In 2014, Stratasys completed the acquisition of Solid Concepts, integrating it into its 3D printing services portfolio, and retaining founder Joe Allison for more than three years.
Allison then decided to step away from the service bureau he had ran for more than 20 years, linking up with industry peers to set up an investor group called 3D Ventures. Though the group made several investments in start-ups, one stood out from the rest, and the Evolve Additive business spun out of Stratasys in 2018 would soon lure Joe Allison out of semi-retirement and into the CEO role. Here, he is tasked with steering the ship as Evolve brings to market its novel STEP 3D printing process.
Meanwhile, Mike Littrell has been running a successful Chicago-based bureau for 25 years. Starting out with FDM, BuildParts has since broadened its offering to include PolyJet, SLA, SLS, DLP and, perhaps soon, a technology called WAV - or Wave Applied Voxel. This technology, a photopolymerisation method that is said to solve the issue of 'trap volume', is being developed through Littrell's Paxis business.
Thus, Allison and Littrell have more than a few things in common. They have always enjoyed one another's company at trade shows and conferences, but never have they had the time to sit down and share their experiences in detail. Nor have either of them spoken so openly about their respective STEP and WAV technologies.
Below, we have the full transcript of the pair's exchange.
ML: Hey, Joe. Good to see you again.
JA: Yes, good to finally talk to you where we can really sit and chat about things. It’s like all the times that we’ve got to talk before, we’re standing in front of a booth at a trade show or something like that. It’s good to have some quiet time where we can learn more about our careers and what we did together.
ML: It’s funny, I think the first time I met you was at one of the RAPID event when Solid Concepts had a booth there. I just remember seeing this huge moquette of an action figure that I think you guys created. And I just thought ‘wow’, these guys are really killing it with this model.
JA: I have to tell you some story behind that. So, what that was about was we had come up with this new build style for stereolithography and we called it ID Light. And it was for doing big mock up models like that, which we used to CNC machine out of a modelling board. So, it was just kind of an offshoot of QuickCast. QuickCast was just too brittle, so we just beefed it up and made it stronger. But it was so light that we had a small girl in marketing who could hold that up over her head by herself. I mean, it weighed like 20 pounds. We named him Zoomer. He went to many trade shows, and you know how when you ship stuff to trade shows they don't last but five, ten trade shows and they're all busted up. This guy lasted, he lasted forever. So, they were very strong, very light. And he got the name Zoomer. I don't know, it was back when Iron Man was out. One of our customers was Gentle Giant Studios, a company that specialises in digital modelling. And so anyways, it was nice to give them some business. And they put together a comic book series that we would send out to our customers and stuff with it, as well. But anyways, that was a full size guy, kind of tailored after Iron Man.
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ML: Yeah, when I first saw that we had just started adding finishing as a service in our company. And we were doing general pattern finishing with some colour matching. Seeing that was inspiring for the way that we did trade models going forward. And going back to what you said about models lasting a certain period of time at trade shows, we had this P38 lightning that we built with about a four foot wingspan. And I think I dragged that to about seven or ten different shows and the only show it ever got hurt in, destroyed in, was a Chicago show, our neck of the woods.
JA: [Laughs] In your back yard.
ML: Yeah, exactly. So out of curiosity, you had started with 3D systems, didn't you?
JA: Yeah. So a little of my backstory was I got into CAD/CAM at a company called Unisys. And they had bought a CAD/ CAM company called Graphtec. So, I moved from one of their subsidiaries called Memorex and went to work there because I fell in love with CAD/CAM. That was back in the days when, I don't know if you remember, the big CAD/CAM show was AutoFact. And I think it was run by SME. It doesn't matter, it's gone now.
So, I was at one of those shows, and all the startups and stuff were downstairs, I think it was in Cobo Hall, and big huge grandiose booths upstairs. And somebody said, 'you got to go downstairs and see this thing, it's the equivalent of a 3D printer.' That was 3D systems down there in a little 10 by 10 [foot] booth, and they had an SLA 1 there. And I went down and I saw that. That changed my life. I called my headhunter as soon as I got back and said, 'get me a job with that company.' He said, 'oh, they have three openings,' and in two weeks, he had me working at 3D Systems. And anyways, there was so many ways to spin out and start a company from there that I spun out and started Solid Concepts with a couple partners back then, Ray Bradford, a brilliant programmer, and Skyler Mitchell, just a natural born salesman and me the manufacturing guy. And about 25 years after that, I sold it to Stratasys and worked for them a few years. And anyways, here's now where I am. So, that's kind of the short story of my backstory.
How did you get into this 3D printing stuff? Where's the first time you saw this. And I see that dinosaur [AMUG DINO Award] in the background. Congratulations.
ML: Thank you. Thank you. I was in the graphic design industry. In fact, I went to art school. And when I came out, I had worked at CompUSA as a part time job while I was going to college. And I became the resident Macintosh expert, I got really into the whole computer consulting side of business. Then at the same time, I was also into graphic design when it first translated over to digital. And when I came out of college, I had two possible offers. One was doing a full time computer consulting gig and the other was freelance graphic design.
I really enjoyed the art side of it and I liked being my own boss. So, I wanted to do the graphic design side. And I was working out in my house for about five years. And my father and I are both huge gadget geeks, any possible gadget that came out we would be the first to have it. Well, he had sold his company to Thomas and Betts back in '97. And he owed them two years worth of consulting. And when he was down at a meeting, one of the guys in the meeting said 'hey, you gotta see this 3D printed part we got, we just got back to do some design verification.' And my dad's like, 'can I have that?' He's like, 'yeah, sure.' So he came back to Chicago and handed me this model. And he said, 'Mike, this is what you should get into.' And, at the time, I was looking to get into possibly opening a 2D service bureau, which would have been digital scanning and pre proof prints in full colour. And I saw this and I immediately thought, 'wow, this is really incredible.' And as I was doing research, I remember thinking to myself, 'wow, this industry has been around for 13 years, I'm kind of coming to it late.' [Laughs]
So, I went and bought a refurbished FDM 1650. And I believe the sticker price on that thing new was like 120 grand, and when I picked it up, it was like 75 which was unheard of, to me, at the time for a piece of equipment that was essentially a printer. But I did, I bought that FDM printer and brought it in and I think at the time Stratasys might have had 50 employees. So it was a very, very small company to work with. And when comparing it to the other technologies like SLA and SLS, SLS, I really didn't know anything about and SLA, I did know about but the complexity of being a one man shop, right, setting up a build room and having a small machine in there and trying to do sales and marketing and the accounting and all this stuff that kind of comes with owning the business. I realised that the FDM process at the time was perfect. The post processing was breaking away support structures and the machine was fairly slow but at the same time, I was able to actually kind of dive into it from there.
JA: Yeah, I remember those days, one man shop, same thing. At least I had a sales guy and he was really good. The business was just pouring in but I had to do everything else. I had to quote the parts, build the parts, sand the parts, package the parts, type up a packing slip, type up the invoice. Those were the days. It was great hiring those first couple of employees to help out.
So, you cut your teeth with FDM?
ML: I did. Actually, it's funny, because most of the companies that I know, and it sounds like you guys did it the same way we did it too, which was we were just parts for hire. It was a commodity at the time. To us, we're competing service bureaus. I think you've been in business since what '92?
JA: Uh, '91.
ML: '91. So when I started in '98, there were a number of service bureaus in the Chicagoland area. And SLA was considered in America the number one 3D printing process, where FDM was still fairly unknown at the time. But it really lent itself to me being able to do it all at one time. And when we brought our first employee in, he essentially just mirrored me, Dan Williams. And it was probably another year or two, when we had 15 machines, that we finally got an office manager. So, my wife was doing the books out of the house, and I just brought these machines in and we started really expanding, we got our big boost because of Stratasys actually. At the time, they were advertising their service bureaus on their website. And with my website design background, we had created a website, I created the server for it, we actually had a class C full IP licence in our building, I taught myself NT4.0, so I could host it. And so just as you said, business was rolling in, but we never had a salesman. We've never had a physical salesman in our office, we've had a couple of outside reps, but business rolled in pretty quickly. And I think within six months, we added our second FDM machine, which was called an FDM 8000, which was 18" by 18" by 24". But what we found with Stratasys, and with 3D Systems back then or the SLA processes, the FDM was considerably slower. So, when I had 15 machines that was like the equivalent of three SLA machines back at the time.
JA: Yeah. And that's what it took, if you were going to be in business. I remember, we got into FDM, it was probably about our third 3D printing technology. I cut my teeth with SLA, because I came out of 3D Systems, definitely had a competitive advantage having been a process development engineer with the technology, in being able to run it. We got into SLS next. And then we got into FDM. And we looked at FDM, and how slow it was, and figured we can't get into that business unless we start with four machines, because that's equivalent to one. And we didn't want to buy four machines. Finally, Stratasys came up with some very creative financing scheme, where we'll put four machines there and you just pay per hour when they're running. And I said 'okay,' and that was it, it took off because it's definitely has a niche in the marketplace with the amorphous thermoplastics.
And I'm just wondering, though, I know what markets we addressed early on with stereolithography and then with SLS. In the early market development of FDM, what applications did you find that fit best and in what marketplaces?
ML: Well, when I got into the industry in '98, the three primary businesses in the industry were medical, automotive and aerospace. And our first company that we worked with, oddly enough, was Thomas and Betts and they never paid their bill [laughs]. They still owe me 700 dollars. But medical became our first primary business model case. It was a company out in Pennsylvania that started ordering parts from us, and that actually drove us to get into the [FDM] 8000 because they needed larger parts. They were doing air compressors for the medical device industry. And so having these large housings were imperative and that's where FDM shined. Stratasys with their marketing at the time claim that their parts where 75% the strength of an injection moulded part, which we had to re educate a lot of our clients because it was based on the Z strength, that became problematic.
Where FDM really shined, I always felt was in large flat parts, because SLS was very difficult to get large flat parts, SLA materials weren't as durable back then and FDM produced very good repeatability as well. So, we had a lot of customers utilising it for various durability tests. And I think that, at the time Stratasys only had one material. Well, they actually had two, they had ICW, which was a wax material, but that was short lived and then ABS, they had multiple colours, but ABS was really it for them. So, with the few number of 3D printing hardware out there, the vertical markets were pretty limited. Ironically, when I first got my start, and I think it was actually a huge boost to us, was when SolidWorks came out at 3800 bucks. Before that [an alternative CAD package] was like 28 grand, you needed a Unix station, which is 40 grand and so really, 3D printing was only relegated to the companies that could afford it. So, when SolidWorks came out, within a year, we were seeing RFQs from companies that were in the consumer electronics industry that would have never thought they could have afforded a 3D print.
So, it started becoming kind of a commodity at that time and people started thinking outside the box immediately, like 'how can I use this for a production part?' So, we were doing one-off production parts for companies. In fact, one of them was building large bailers and they were custom one-off machines that are like three, four million dollar machines, and they couldn't afford to do the tooling, or justify the tooling, for doing a control panel on their machines. So, what we would do is we'd end up building these large control panels and sanding and putting together and at the time, we're outsourcing the finishing.
But you said that that was your third process. Our second process was PolyJet. And our third process was SLS.
JA: Yeah, because at that point, you were tied into Stratasys. So they sold you that PolyJet next. It's funny, even when I departed, semi retired, about six years ago, on FDM, the sweet spot was still, it was large parts, large flat parts for the FDM. And that was different for us.
With SLS or SLA, we would normally have one big machine surrounded by four little machines, that was kind of the ratio, standard ratio, for the size parts you were gonna get. So the first FDM machines we got, we asked for four small ones and a big one. Then what we found was that what we needed was all big ones. And from then on, we got more and more big machines, instead of the small ones. And you had mentioned medical and launching into that industry. That was also always one of our strong industries. I mean industries that like low volume rooms would be medical, and we found in aerospace/defence stuff as well. But with stereolithography, the FDM technology is weak in the Z axis, right. But SLA technology is weak in all axes.
ML: [Laughs].
JA: So it forced us to get into silicone moulding and cast urethanes. And we became very good at it. And we were doing that just for prototypes, we'd make 10 to 15 parts for someone, and that mould was spent. But the quality got so good, customers started asking, can we use this for our production parts, and they'd use it for quite a while until they could get some tooling made. And if the volumes were low enough, we'd make parts for them forever for it, and those were pretty low volumes.
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ML: Yeah, you guys were really big into QuickCast weren’t you? Or investment casting masters, I’m sorry.
JA: Yeah. Well, it's alright, we can use the trade name. Yeah, it was QuickCast. And we had come up with a better build style than what was out there. We were the first ones to come up with, you know the centrifuging? We had that a secret for three years of centrifuging to get all the resin out of the parts. No one could figure out why can Solid Concepts get all the resin out of the parts. And to keep it a secret, we literally built a room around the centrifuges, so no one would see it. We put over the door it said 'Sol Vac' to try and throw people off. Like, maybe it uses solvent vacuums and it kind of worked, we kept that a secret for three years. And then once everybody figured that stuff out, we had a strong grip on that marketplace. And so, yeah, I think we were the biggest player in that QuickCast market.
ML: Yeah, we never really delved into the QuickCast side of things. And we probably should have, because I know it's a fairly lucrative market. But at the same time, it can be very difficult, can't it, as far as evacuating all the materials out of it and sealing the part and making sure it's fully sealed?
JA: Yeah, we got it down, so that was that was very reliable. The whole process was very reliable. But it's not as big an industry as a lot of people would think. I think we had 30% of the industry and it was maybe 10 million a year or something.
ML: Wow.
JA: Yeah, the total industry for QuickCast parts, maybe 30 million and our total, I don't know. Maybe it got bigger than that. Maybe it's 40 or 50. But I don't think it's 100 million.
ML: Now that you mention it, I'm curious what your thought on this is. For years, we've been told what the market cap of our industry is and volume of sales and machine estimates and what they think that market is going to be. Do you think that they've been off for a long time? Because I've never felt like the market was, well, it's certainly not 21 billion [USD] at the time that they were calling it out a few years ago. And I just wondered your thoughts on that?
JA: Well, in the early days, it was a little easier to hold your thumb up and look at it and go, 'yeah, I think those estimates are high.' And the industry is so big, and there's so many different technologies out there, hundreds, there's just no way to hold your thumb up anymore and tell, like, I just don't know.
But in any case, I had somebody asking me yesterday about what you do in a down market. And I've been through quite a few in my career of 35 years. And it's like, I always look for something that will do well in a down market. And that's really something, you've got something that nobody else has, so when it's a down market, it's even more important for them to use your product to reduce their costs to survive the down market. And, you have to have that competitive advantage that people are still going to need to use your product.
ML: Yeah, when we entered the market, it was actually a down market. In '98 is I believe it was a year before, do you remember Plyonetics and Prototype Express? When they merged? They were a pretty big game back then. And they had went bankrupt the year after I started which was actually a godsend for us because they were a Chicagoland based bureau. In fact, I think other than you guys, because you were out in California, the three largest service bureaus in the US, I think, were in the Chicagoland area, not excluding Baxter Healthcare, which was run by Mike McAvoy at the time.
JA: I kind of thought we were number three at that time. When those guys merged together, it was like a gut punch.
ML: Oh, did it, was it like 'oh, man, this is going to be bad.'
JA: Yeah, when they merged together. And then when they closed the doors, we all benefited from that.
ML: Oh, yeah. What it did in our area was essentially, from what I had heard, they pretty much padlocked the building, and there were jobs physically running in the place when it shut down. And it almost immediately started like four service bureaus in Illinois because you had these employees and customers reaching out to them saying, 'hey, we've got to get this job done. Can you do this for me?' So, we ended up getting quite a bit of work as a result of that, but our market has always been nationwide. And actually, in the early days, it was worldwide. And a lot of that was because of Stratasys co-marketing with us at the time. And that was a real big push for us.
But the market, it was very small. I mean, there may have been a couple hundred service bureaus in the world at the time, and not as many obviously in some of the outlying countries, but Europe and the US were pretty much it.
JA: Yeah, it was a much smaller market. We were almost swimming in a blue ocean back then. And so it was a little recession resistant. So, you're saying you got in, right at the beginning of a recession?
ML: So yeah, thank you. We did, we got into it in the beginning of the recession. And I think that, at the time, what really drove a lot of our business were companies redesigning products to be less expensive to produce, so where some of the downtimes in these markets, where the market shifts and the economy changes, obviously 9/11 was a big impact, the mortgage crisis was a big impact, what we had with a pandemic was a big impact. What we found propelled our growth were not only the medical and aerospace markets, but these companies were retooling their products, so that they could be less expensive to produce. And at the time, I would say, when I first started, maybe 5% of the companies were utilising three dimensional CAD, can even utilise 3D printing. So even the guys that were doing 3D CAD didn't necessarily mean it was going to land into a 3D print.
But that expanded greatly in the early 2000s, which is why we ended up bringing PolyJet because FDM can be clunky, the surface finish isn't as nice as SLA. So when PolyJet came out, oh my gosh, that was a huge boost for us. So, that was our first big push was to bring in the MJM process from 3D systems, but also to resell that product, but then we also brought in the PolyJet process. Those two combined with some urethane casting was our first big growth spurt as a company. And when the the mortgage crisis occurred, nobody was really expanding their equipment offerings. And, at the same time, we decided let's tackle new markets. And just as you said, when times get rough, the best thing you could do is start to become innovative and start to think outside the box, how are we going to bring in more customer base, let's diversify our portfolio of what we offer.
It was the mortgage crisis where we actually quadrupled ou facility, brought an SLS and then brought in SLA. And when we brought in SLA, it was funny because we'd already been running PolyJet for a number of years, and we were running the single material stuff. My employees, were asking for a Connex, which is the two material, where you can digitally blend the elastomer with the rigid material. And I took a poll in the office, I said, 'hey, guys, what do you want? SLA or Connex?' And everyone raised their hand and they said Connex. And I said, 'Okay, we're buying SLA.'
JA: [Laughs].
ML: [Laughs] And the reason why we did that is we were outsourcing enough of it, that I could look at the numbers and I saw that we're paying a premium for premium quality parts so that our customers were getting the best parts they could get. And customers were buying from us. So, if we brought it in, and we were able to get rid of that upcharge that we were attaching to it, our quality was fantastic. And our pricing was right in line with everyone else. So, it was funny because when we brought it in a couple of my guys up front were thinking, 'I'm not really sure that's the right path for us.' I think we had three machines on order by the end of that year. So it really did take off for us. It's a great process, but having these multiple tools in the toolbox is just, we're almost growing because of our customers demands, not really because of what we think the market is doing.
JA: Yeah.
ML: Have you found that to be the case for you guys, or when you were doing it?
JA: Yeah, sorry. I was thinking ahead a little bit on what you said earlier, on the recessions.
ML: Yeah, go ahead.
JA: Let me see if this fits what we were just asking, but what you said was exactly what we learned. I've been through three recessions and it's a tighten your belt, innovate, and we found that there's always a slingshot on the backside.
'Mike, I think you might have just killed SLA.'
JA: I was just looking at the clock and I was thinking we should maybe transition a little bit from the past to what's going on now.
ML: Yeah, absolutely.
JA: Yeah, one thing we hadn't even asked about is what's going on at Cideas now and what's going on with Paxis? I've never really, I've walked by it at the trade shows but it seemed like it's behind a black curtain, I'm not really sure exactly what it is. This is a good opportunity for you to tell me about that as well.
ML: Sure, sure. So kind of wrapping up on that final recession bit. When the mortgage crisis occurred, we moved into a new building and started adding equipment, the one thing I realised we were lacking was software, we didn't have an online quote engine, and all of our competitors did. So, through a bizarre interaction, I was introduced to a guy named Fred Knecht, and it was through Mike McAvoy, actually, that I was introduced to him. And Fred came over and said, 'hey, I'm a computer programmer, I do it part time on the side, I said, 'look, I want to develop this online quote engine, but I want to do it unlike any other quote engine that anyone else has out there.' And part of that was understanding the orientation and how that affects the price as well as the waste stream of the support materials when the parts are oriented in different directions. I wanted the quote jobs because most quote engines that were developed at the time looked at the X, Y, Z extents of a model, and then they arbitrarily threw some support number in there, and then they just gave discounts on quantity. We wanted to develop a quote engine that was a lot more comprehensive, that could understand these waste streams.
So, when Fred was developing the software, he was going back and working with our operators and looking at each individual machine and how they worked and how they functioned and what their speeds were and so forth. And as a result of it, he started hearing my guys in the back complain about trap volume in liquid photopolymer technologies. And the best analogy, I'm sure you already understand this, but for the audience would be, that if you were to take a ping pong ball and build it in SLA, you'd have to sink it into the VAT, filling the ball up with resin. If you build it in jetted photopolymer, you have to fill and encapsulate the entire part with a support structure. And if you're building in DLP, you're actually pulling the part out of the tray and it creates a suction, which could cavitate the part or collect the material into the part. So he had kind of taken it upon himself to more or less solve trap volume. So, one afternoon, while we were beta testing, TrueQuote, our quoting engine, internally, he had pinged me and said, 'Hey, come into my office, I really want to share something with you.' And I walked into his office and he goes, 'Mike, I think I might have invented a new 3D printing process.' And I'm like, 'okay, well, give me the elevator spiel on this, what do you got?' And so he demonstrated with me, he more or less showed me, how we could take and build a trap volume part without it collecting resin inside of it. And as he's describing this technology to me, I thought, 'wow, I've never seen anything like this, but I'm surprised,' because it's one of those 'aha' moments where you look at the simplicity of it and it's there.
So, what he did when he developed this, the first thing I said to him was, 'okay, stop working on TrueQuote, let's get it launched on our website, we'll dial it in, but your primary goal right now is to develop this technology. So, here's my credit card, this is your full time job, we'll peel the company off, we'll call it Paxis. And we're going to come up with whatever the technology's name is.' So, we filed our provisional patents, giving us a year to prove out the concept. And, because he was very concerned about spending the money that could be invested into the patents, he wanted to make sure that the proof of concept ran. So, literally, I think two weeks before we filed our non provisionals, we were able to run our first part, our first layer of the first part of this technology.
And we've kept it really in the dark, Joe, honestly, because we're small, we're bootstrapped, we didn't know if our patents were going to get granted, which they fortunately did, we actually just got granted our sixth worldwide patent with five pending right now. And I've kept it in the dark. And I think it's this year, Elizabeth [Goode] and I have been talking about sharing videos of how the technology works, I'd love to have you out here under an NDA and show you what we're working on. But one of the aspects of the technology that Fred developed that makes it so unique, is that it's very scalable. In fact, our very first design was essentially a 24 inch by 24 inch with a 10 inch Z. And Fred decided, 'hey, wouldn't it be cool if we can make a surfboard?' He's like, what's the biggest machine in the world? And I said, in this particular application if we're going to use liquid photopolymers for now, what's the machine that Materialise has? The mammoth! So, the Mammoth in Belgium was the benchmark to him expanding the machine so we can build a surfboard in one piece, the Mammoth has, I think, about half a million dollars worth of resin loaded in it, and the sides are bowing on it. And, so he said, 'well, I'll expand the machine.' So, we were able to, over the weekend, make the machine 83 inches long and build the surfboard utilising nothing more than $200 worth of resin loaded into the machine. At any given time, obviously, by the time we were done, it was more than 200 dollars worth of resin.
JA: I'd come by to see that and sign an NDA of course.
ML: [Laughs] Of course.
JA: I'll take you up on that.
ML: Yeah, that sounds great. I'd love to have you because I've never really had a chance to sit down and talk with you. And I know that your roots came from the SLA market, I think you'd really geek out on what Fred has developed here. I mean, we're doing it obviously as a team, but he's really the genius behind this. Honestly, I'm afraid that if he were to work at a large corporation, and he brought this idea up to his boss and middle management, I think it would have just fell on deaf ears. It's really very unique. And I think my first person that I had out to see it was Elizabeth Goode, who's now our Marketing and VP of the company. So, she came out under an NDA and saw the process and she stoically walked around the machine and saw it building, she's just like, 'Mike, I think you might have just killed SLA.'
JA: Well, I do understand the significance of that, because the technologies that have solved the trap volume problem, they have to deal with cavitation. People who maybe they don't understand what the cavitation word really means, they act like a suction cup. You're building them over a lens or flat surface and as you try and move them as it cures, and you try and move them away from that lens, there's the cavitation or a suction cup effect of trying to suck the resin in between the lens and the material. So I do understand the significance of that, definitely would like to have a peek behind that curtain.
ML: Yeah, I would definitely love to have you out here. In fact, I believe that we're going to be running dual materials in the machine by the end of this year, we want to start integrating it into the BuildParts division of Cideas, and really start to maybe be the first service bureau in the world to be able to offer parts of very large size in multi materials that can't be done in any other technology. And one of the big problems when you look at DLP, because DLP has really driven a lot of material development over the last couple of years. In fact, that and patent expirations have really driven that material development, and we're seeing some really exciting materials come out as a result of that. Having multiple materials in a system that can do a large flat part and a large thick part, DLP really has a difficult time building, let's say, a brick. Anyone can build like an Eiffel Tower. In fact, that's how most people demonstrate the speed of DLP. But if you were to take and build a physical brick, in a DLP machine, it would be extraordinarily slow but there would be this heat buildup inside of the part. And it would create cracking and bubbles, and there's a lot of nuances to that technology.
So, what I'm looking forward to is the fact that we've come out at a time when resin development is starting to really take off. Because I would have never imagined ten years ago that liquid photopolymers could be utilised as end use parts. It really wasn't until about five years ago, when Carbon introduced their two part resins that we realised, 'wow, there are some material properties that are usable in production.'
So, you've you've been kind enough to mention Paxis, I would really like to hear about what you're doing over at Evolve because going from Stratasys, you're obviously still, Evolve is like, partly funded by Stratasys aren't they? Or were they?
Parts printed with WAV technology.
JA: Yeah, thanks for asking. Let me tell you about that. Well, first. Let me maybe take on the the last bit of my story that after I left Stratasys. After I sold to them, I had a three-year employment contract. And I serve that out, and then a few extra months to wrap things up. Then I took a year off. And then I had more time to chat with old buddies and things like that. The next thing, I got involved in investing together with some people and me and some of the other old cronies from the industry, we started an investment business called 3D Ventures. So, we were investing. And we've invested in about 15 different companies together over the last few years. But the most exciting one we saw was the STEP technology.
And yes, it is a spin off from Stratasys. It was invented and developed in an R&D incubator at Stratasys. And at some point, they decided that they had so many of these kinds of things going on that they could be developed faster and more efficiently if they turned them into subsidiaries and let other people invest in them. And so, this one was spun off in that way. Stratasys still has a significant stake in the company, and is on the Board of Directors. And that's one of the ways I found out about it is my past, I still have lots of good friends in Stratasys and from Stratasys.
So, anyways, to get to the technology, what it is, well, first STEP stands for Selective Thermoplastic Electro Photographic process. And that, let me simplify that, if you've got a 2D laser printer sitting on your desk somewhere in that room, you take the covers off it, it's basically a laser printer inside. You take that and instead of paper sheets going by as it prints, you have a platen that goes back and forth and simulates the speed of a piece of paper going through it. And it's putting each one of those layers on top of each other. The resolution is amazing, because you're talking about particle sizes smaller than 25 microns and layer thicknesses of smaller than 13 microns. And the real trick to it wasn't maybe getting the platen to go the same speed as the paper would be going through and going back and forth and stuff, the real trick is taking thermoplastics and micronising them to turn them into toner, essentially. And the first one they did, which I think was a great choice because it's just such a huge market for it and nothing else can really do it, is ABS. Until now, ABS, they're FDM parts, they're weak in the Z axis, but bigger than that, because they're put out with a hot glue gun on a nozzle on a gantry system, they're very slow, like we talked about. And the only way you make them faster is a bigger glue gun, making bigger layers with bigger stair steps. And so the surface finish on this if you can picture 25 micron range is amazing. The feature detail is amazing. And it doesn't build up the stresses even that you build up in injection moulding because of the way the layers and the stress anneal, has time to anneal and stress relief as you're putting the other layers down on top, so it doesn't have a lot of built up stress.
So, it's got accuracy, feature definition, surface finish. It's got all that going for it but even more than that, so we didn't take a 2D printer - and I say we, this is the guys before me that did this - off someone's desk, it's an industrial colour printer from Kodak, with five print engines in it. So, right now, what we're selling, it's just using two print engines, one for support and one for ABS part material. Now, we've already done more than two print engines at a time but those aren't released yet. But with five engines, I mean, you could have three for each colour, and one for Black and a support material. Or to make it go faster you could put two support materials and two part materials and make it go fast. There's all sorts of things you can do with all five engines going, but it's an industrial print engine behind this thing.
ML: I saw some parts at Formnext in 2019 off your process. They were amazing. I mean, they truly look like injection moulded parts. They were placards, I believe, for vehicles. And I've taken a look at the patents when I think somebody had done an article announcing, it was you guys announcing your existence more or less a few years ago, and they posted a link to the patents and I flipped through it. Does it move the layer from one location to another location and then assemble the layers separately? Is that how you're going to be able to do colour? Or is it in a mixing, is it going across..?
JA: Yeah, just like your colour printer, it's intermixing, putting them all down together at the same time, so one of the distant capabilities of this is going to be maybe doing full colour or different materials instead of colour, mixed elastomeric with rigid thermoplastics. And I want to say the distant future because that's not really a priority. My experience has been in the industry, when you provide something that nobody has ever done before, it takes so long for people to start adopting it and figure out even how to use it, that we're not interested in launching the company with those capabilities. But it's there. And we'll introduce them at the right time. And let people start playing with those capabilities and see where they go. But you could print a part with an overmolded part, some of that would be elastomeric, some would be rigid. So, you can do two different materials, you can do different colours. And put them wherever you want.
ML: Now, are there any size limitations to the technology?
JA: Yeah, right now. One platen size is 300 millimetres by 600 millimetres. And in the Z, we only reliably want to go a couple inches. But, very quickly, once you get to four inches and then to six inches, and from there, 300 millimetre by 600 millimetres, pretty big XY, so it's just slowly expanding the Z.
ML: What's your support matrix or the support material?
JA: It's similar to FDM, it's a soluble material. So, when it comes to sustainability, we're working, I'm sure everybody who has to use soluble materials is working, toward water soluble materials. We already have filtration systems that will take all the solids out and leave you with the caustic materials so that you can use that again, right? But being able to use tap water to dissolve stuff, that's the Holy Grail. And then you have a material after you've dissolved it out that's not contaminated. And you can then start trying to work to reprocess that and turn it back into more support material. Now, you've got a process that's fully sustainable.
ML: Yeah, I recently went to IMTS and saw the first time in my career where there was a reusable support material, other than a TJ, was with a company called Inkbit. And I think they're like an MIT offspring that created, very similar to MJM or Multijet Modelling, which is a tray that slides underneath some jetted heads. They utilise wax as a support. And what I found interesting about that was that they're reusing that support, they're able to melt it down and reuse it, which is a really novel idea for sustainability as far as I'm concerned.
But when I looked at the parts that came off of what you guys do, I think that you have the same advantage to being similar to that as well as SLS as well as some of these other technologies where you can stack the parts, right? So, you can do thousands of small connectors and placards and pieces of high detail in this build area of yours, right?
First look at the Evolve STEP machine.
JA: Yeah, we could. Right now, if they're small pieces stacking, it's so fast to swap a machine over, we're not really headed that direction right now. But when you mentioned Inkbit, I am familiar with the technology, and I do like that technology. I view that as it's like the thermoset version of the STEP technology. They can deposit different material properties or colours, if they wanted, either one, right down at the voxel level as well. But their space is going to be two-part thermosets. And ours is going to be an amorphous thermoplastics. And they don't have to be amorphous. We've done crystal and semi crystalline.
ML: Really?
JA: Yeah, it does Nylon very well. So it’s more thermoplastics.
ML: Have you tried polypropylene by any chance?
JA: No, but that should be right in its sweet spot. Nylon works, TPU works, and polypropylene is definitely on our list, because that should be right in its sweet spot.
ML: That’s great. Have you parked any machines in company’s facilities yet?
JA: Yeah, there's two parked somewhere. They haven't given us permission. So we have one customer with two machines. It's a big name, they won't let us use it. There is another one sitting here ready to go to Fathom and waiting for their tech centre to be finished. So for now, we're building parts for them in our facility. But I think it's going to be a couple of months before this tech centre, where they want to put it, is going to be done.
ML: How large is the machine?
JA: It's pretty big. It's a beast. I think it's about 15 feet long. And that's because you've got these five print engines all in a row. But it's also set up so you can do two platens. We're not selling it yet using the two platens, right? But you could run two platens at the same time, that are each 300 by 600 millimetres, so that makes it pretty long. So it's a big machine. But when it comes down to cost productivity per part, it's it's gonna rock people's worlds.
ML: So, when we look at our technology, Paxis, we call our process WAV which is Wave Applied Voxel. And similar to you, we utilise multiple imaging units. And that actually allows us to increase our speed exponentially. Where the system that we're developing is pretty unique is that it's very small footprint for its buildable area. In fact, the machine that built the full surfboard, could roll in and out of a standard doorway. And we are looking at the machine and the future of how we're tackling it from our perspective of modular expandability. So, that somebody could say, 'hey, look, we want to do a three foot by four foot by six foot part,' that's one module, and then we can add modules as we go on. So, in theory, our technology could build a 40 or 50 foot long parts on a 40 or 50 foot long tray. That one probably wouldn't fit through a standard doorway, [maybe] a standard big doorway.
JA: Wow, that’d be a game changer.
ML: Well, it's funny to see where the industry is going now, because as you mentioned earlier, the adoption of new technologies is fairly slow, which is ironic because people have been screaming for them for years, right? There's no shortage of 3D printing manufacturer companies, but what I found is that they're all just 'me too' technologies from capitalising off of expired patents. So, you're seeing some derivatives of FDM, derivatives of SLA, SLS, Powder Bed Fusion, but for the most part what you guys are working on, what I think we're working on, are very, very new. Like, with us, our print engine, you guys are utilising a Kodak engine, we're developing ours ourselves, there is no current technology that we can retrofit to our system. So, everything has to be bespoke. And I think that's part of the reason why we've taken a little bit longer to come to market. The pandemic didn't help with chip shortages, but the reality is we're really creating our print engine ourselves internally. So, we're not going to be beholden to any particular manufacturer fortunately, in that area.
JA: Yeah, I think the innovation we're talking about, a lot of people wonder, they look at the new 3D printing technologies come out and 'are they really disruptive? It seems like it's going so slow.' But I've been in it for 35 years, you've been in it for what at least 25 I think.
ML: 25, yeah.
JA: Yeah. And basically, the way this has been working so far, has been one application at a time, we champion this technology into use. And it started with prototypes, and then it moved into end-use production parts. And then we keep innovating each piece of technology so that we can then expand into other applications. And it might seem slow right now, while we're in the middle of it and watching it. But I guarantee in 100 years from now when you look at the graph, there's a huge inflection point going on right now.
ML: Yes, yeah. Especially in the material development side of things. I think when we first started, I remember people would call out the technology name, not the material. Back in the day, it was, 'hey, I need an FDM part, I need an SLA part or I need an SLS part.' Now people are saying, 'hey, I've got this flame smoke toxicity rating I need to meet and I need a material that can withstand 280°C, what what can you guys offer us?' And the number of material companies that have been coming out of the woodwork in the last couple of years, it's been pretty impressive from a standpoint of seeing maybe four or five materials developed in the first ten years I was in the industry versus hundreds, if not thousands of materials being developed now. And I think materials are really driving the growth of this industry.
But you're right. I mean, we saw production parts as early as '98 for companies, but now companies are starting to look at this as adopting it to replace traditional manufacturing methods. The only catch that I think we're running into right now is that the material cost and the machine costs are still outside of that window of opportunity for normalised production. For mass customisation, it's there, we all see it every day, and generative design, of course, but really, the materials I think are going to be driving the future. And we need new technologies to drive those materials because the current technologies limitations are just too great.
JA: Yeah, agreed. And the innovation is still going on to make that happen. So, I mean, with the STEP technology, for instance, to be able to do the high res, the real engineering plastics that people design parts with. We also believe that we'll be able to do Polycarbonate. Those, in high resolution, accurate, good feature definition, and that's just one step in this whole evolution now of expanding and addressing more materials. And all the technologies will continue to get better, they'll get cheaper, and we're in the middle of an inflection point.
