Oh it’s a tough old business this trade show stuff. Woke up early this morning, grabbed myself a Starbucks and strolled along the California sun kissed streets on my way to the Long Beach Convention Centre for the first day of RAPID 2015.
Of course there was the small matter of our North America mag launch to attend to before that. If you haven’t already seen the news all over our Twitter today, TCT + Personalize has officially announced the launch of a new North American Edition magazine – so if you’re in the U.S., you can sign up for your free subscription to the new mag which is set to drop at the end of this year.
As with all trade shows, we weren’t the only folks with big news to shout about and we’ve been very busy running around on our prematurely tired trade show feet to bring you all the latest announcements and highlights from day one.
First up we saw the debut of Cosine Additive’s industrial grade, ultra large format AM1 3D printer. Fresh out of Houston, Texas, the machine is taller than me and completely open source in a bid to bring together intel from all corners of the industry from materials to architecture to address the limitations of current technology.
Cosine's industrial grade AM machine.
Remember an intriguing, large empty wooden box on the showfloor at last year’s Euromold? Well today that mystery was no more when Additive Industries announced details of their MetalFab1, industrial grade additive manufacturing solution expected to launch in Q4. Dan spoke to CEO Daan A.J. Kersten to find out more.
Following the success of their 25th Anniversary conference last month in Brussels, Materialise continued the celebrations last night (Hollywood style complete with Elvis, Marilyn and Danny Zuko – couldn’t resist a try of the Sandra Dee cardie – no pictures to follow) and some new announcements. I caught up with CEO Fried Vancrean and MD Bryan Crutchfield to talk about the company’s recently introduced Additive Manufacturing ENGINE, capable of upgrading current AM technology and enhancing the entire process, along with the launch of 3-matic STL 10.0 and their recent partnership with Trimble.
3D Systems’ Tom Charron was keen to talk injection moulding and showcase some metal 3D printed parts with Layerwise and I caught up with Harris Kenny at Aleph Objects to talk about their new partnership with taulman3D.
Airwolf 3D showed off their huge range of material capabilities and gave us a teaser of their exciting machine news expected to be revealed next month. There are no names to speak of just yet but Co-founder Erick Wolf tells us that it promises to completely change the industry. Watch this space.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
Mcor IRIS HD.
I also got a close look at the crisp new prints coming off Mcor’s just announced IRIS HD paper based colour 3D printing. We've gone a bit colour crazy at TCT Towers recently and the 360° high-definition colour shows they’ve really stepped up their game.
Finally Jason Lopes’ giant 3D printed monster has been stealing the attention away from metals and plastics all day as it loomed over the corner of the showfloor. Bodock & Ja’naar took an unbelievable 34 hours to create on six different machines and takes four people to operate. I was just missing three other volunteers.
This took just 34 hours to create.
And that’s it for day one! I’m off to make the most of the L.A. sun before trade show vitamin D deficiency kicks in.
Keep up with all the action tomorrow over on the live blog for the latest news and pictures straight from the show floor or come visit us in booth #947.
