Bigger and better: Ultimaker’s John Kawola on the S5, materials and applications

'The market was pulling us in the direction of the production space.'

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Traditionally, there’s nothing big about Ultimaker. It started out as a company operating in a small industry, in a small country, manufacturing 3D printing machines that could function atop of a small desk. But in the last few years, the Dutch company has branched out to North America, has built a workforce of more than 200 people, and at the recent RAPID + TCT event in Fort Worth, TX, there was more.

Pulled into production

On tradition, though, Ultimaker has been a firm favourite among hobbyists, consumer customers and educators, thanks to its consistent simplicity and affordability. Back in the day, the TCT Magazine in-tray would be being filled with fablab and maker case studies from the likes of Ultimaker, and today, in 2018, the company tops 3D Hubs’ 3D printing guide in the prosumer category, despite its pricing labelled as a drawback. Prosumer, however, signals a change in its perception. Still a consumer-favourite, the machines that retail at a few thousand dollars are also finding their application among industry’s elite. And that is set to provide inspiration for not only their competitors, but also small and medium enterprises (SMEs) too. One of the biggest pulls for these firms? The price.

“We debuted this yesterday and a lot of people said ‘that’s really cheap’ and we’re like ‘we should have priced it higher!’” joked John Kawola, President North America, Ultimaker at the company’s RAPID + TCT stand. “But in the big scheme of things I think we made the right decision. We see that, at least for the professional user, there’s not a lot of price sensitivity, between $2,000 and $5,000 or $6,000.”

Kawola speaks in a near-empty Fort Worth Convention Center 30 minutes prior to the start of the second day of the RAPID + TCT 2018, a Mayo Clinic keynote stealing the attention of most show attendees in the arena at the other end of the hall. The peace and quiet of the trade fair show floor, that’s usually abuzz with conversation and machinery, allows for more considered responses. There’s time to digest each question, and hit back with answers that are considered in the context of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry.

"I think the fact is that desktop printers are a good fit because they can be essentially right there. People underestimate the negative effect of if the printer is upstairs or across the street. You can say ‘it’s only upstairs or across the street’, but it’s still upstairs or across the street."

Desktop 3D printing has long-been categorised as a maker’s play thing, not representative of true AM because extruding PLA material doesn’t cut it in the real world. Kawola subscribed to that notion himself in the early days. But gradually, as process and materials developed, the likes of Ultimaker have been accepted by professional manufacturers, and the company is flying the flag for the use of office-friendly polymer machines in industrial settings.

“I think it really started with the Ultimaker 3, our migration and transition, it was partly strategic on our part, but probably the market was pulling us in the direction of the production space,” Kawola said. “I think it’s a testament to the technologies, our technology, but some of our competitors as well in the desktop space. Printers are getting better, more reliable, the companies that have survived so far, there must be something good going on there, all the new materials coming in. I think if there was a bias against the desktop space by the professional users, that’s starting to go away.”

A regular fixture

It helps that Ultimaker is regular presence at industry technology trade shows, like RAPID + TCT and Hannover Messe where the company’s newest printer, the S5, was co-launched this spring. The breakthrough, however, came last year. Volkswagen Autoeuropa’s jigs and fixtures use case study, which won in the automotive category at the inaugural TCT Awards, was brand new, as was Ultimaker as an AMUG Conference exhibitor. It caused engineers to take notice of the company and how its technology was being harnessed by one of the leading players in the automotive sector. Kawola, again, stresses the low cost, and therefore low-risk, of purchasing Ultimaker machines. Companies can try one or two, if it works they buy more, and if it doesn’t they take the $4-8,000 loss on the chin and learn from the process.

“Jabil is a good example,” Kawola says. “It’s not like we went to Jabil two years ago with some grand strategy like ‘this is what you should do’. They bought a couple, we didn’t even know it, then they had some theories that this would be good for our applications, and they went and did it and it worked. Before we knew it, they had dozens and dozens.”

Those dozens of machines were brought on board at Jabil’s Auburn Hills facility to ditch its outsourcing strategy, and take advantage of the potential for time and cost reductions that it knows so well. Jabil has a host of AM technologies, even recently setting up a global network to digitally connect them, and when it deployed its squad of Ultimaker machines achieved an 80% reduction time in delivery time and 40% reduction in cost.

The parts they were making? Jigs and fixtures. Again.

“Certainly, there’s always been a need for jigs and fixtures in factories, and that need has been fulfilled in other ways, the machine shop onsite or they machine it offsite, or they may even be using more expensive technologies, but I think it’s about access,” argues Kawola in favour of utilising desktop machines for tooling parts. “The fact you can have [the printer] in an office environment versus being in a [separate] room, it means fundamentally you’re going to make more parts, you’re going to make more prototypes, because it’s easier to. You’re going to make more jigs and fixtures and tools, because it’s easy to do.

“We’ve seen some jigs and fixtures applications where they weren’t using jigs and fixtures. They said ‘well to make a jig and fixture tool for this we’ve got to go out to a machine shop and then it’ll take six weeks.’”

Now, they can just print the tool and get to work immediately. Volkswagen Autoeuropa, in similar vein to Jabil, started with just a single printer, assessed its potential, then took on more. Within two months they had a full return on investment. Time savings at VW amounted to around 89% when 3D printing jigs and fixtures, and their assistance was bringing the manufacture of parts down from four weeks to four days. It was among the most successful, widely acknowledged, and innovative AM use case studies of 2017, and with Jabil following suit, Ultimaker has cause to be buoyant.

“We’re excited that they have identified these technologies are useful for them,” Kawola says. “We give them all the credit for proving out the application and getting it to work. We’re there to provide support, but again we didn’t go to Volkswagen and we didn’t go to Jabil and give a presentation about why they should do this. Some enterprising group of people within those organisations said ‘hmm, these [printers] are getting better maybe we should try them’. And the risk is low, if they buy it and it doesn’t work: ‘okay, we tried it.’ If they buy it and it does work then they’re heroes. That’s what happened.

“The benefit for us? That Volkswagen case study is now a year old, and the Jabil case study is just a few weeks old, but everybody is watching. All the automotive industries are thinking ‘maybe we should do this’, and Jabil’s competitors are too.”

Kawola can’t stress enough the advantages to desktop 3D printing for these kind of applications. The price point is an obvious pull, but such is the simplicity of an Ultimaker platform there’s no visit-demo required, and most mechanical issues can be negotiated with the help of Ultimaker’s online support channels, which consists of step by step guides and a public forum. When an army of printers is established, not only can you have 11 machines still running while the 12th is out of action, but you can have that army on the factory floor. And, for Kawola, that can’t be over-emphasised.

“I think historically with some of the more expensive technologies that’s not true, and even some of the bigger technologies, is there going to be a [larger format] printer on the production floor to make jigs? Probably not. It’s going to be in some other facility in some other area. I think the fact is that desktop printers are a good fit because they can be essentially right there. People underestimate the negative effect of if the printer is upstairs or across the street. You can say ‘it’s only upstairs or across the street’, but it’s still upstairs or across the street.”

Make the grade

If Ultimaker’s ease-of-use and ease-of-integration is an attractive enough proposition for industry leaders like VW and Jabil to adopt the technology, what can we expect when more engineering-grade materials become available on the platforms? At RAPID + TCT, Ultimaker revealed a host of collaborations with some of the most renowned chemical companies on the planet. BASF; DuPont; Clariant; Solvay, the list went on. It was a step towards ‘an optimised alignment of hardware, software and materials’, as CEO Jos Burger put it in a company press release. A start to offering industrial-standard materials on a platform that is becoming more and more trusted, powered by Cura, a sufficient print preparation software. The end result, Ultimaker hopes, and to some degree, expects, is a wide scale adoption of its printers by the industry big boys.

The company is confident in that because this number of companies doesn’t just invest in a market for nothing. There’s a demand for them to do it.

“They have a customer we’ve all heard of, in automotive or healthcare [for example],” Kawola points out. “Those customers are starting to really push these suppliers, [they] use 3D printing in [their] design process, maybe jigs and fixtures, wherever they’re using it, it’s actually really more about product design and prototypes. If they’re injection moulding this part out of BASF ABS grade 6, then wouldn’t it be nice if they could be prototyping it out of exactly the same thing. There’s a comfort level of having that same material all the way through the chain, and in some cases, there’s certification where they would like to have materials certified all the way through the chain and that concept has not really existed in this industry yet. That’s been a big part of the demand.”

It’s why in the last two years these companies have followed one another into the burgeoning AM market. There’s not only a demand for them, but a need. Over the last few decades the hardware and processes have developed at different paces to the materials. And when TCT spoke to Kawola on the first of two occasions last year, he welcomed the arrival of the chemical giants, and credited the open source nature of desktop 3D printing as a big influence on their move into the industry. But it was always going to happen because of the potential in this market.

“Those big plastic companies, practically 100% of their business today is providing plastics to injection moulding. I think the industry is still some years away where 3D printing will displace injection moulding, but they’re paying attention,” Kawola assesses. “If that’s going to be a future, they want to be part of it.”

If that’s going to be a future, Ultimaker wants to have a say in it too. The company has aligned with a group of materials specialists that already have the know-how and the facilities, and just needs to apply those resources in the context of the FDM process and Ultimaker’s hardware. They’ll be certified to work on the company’s printers, tailored, in some cases, to certain applications, and help Ultimaker to become an even more viable option for professional users.

Bigger and better

Something those chemical companies will have to take into consideration is the S5, Ultimaker’s newest, biggest, and perhaps most adept 3D printer yet. The company’s line of Fused Deposition Modelling machines up to the release of the S5 has barely deviated from rough build volume dimensions of 215 x 215 x 205 mm, save for Extended versions which have seen the volume in the Z axis enhanced to around 300 mm. In the run up to RAPID + TCT, the Ultimaker contingent deployed at the AMUG Conference were teasing some ‘big’ news for the trip to Texas.  

The news, maybe predictably, was a bigger machine, but not exactly a big one – Kawola confirmed: “We don’t ever see ourselves creating a big machine, we might go a little bigger than [the S5], but we’re not going to be a BigRep, or a Titan [Robotics], or somebody like that. It’s not who we are.” Priced at $5,995, the S5 boasts a build volume of 330 x 240 x 300 mm, to enable the manufacture of bigger parts, but that’s not all. New features included a brand new 11.9cm touch screen display, active print bed levelling to ensure the quality of the first layer, and more, as Kawola details.

“The big things about the S5: 1) it’s bigger; 2) in this attempt to continue to evolve the user experience both on the front end and the back end, adding the screen versus the previous screen, there’s the next level up in terms of bed levelling and automation, [the machine] will be enabled for more abrasive materials like carbon fibre with the print head and the feeder at the back, there’s a filament flow sensor now at the back to monitor [the amount of material remaining]. There’s a whole bundle of things that make this easier to use, it’s a lot more capable in terms of range of material. And [although] it’s bigger, we still feel that the very large majority of the parts that are made in the world fit in machines these size,” gesturing to the Ultimaker 3.

It’s apparent to Ultimaker, then, that providing a bigger machine isn’t all that it will take to appease industrial players, a better machine is the way to impress and attract. Such is the compactness of Ultimaker machines, there aren’t a bucket-load of enhancements to be made, but what it can improve, it is doing. The touch screen by which the user operates the machine has been updated; bed levelling has been worked on; filament flow sensors have been added; the print core design allows the user to swap nozzles in seconds; and the materials available to use on the machine are ever-expanding.

"This industry is growing because there’s more parts being made in the world every day than there were five years ago."

Yet, it still markets at an affordable rate. And as the industry itself grows, there are plenty of companies to target. That goes, too, for Ultimaker’s competitors, who earlier Kawola attributed much of the credit to with regards to desktop 3D printing’s acceptance as an industrial solution to certain challenges, and the rest of the companies that make up the industry as well.

“I think if the only thing we were doing was replacing parts that could be made some other way, this market would be okay but it wouldn’t be what it’s turning out to be,” Kawola evaluates. “I think the big win for a lot of these technologies is creating a capability to do more, to print more. This industry is growing because there’s more parts being made in the world every day than there were five years ago. If it was the same number of parts I think we would all be trying to kill each other to get those parts.”

But they’re not. And that’s why Ultimaker can release a bigger and better machine, align itself with some of the chemical heavyweights, and be the enabler in such success stories as the Volkswagen and Jabil ones.

The S5 isn’t the biggest machine, although by Ultimaker’s standards it is, but the company’s partnership with several materials companies is a big development, it’s application by multiple industrial giants is a big story, and going forward the company certainly looks able to make a big impact. That small company emanating out of The Netherlands, founded only seven years ago and fighting its way into the thoughts of professional users, is getting bigger and better.