What gauge metal should I use, etc.? After getting my requirements I continued to think of my metal working capabilities as well as the tools available. Realizing that I don’t have much firsthand experience in metal fabrication and only basic shop tools, hammers, bench vise, angle grinder, and a welder, I knew I had to keep the parts and the design simple.

After many hours (and beers) contemplating my requirements and fabrication abilities, it was time to sit down and design the new seat in Creo Parametric. Inside of Creo, I used the sheet metal functionality to design my metal parts. The sheet metal functionality allowed me to design the parts the way that they would be built. For example, start with a flat sheet in the shape of the base and add a couple of 90-degree walls. Then add a couple of rounds and corner cutouts to get the base of the seat.

The other sheet metal parts were created in a similar fashion as the base. I decided to mount the taillight under the rear fairing which meant I needed an assembly model to make sure everything would fit together. Modeling the seat and assembly up in 3D was a life-saver. It showed me the original angle on the rear fairing was too steep and would interfere with the taillight. I flattened out the angle and adjusted the location of the taillight to get the correct fit and look. Below you can see the final design process.

With the design work completed, it was time to make sure everything would work in real life so I made a prototype. To create my prototype I printed the flattened state of the sheet metal parts and traced them on cardboard.  A little cutting, bending, taping and voila, a prototype. Building a prototype is something we strongly encourage our customers to make.  It’s should be part of every product development project. It made it so I could ‘place’ my design on the moped. It allowed me to see that I needed to make the seat just a little longer and a little wider. The original design just didn’t look right on the moped. Also, the slightly larger seat will be much more comfortable while cruising around on the winter-torn roads.  After I updated the design it was time to start cutting and forming metal.

Step 2: Fabrication

With each flat pattern done I created an assembly with a part that was the size of the blank piece of sheet metal and then I assembled all of the flat patterns to the stock piece to make sure I had enough stock material to cut out all of the parts. Knowing that I had enough stock material I went and traced out the parts on the actual sheet metal and started cutting. I used an angle grinder to cut out my patterns because the material was a little too thick for tin snips.

With the parts cut out, I laid the flat patterns back over the cutouts and marked the bend lines so I knew where to start and stop the bends. That is another perk of using Creo’s sheet metal functionality. It shows you the start and stop locations for bends with dashed lines. See the following picture for the bend lines.

Now that everything was cut out and marked I needed something to hold the metal flange walls in order to bend them on the base. Thankfully we have a bench vise in the workshop. The only problem was that the walls on the long side were longer than the jaws on the vise. To get around this I took a couple of 2x4s and placed them in the jaws of the vise and the sheet metal between the 2x4s. The 2x4s provided two benefits, support along the entire edge of the bend as well as a nice round edge for the sheet metal to follow. Thankfully I was able to create the bends with just my hands and body weight.

For the rear fairing and the front edge, the radii of the bends were so large that I could not use the same setup used to create the bends on the base. What I did was I found a steel pipe with roughly a two-inch diameter and clamped it in the vise. I then roughly placed the middle of the bend on the center of the pipe and pressed down creating a bend/crease in the sheet metal and repeated this several times. When I had the general shape bent out in the design process I took a rubber mallet and used that to smooth out the bend. One thing to note about the rear fairing and the front edge is that I left extra material on the ends in order to have something to hold on to while bending the parts.

Once all of the sheet metal parts were cut and formed it was time to start welding them together.  Welding seemed a little daunting since the only other time I welded, about 7 years ago, I set my pants on fire. Thankfully I had a coworker teach me a little about welding before I started. I also practiced quite a bit on some spare material before I started. This helped me get the welder settings correct for the material thickness. With the welder dialed in, I made tack welds to hold the parts in place while I made sure they were exactly where I wanted them. Once each piece was in its proper place I started to weld it all together. After the parts were welded together I ground down to smooth any excess weld and then went back and filled in any voids and re-ground as necessary. It was a learning experience. It was kind of like “lather, rinse, repeat” only “weld, grind, repeat.”

Below are pictures of the seat during different times of assembly as well as the finished product on the moped.

Lessons Learned:

Throughout this design process, I learned a lot.  For one thing, you can do a lot more with a can-do attitude than you think. Another thing I learned was that welding is not as daunting as I thought. As with anything in life, it takes a little practice and patience. Prototypes are amazing. They may cost some time and or money but they are worth it.  If I did not make a cardboard prototype in my design process I would have had a seat that was just a little too short and I would have had to remake the seat from scratch once it was finished. The sheet metal functionality in Creo Parametric is fantastic and really does work.  The bend lines on the flat patterns helped immensely to create accurate parts. One other thing I learned throughout the design process was that on my next project I need to take a lot more pictures along the way.

I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures of the finished product (minus paint and a little bit of leather and foam). Until next time…