There’s a jig sitting in a drawer at most aerospace and automotive shops. Making it meant calling a machinist, waiting weeks, and paying for a block of aluminum to be carved down into something used maybe 50 times before the design changed.
Additive manufacturing was supposed to fix that. And it has, at small scales. But scale up beyond a desktop printer, or the moment a structural component needs to actually bear load, the old world tends to reassert itself. The printers either can’t handle the material, can’t hold the tolerances, or require a specialist to babysit every job.
That gap between what industrial additive manufacturing promises and what it actually delivers on the shop floor is what large-format 3D printer manufacturer BigRep has spent the better part of a decade trying to close. The latest wave of announcements from the company suggests they’ve made real progress on multiple fronts at once.
Smart Automation Drives Better Print Performance
The most immediate story is the BigRep ONE.5X, an update to its predecessor BigRep ONE large-format 3D printer. What’s changed isn’t the footprint (it still offers roughly a cubic meter of build volume) but the degree to which the machine manages itself.
XYZ autocalibration, adaptive bed leveling, and a relay mode that switches to a second extruder when the first runs dry are the kinds of features that read as minor conveniences on a spec sheet but represent something more meaningful in practice. A machine you can queue up and walk away from.
Auto-sequential printing, which detects available bed space and starts the next job without operator input, is the same idea extended to overnight production runs. For shops that are trying to get more throughput without adding headcount, that matters.
“The ONE.5X represents everything we’ve learned from over a decade of industrial large-format 3D printing, as well as global customer feedback. All of that is distilled into a machine that delivers consistent results, regardless of an end-user’s experience level,” said Jeff Olson, President, BigRep America, Inc.
A pressure advance algorithm and vibration compensation are the less visible additions, but they’re doing real work. The ONE.5X prints at up to 250mm/s, and at those speeds material flow irregularities tend to show up as bulging corners or degraded surface quality.
Compensating for those dynamically, rather than forcing operators to dial back speed, is how the company says they’re getting up to 10% reductions in print time without giving up dimensional accuracy.
Continuous Fiber Reinforcement Hits Industrial Scale
But solving for consistency and throughput only gets you so far. A part that prints reliably is only as useful as what it can withstand in service, and for structural components that need to bear real load, unreinforced thermoplastics hit a ceiling most large-format printers can’t clear. That’s where BigRep’s partnership with Endless Industries begins.
Continuous fiber reinforcement in large-format 3D printing has existed as a concept for a while. Making it work at industrial scale, with repeatable results and materials costs that don’t require a defense contract to justify, is a different problem. BigRep’s integration of Endless Industries’ fiber system into the IPSO 105 platform is the result of two years of joint development, and the pitch is straightforward.
Parts with structural properties that approach what you’d get from automated fiber placement, at a fraction of the cost. The system runs a build chamber heated to 100°C for process stability, and the Endless Industries software, called Akio, handles fiber path optimization, which is where most of the structural value gets determined.
Crucially, the components remain thermoplastic, which means they’re recyclable, a distinction that matters more as aerospace and medical supply chains face increasing scrutiny over end-of-life material handling.
The commercial rollout is staged, with Europe first in summer 2026 and broader international availability through 2027 and 2028, which is probably the right call for a technology that will require application engineering support to land properly in new customers’ workflows.
Pellet Printing Maximizes Shop Floor Throughput
The third piece of the picture is a pellet extrusion partnership with Massive Dimension, a Vermont company with more than a decade in large-format AM. The MDX extruder they’ve developed together is 25% lighter and built with 40% fewer parts than its predecessor.
Pellet-based extrusion isn’t new, but pairing it with BigRep’s 3D printer platform and service network extends the approach to customers who need high throughput and lower material costs, without having to source and support a standalone system.
For applications where material performance is the limiting factor, BigRep’s ALTRA 280 is the answer. The high-temperature platform supports materials like PEKK and ULTEM that aerospace and industrial tooling applications demand. With a build chamber heated to 180°C and a 500 × 700 × 800mm build volume, it’s built for the process stability required to hold tolerances in polymers that have very little tolerance for thermal inconsistency.
Whether any one of these updates matters depends on what a given shop is actually trying to solve. But the direction is clear. Industrial AM that runs without supervision, handles high-performance materials, and now produces parts that can bear real structural load. For manufacturers who’ve been waiting for the technology to meet them where they are, the gap is getting smaller.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows a 3D printed part being removed from the BigRep ONE.5X. Photo via BigRep.
