Figure 4 Direct Digital Molding – Production
In the previous part of this series I showed how a high-density vertically stacked build of 90 parts was printed a little over 5 hours and post processed in 15 minutes. It’s great to be able to print and clean parts fast. But it’s also important that the parts are accurate and within spec. We scanned one of the parts printed on the Figure 4 Modular using a 3D scanner and then used our Geomagic Control X inspection software to analyze the CAD to part deviation. Here is a heat map showing that the deviation was well within acceptable limits.
A conversation about production cannot be complete without talking about wastage. We weighed a few builds and found that 6.8 kgs of material produced 6.5 kgs of parts. That’s a 95.6% utilization with the wastage being 4.4%, mainly in the support structures.
In the end the per part cost was $2 and $0.62 for the larger and smaller parts respectively. This is after factoring the cost of the printer over time.
After 24 hours, the production run looked like this.
And after 48 hours it looked like this.
In the next part of the series I will talk about a real world use case.
