Today is a somewhat sad day for me, it marks my final day on TCT Magazine and in the additive manufacturing industry as a whole.
It’s been near enough eight years since I first started on what was then a consumer facing TCT brand called, personalize (with the emphasis on the Z because of, you know, the z axis). Ahead of its time or perhaps, but a lack of commercial success meant the brand was eventually dropped. Fortunately, I was not.
My rise from Digital and Community Editor on a consumer/maker platform to Head of Content on the flagship industrial brand that is TCT, is comparable to the rise of one of the first companies I ever went to see: Ultimaker.
In 2014, I hired a car in Brussels and toured the hub of 3D printing that was then the Lowlands. In little under four days I visited the HQs of Materialise, Shapeways, Felix Printers, MakerPoint, 3D Hubs, Leapfrog and on what was ostensibly a farm in Utrecht, Ultimaker.
At TCT Show the previous year, the Dutch firm had launched the Ultimaker 2, but here in Utrecht they were still manufacturing the original wooden machine, which, when you look at it now, feels like a technology from the days of Charles Babbage as opposed to a product released in the same year as the first iPad.
The emphasis in 2014 was still very much on the maker market and given the trials and tribulations of MakerBot at the time, who had been ostracised by the open-source community for becoming a closed shop, it seemed a sensible play.
Although you could tell from that visit the passion Ultimaker had for their technology, I could never have predicted that just three years down the line they would have a plant manager at VW saying something like; “we decided Ultimaker printers were the best choice for us”.
I don't want to compare my career to that of the successful Ultimaker but I have just done that so I'll continue. Like Ultimaker, having worked on understanding the technology through rudimentary FFF technologies that like that of the trusty UP! we had in the office, I like to think this gave me a grounding in the industry.
I was asked by Laura and Sam on the most recent episode of Additive Insight for my thoughts on the most significant changes in the industry over my time and one would be forgiven for presuming it would be that kind of pivot from wooden maker machines to professional industrial devices. However, for me, the most significant changes have not come from the 3D printers themselves but the technologies that surround it.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
The leaps and bounds have come out of material science, software development and post-processing solutions. When Carbon’s technology almost broke the internet after Joseph de Simone’s tantalising TED talk, it was the process speed that grabbed the headlines, but the reason Carbon has succeeded for the likes of Specialized and Adidas as an industrial technology is Carbon’s material portfolio.
Chanel is now 3D printing mascara brushes using SLS technology at rates akin to that of mass production. The EOS Formiga technology used to produce those brushes at Erpro Group in France has undoubtedly had some incremental improvements over that time but without automated post-processing solutions like DyeMansion and PostPro3D, the manual labour in finishing would have proved too costly to make that product a reality.
The fact that you can casually just drop brand names like those above as regular exponents of series production additive manufacturing not only shows how far the technology has come but how far the understanding of the technologies has come.
For the first five years it felt like every single interview I did had a variant of the line “we need to change the way we think about design.” The fact that we now have entire conferences dedicated to DfAM, and the fact that I can type that with most reading this knowing what that acronym means, shows that we have indeed changed the way we think about we design.
There was something of a throwaway remark by Dr David Wragg of Leonardo Helicopter at the last conference I attended pre-lockdown. During his presentation he said that he wasn’t going to show any prototyping or jigs and fixtures applications because they now just considered it ‘standard practise’.
Standard practise by aerospace manufacturers, the normality of big brands showcasing their applications, the fact that friends message me about printing parts for their Ikea furniture. The fact that nobody is wowed by a 3D printer anymore, it makes me feel like we’ve done our job, 3D printing is the new normal.