Stratasys, Inc.

The mousetrap and the bicycle are often held up as icons of good design — effective, simple, tough to improve upon. The inventors behind them were so good that it’s easy to forget human minds created them. Some of our favorite modern gadgets have the same quality, seeming to have sprung fully formed from collective need rather than a series of prototypes. 

What famous design, old or new, do you admire to the point of envy? What makes you go, “Darn, I wish I’d thought of that!”

A considerable amount of tools and equipment are needed to support aircraft before and after flight. Custom ground-support equipment typically isn't cost-effective to produce with conventional manufacturing methods because of the low quantities. Direct digital manufacturing (or 3D printing) provides the ideal platform to produce many ground support-equipment components because of its ability to produce parts without tooling expense.

"Constant Improvement" is a Stratasys white paper that discusses...

At Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, students are hard at work becoming tomorrow’s aerospace engineers. The institution’s College of Engineering emphasizes precision in aircraft and spacecraft design, according to laboratory manager Chris Smith.

But once students had perfected a CAD design and were ready to test what they’d created, they had to hand carve models from mahogany or rely on offsite machinists to make models by hand. The school needed a cost-effective way for students to create...

I tend to think of engineers as a practical bunch, but I’m wondering: What might justify sacrificing function for form? Maybe a particular project calls for spectacular aesthetics, or maybe you feel form is a function in itself — or at least that it deserves equal consideration when engineering a product.

Have you ever felt it was worth sacrificing some function to achieve a beautiful form?

Aftermarket innovations promise to enhance consumers’ relationships with the products they love — through personalization, by enabling niche uses, and by solving problems that only become obvious once consumers start using a product en-masse.

GROWit, a California additive manufacturing company, recently illustrated 3D printing’s potential to expand aftermarket offerings. GROWit’s customer is a go-kart maker that needed a redesign for a front-end component susceptible to breaking. 

Besides just...

Aerospace manufacturers often produce small volumes to begin with and then customize products to customer need. Direct digital manufaturing using materials that meet FST (flame, smoke and toxicity) requirements lets manufacturers reduce cost by enabling production quantities as low as one. Requiring no tooling, additive manufacturing (a.k.a. 3D printing) enables each component to be customized in a production run without significantly affecting the manufacturing cost.

"Constant Improvement" is a...

Advanced Composite Structures (ACS) repairs components for planes and helicopters, and manufactures low-volume composite parts for the aerospace industry. A typical job might include repairing a helicopter blade or building an aircraft camera fairing. Tooling is often a big portion of a job's cost, including layup tools to create composite parts and fixtures for drilling. 

In the past, CNC machining weighed down ACS with heavy costs and lead times. The typical tool cost around $2,000 to make...

February is a time to show you care. Engineers and designers: now's your chance to make up for all those late nights you've spent tweaking CAD files or preparing for design reveiws.

A 3D printer is a bottomless well of personalized gifts for kids, moms, dads and significant others. A keychain imprinted with an inside joke? A double coaster for two favorite coffee mugs? A valentine with depth?

What will you 3D print for your sweetheart?

Additive manufacturing has long been used in the aerospace industry to build functional prototypes used to evaluate form, fit and function. But machine improvements and new materials have opened up the potential for producing manufacturing tooling used to align, assemble, clamp, hold test and calibrate components and sub-assemblies at all stages of the manufacturing process. A key advantage of creating these tools with FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) is that they can be produced in less...

Welcome to the first 3D Printing Question of the Week! We're launching this new feature to spark conversation among engineers, designers and Stratasys experts. Please take a moment to add your two cents. 

Last year, researchers at Exeter University began 3D printing with chocolate. A new system at MIT creates ice sculptures through additive manufacturing, with water the main consumable.

I bet every manufacturing engineer and designer has a fantasy 3D printing material — fun or practical,...

An article in MIT’s Technology Review, “ Why 3D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality,” speaks to the hype surrounding 3D printers today.

While there’s a lot of understandable excitement over 3D printers for consumer use, I have to agree with the author that the vision of the Star Trek-like home replicator, which produces professional-grade consumer products or parts will remain a futuristic dream for some time.

Before we have replicators in our homes, we’ll likely see a step where 3D...

Many assemblies are designed as assemblies because of limitations with traditional manufacturing processes. But with direct digital manufacturing you no longer have to worry about how to get a tool into position to machine a feature or how to get the part out of a mold. Direct digital manufacturing lets you build any geometry that you can define in your CAD system. No longer limited by the process, direct digital manufacturing allows complete assemblies, both static and dynamic, to be...

The RDASS 4 is a remotely piloted, 3D printed helicopter from Leptron. The little five-pound drone contains modular, nesting layers. Depending on purpose, these clever interchangeable layers stack inside the fuselage to provide tailored functionality. Applications include flying ahead of armored vehicles to see over the horizon.

Leptron had to develop eight layer variations, crash-test the prototypes, and create end-use parts on a competitive timeline. This would have been prohibitively expensive...

Last week Gardner Publishing, launched “Additive Manufacturing,” a quarterly supplement to Modern Machine Shop and its sister publication, MoldMaking Technology. A surprising move, since these publications are aimed at CNC and mold-making facility leaders.

By recalling hockey legend Wayne Gretsky’s secret to success, Senior Editor, Peter Zelinski explains why Gardner launched the publication. Gretsky said his secret was to skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been. It involves “seeing...

Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) and Stratasys Inc. have developed what may be the first heat exchanger made by additive manufacturing (or 3D printing). Additive manufacturing can economically produce complex geometries so it has the potential to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of heat exchangers in applications where plastic materials can be used.

In the UMD design, room air heated to 120^oC flows through the gaps between rectangular webbed tube plates and...

For many companies, the design process begins with the previous version of the product and proceeds with a series of step-by-step improvements. This approach may make sense when you are limited by conventional manufacturing methods such as injection molding and CNC machining. With direct digital manufacturing, on the other hand, the sky is the limit. So grab a pencil and a clean sheet of paper and let your imagination run free. Did you previously build a housing from four components so you could...

SAP, a Norwegian company that makes parts for marine environments (like oil-drilling facilities in the North Sea), bought a Fused Deposition Modeling System to save time and money in prototyping. To SAP's surprise, its prototypes were strong and attractive enough to become end-use products.

SAP's move to direct digital manufacturing (DDM) grew out of necessity. An extensive redesign of a driller-operator chair involved many intricate parts and was running up against a tight deadline. So SAP...

The Department of Defense STARBASE youth program recently placed a large order – roughly $1 million – with Stratasys for another batch of 3D printers. DOD STARBASE locations nationwide now have more than 100 Dimension and uPrint 3D printers being used as classroom technology. 3D printing or rapid prototyping with FDM technoloogy helps the program raise kids’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and careers.

The week-long special program engages kids in...

"If at first you DO succeed, try try again" is an important rule to keep in mind when designing a part for direct digital manufacturing. A key advantage of direct digital manufacturing is that it allows you to easily and inexpensively build prototypes using the same manufacturing technology that will be used to produce the finished parts. So you can easily build and test a range of alternatives. Try something wild – who knows, maybe it will work. If it doesn't, you don’t lose a thing. If it does...

BusinessWeek.com profiled 3D printing this week on its CEO Tech Guide section, and in it, a group of articles and multimedia explores the 3D printing process (also known as additive manufacturing) from several viewpoints. It’s compelling information that discusses the technology's uses, ranging from NASA creating spare parts in space to scientists creating human organs in the lab to children creating toys. There are no limits to how people will create

While Stratasys continues to explore all our...