So we're down at
SolidWorks World 2019, and we're currently not there right now, but there are people down there right now, and we're getting a bunch of questions about
exactly how does
The Markforged metal printing system work. So I thought we'd grab Nick here real quick and we'll give you a quick run-through of Metal X
Fire way Nick. Sure thing. So this is the Metal X 3D printer, and how this works is we have metal
powder that's bound in a wax and thermoplastic matrix, and so that allows us to put it on a spool much like other FFF
Processes you've seen in 3D printing and that's extruded
Heated and extruded through a print head and then built up layer by layer into a part, which is what we call a green part and
Here's an example of one right here.
So basically we're using similar technology it sounds like that we're using with our composite printers except
we're doing metal powder. Exactly, so our first composite printers came out a little over five years ago and
we basically perfected that technology and
inserted that into the metal space to make a more office-friendly version of a metal 3D printer essentially
And of course the other differences, on some of our composites, we also run secondary continuous fiber
reinforcement. What of course we're not doing here. Exactly. Okay, so you get this part out and
Is this finished? So this is not finished yet. As I mentioned, this is called a green part so
Once you get this part out of the printer it still has that plastic and wax
matrix bound within it, and so what you do is you take this green part and you put it into our wash and
What this wash does
is it starts to de-bind the wax out of the part, and when it comes out it actually looks very similar to a
Green part but then it's called a brown part
And so what you do with that brown part is to finish it off
You stick it in our sintering oven which is over here
And the sintering oven--and what that does is incinerates all that plastic binder that's left in there
And then melds the metal powder together to get a full density metal part and so what that looks like is here
these are examples of parts of an end effector for a robot arm and
as you can see there's some significant shrinkage here it shrinks about 20 percent in each dimension and that's because the
Plastic that's in there gets incinerated out, and it shrinks down as the metal powder binds together. So a common question
We get is, how do we accomodate
for the shrinkage when you design the parts. Yeah that's a great question
we have a bunch of really intelligent software people. So basically what you do is you put in your final dimensions that you want in
your part and the printing algorithms
automatically scale up the part so that your green part is the size it should be
to go into the sintering oven and get you down to the
Dimensions you originally request. And that software of course is Eiger, which is our cloud-based
Software we've got a large cloud infrastructure up there, running some super-smart software that allows you to go do all those pieces
Okay, super, so it shrinks down--Eiger takes care of it. So what materials are we currently printing? So right now this is
17-4 ph stainless steel, and that's what's printing right here. This is just a tensile test dog-bone that's printing right now
And we're also printing an H13 tool steel, which is really good for those high heat and
High-impact use cases, and so we're looking in the future to start printing a couple more tool steels like A2 and
Inconel as well which is a high nickel alloy, and then even further in the future looking to print titanium. All right great so
We got some cool applications over here
Anything you want to share with folks in terms of some sample metal parts that have been printed on the printer? Definitely.
Here's an example of an
End use part that one of our customers prints. Stanley Black & Decker, they print this actuator housing, which goes on a post driver
And so this used to be a four-part assembly and now it can be printed just as one solid part
Is that an injection mold, I'm seeing over there?
yeah
so this is an example of a printed injection mold and
So one giant advantage to 3D printing in general, not just metal 3D printing is
Compressing your tooling manufacture process so you can design and iterate on tooling a lot faster which saves you a lot of money and so
prototyping injection molds and then eventually printing your injection molds that you're you're actually doing shots out of
Is a really good way to accelerate that tooling process. And actually
injection molding has been one of the
Applications that we get a lot of questions actually. Sometimes people look at this thing, they look at the materials, they'll look at stainless
then they'll say
oh
you do tool steel, and then the next question is what about injection molds. Yeah that's a really large area of
Application for this so that is our Metal X system, so it is shipping today. You can buy it today. We can ship it
eeeh I don't want to make any commitments for the
Manufacturing team but we could probably get between a couple weeks. There is a backlog but we can get it out to you
There's customers out there in fact, we are shipping several hundred units right now out to customers
the total price for all three of these when you factor in
installation
Three-year success plans you should probably count on maybe 150 hundred and sixty thousand dollars
US dollars in the US
Prices will be different to other parts of the world
You need to have about, you can get about three printers
Can drive about one wash station in one sinter. Again it's going to depend upon the types of materials that you print. You can always
Get your own individual and incremental printer for about a hundred thousand dollars. Again you need add-on installation and success plans on top of that
So very affordable high-quality 3d printing in metal that anybody can use