A whole new dimension to printing

Things weren't always this easy for Mario Lampron.

On the second-last day of a recent trade show - a Thursday - a pool supplies distributor approached him and asked whether he could produce a prototype of a vacuum plate with a 40-millimetre hose opening.

Now, the request was not uncommon for Mr. Lampron, co-founder of Competition Pool Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of pool accessories in the country. But the manner and the speed with which he fulfilled the request certainly was.

The first thing Mr. Lampron did when he got back to his Montreal office the following Monday was talk to his designer, who created a three-dimensional model of a vacuum plate prototype on a computer.

The designer then clicked "print," but neither of them sat around waiting for a flat paper image.

The digital file containing the prototype plans were sent to the company's FDM Maxum, a $400,000 (U.S.) machine that lays down melted thermoplastic to form 3-D objects. Built by Stratasys Inc. in Eden Prairie, Minn., the Maxum looks like a massive industrial clothes dryer and can create a prototype in a few hours. The distributor had his model in hand one week after making the request.

Before Competition Pool splurged on the 3-D printer, Mr. Lampron says, the company would send a new product to manufacturing, wait 45 to 60 days for the factory to tool up and produce the first parts, then look at them and often discover problems requiring design changes. Getting a new item into production could take three months or more. Now Competition Pool produces realistic prototypes in hours.

And speed matters. As with the vacuum plate with a 40-mm hose opening example, which actually became a commercial product, Mr. Lampron attributes his company's success largely to its ability to bring products to market quickly.

The FDM Maxum helps them do just that.

But while large manufacturers have used such rapid prototyping machines - or three-dimensional printers - for more than 20 years, smaller companies have only recently been able to afford them, says Terry Wohlers, principal analyst and president of Wohlers Associates, a Fort Collins, Colo., consulting firm. What once cost $150,000 to $1-million can now be found for as low as $20,000 or $30,000, Mr. Wohlers says.

They're slower than ordinary printers. A Stratasys printer can take two days to turn out its maximum-size object - 20 by 24 by 24 inches - says Fred Fischer, product marketing manager at Stratasys. But they're faster and cheaper than alternatives like machining or hand-carving models. Competition Pool says its FDM Maxum has paid for itself in the three years the company's had it.

Karen Howard-Chun, a designer at the Ajax, Ont., plant of German aircraft parts manufacturer Messier-Dowty International Ltd., says her company has used prototypes created with a 3-D printer to ensure maintenance workers will be able to reach into tight spaces to make adjustments.

With complicated parts, a model is often the only way to see whether a design works. Without its 3-D printer, Messier-Dowty would have to have test parts machined, Ms. Howard-Chun says. That's time-consuming and expensive.

3-D printer technologies vary. Messier-Dowty's unit, built by Z Corp. of Burlington, Mass., spreads thin layers of powder inside a sealed compartment, uses a print head to deposit bonding polymer where the part will be, and then vacuums away the unbonded powder. The polymer comes in colours, so the device can produce full-colour pieces.

Powder machines turn out a part in a few hours, but the result isn't as strong as those from thermoplastic machines such as the Stratasys, says Nina Conrad, an industrial designer at Omachron Technologies Inc., a Hampton, Ont., design firm that uses both kinds of machines to produce prototypes and models for customer presentations.

Mr. Fischer says Stratasys's machines can make not just prototypes but also parts for real-world use. That, Mr. Wohlers notes, is a growing market. For instance, 3-D printers now produce the outer shells of many hearing aids, which must be customized to fit each individual customer's ear.

Tom Clay, Z Corp.'s chief executive officer, says participants in some online video games will soon be able to order three-dimensional models of their online characters, or avatars, produced with 3-D printers.

The connection with action games, where speed is key to survival, is fitting. The same is true in business, Mr. Lampron observes, and delivering a prototype in a week means a competitive advantage.

"Today it's not the big that eat the small," he says, "but the fast that eat the slow."

By the numbers

$150,000

Approximate price of a basic

3-D printer a decade ago

$20,000

Approximate starting price

of a basic 3-D printer today

Cost per cubic inch of a model made with a powder-based

3-D printer

20 by 24 by 24

Size in inches of the largest