When I read about the Esun new extruder cleaning filament, I pointed to my friend excitedly and said, “Hey, Jon! Look! This stuff will clean out my 3D printer!” To which he replied, “Oh.” See, you know that your obscure hobby has hit the big time when businesses start hocking all sorts of stuff that no one else in the world would care about except you.
In recent months, you may have noticed that a number of niche 3D printing accessories have been released to the market. Not too long ago, there was the Discov3ry paste extruder, which hit Kickstarter, with overwhelming success. Davide also wrote about GeckoTek 3D’s specialty build plate, meant to provide the perfect mix of first layer adhesion and unwarpability to satisfy any FFF user. That last sentence is clearly incomprehensible to those outside of the 3D printing community, but to those within, it’s an indication of an important trend: 3D printing is maturing.
No longer are 3DP accessories limited to those being hammered together by RepRappers in garages and basements. Instead, they are being developed by businesses to be sold to (semi-)mainstream 3D printer users. Though it is not the definitive source on 3D printing trends, 3D Hubs now has over 5000 3D printers listed on their distributed network, compared to the 789 printers listed about 33 weeks earlier. At this point, after writing for 3DPI for more than a year, I’m less excited by new FFF 3D printers on the market (and, I think, seeing less of them, overall). Instead, I’m getting excited by (and seeing more) refinements in the technology.
If the 3D printing industry were a Yoda bust made with an FFF machine, last year would have been printed with a layer thickness of .4mm and a perimeter speed of 65 mm/s. This year, on the other hand, the industry’s layer height is closer to .2mm, being printed at a speed of 80 mm/s. Our print is starting to have finer details so that we can really start to recognize that the figure we are, in fact, printing is Yoda. Those details are made up of the aforementioned 3DP accessories that really hone the ability of desktop 3DP users.
Coupled with such accessories, we’re also beginning to see a refinement in existing 3D printing technologies. Again, it might not seem like a big deal to those outside of the community, but recent news from 3D Systems and FormLabs are indications of the fine detail work being performed by existing 3DP players. The Form1 SLA printer started to see a huge amount of competition from new SLA and DLP 3D printers on the market, including the Titan1, which promised to be twice as fast as the Form1. FormLabs’ response? They made their printer twice as fast and increased layer height resolution with a new, more powerful laser. 3D Systems also made big news by announcing that they’d doubled the speed of some of their SLA machines, creating goods at an even faster speed than possible with injection moulding, overcoming the oft-mentioned barrier to widespread adoption of slow print times.
As 3DS enters the sphere of mainstream manufacturing and existing 3D printer brands enhance existing products, the industry is starting to flesh out. What this means is that the news from here on out may be somewhat quiet, given the relative loudness of 3DP hype from previous years, with occasional huge breakthroughs (3D printed houses, cars, and space objects). To those outside of the community, eyes will roll or be completely vacant, but for those of us within, we’ll scream, “Bring on the cleaning filaments, the specialty build plates, and paste extruders!” This is because we know that, next year, the layer thickness will be less than .1mm in height printed at perimeter speeds of more than 100 mm/s, without losing any quality.
Feature Image Source: Solidoodle
