Slant 3D CEO on building the world's biggest 3D printer farm

"A 3D printer is a tool. It's not a device or an appliance."

by Laura Griffiths

18 February 2020

16:28

Slant 3D via Facebook

Slant 3D printer farm.

“Designers and engineers, when we think about [3D printing] technology, we consider it and describe it using these three words: slow, crappy, and expensive.”

That might not sound like the opinion of a guy running a high-volume 3D printing factory but then Gabe Bentz, founder and CEO of Slant 3D, never intended for that to happen. In fact, his 3D printing venture, which operates as a 24/7 production facility in Nampa, Idaho, was a bit of a happy accident, as he recently recalled to TCT.

The above statement comes from Bentz’ TED Talk in Boise back in 2018 where the roboticist and entrepreneur described how a small robotic arm project he began one quiet weekend at home led to a full-blown product and crowdfunding campaign. The bad news? It was successfully funded. The worse news? It was 3D printed.

“We didn't anticipate [it] would be as popular as it turned out to be,” Bentz told TCT. “We had designed it to work with 3D printing but then when it took off, we were caught off guard and had to basically figure out how to produce them with 3D printing. We were so far down the rabbit hole, we couldn't back off and do it with injection moulding but in doing that, having those products produced with 3D printing, we realised that fundamentally it was feasible for 3D printing to scale to a large degree.”

This was new territory for the company which originated out of product design firm Slant Concepts in 2017. Prior to that, 3D printing had always been seen as a prototyping tool, far too expensive, and the overhyped expectations around personal printing had left Bentz hesitant towards seeing the technology as anything but. Put simply, he was not a fan.

Slant 3D via Facebook

Slant 3D's average production runs span anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 parts.

“The reason I had such a negative connotation with 3D printing was because it was always touted as a personal technology, something that people would have in their home,” Bentz explained. “A 3D printer is a tool. It's not a device or an appliance, it's a band saw not a microwave. So that always soured me when I talked about the technology because everybody else had this grandiose view of what it could be on a personal level. In a professional context, I appreciated it for prototyping and everything else but I had the same sort of biases towards the engineering and the quality of the parts that most folks have, until I realised that if you treat it not as a prototyping process, but as the end goal where you're actually producing large quantities of pieces with 3D printing, then it can be very affordable, very effective, very scalable.”

Slant Concepts was already using a couple of low-cost desktop printers in the office but with a single part taking several hours to produce, the team decided to bring in more machines to speed up production. Leveraging a heavy background in automation, Bentz said they quickly discovered that a print farm setup, with the right software to back it up, was something they could implement fairly readily and successfully. Soon, Slant had an entirely new business on their hands; a high-volume 3D printing service.

Bentz says the Slant 3D printer factory looks more like a large server farm, with rows and rows of printers glowing with blue lights and churning out plastic parts 24/7. The machines run independently from one another via the cloud with just a couple of technicians on-hand to maintain the primary facility and collect parts once finished. Files come in via Slant 3D’s online quote system and engineers work with the customer to ensure the model is up to scratch. Once approved, it gets added to the factory’s production run where it’s automatically distributed amongst machines. After printing, technicians simply pick up the parts and ready them for distribution.

Slant 3D's Mason 3D printer.

Bentz says the factory currently prints thousands of parts per week with most customers requesting production runs anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 parts, and counts names like Amazon, Nickelodeon and Haddington Dynamics amongst its customers. The company claims that on average its current production runs are more affordable than injection moulding for runs of up to 50,000 units.

“We do not do one or two parts at a time very often, unless it's a sampling run so we're certainly not a prototyping house or a tester house or a “print your one toy” location,” Bentz elaborates. “We are an industrial production facility.”

The factory employs hundreds of in-house developed extrusion-based printers, allowing parts up to 400 x 400 x 400 mm in size to be printed in one go in anything from low-grade PLA to carbon-fibre nylon. Slant 3D has even started production on its own 3D filament in order to reduce costs. While the factory does offer some forms of post-processing such as abrasive polishing, the aim is for parts to come off the machine in a finished, end-use state with a surface resolution between 50 to 300 microns. It’s a prime example of how desktop printers have transitioned into the professional space, similar to how companies like Ultimaker have pushed into the industrial sector for low-hanging fruit applications such as jigs and fixtures adopted by the likes of Ford and Volkswagen. In a recent example, Slant 3D successfully produced several hundred cooling vents for a piece of medical equipment, which would have taken up to 12 weeks to manufacture and assemble via injection moulding. Using 3D printing, the parts were manufactured mould-free in just two weeks at a fraction of the cost.

There are of course a number of 3D printing factories operating in a similar fashion around the world such as Voodoo Manufacturing on the East Coast, and Prusa’s 3D printer-printing factory in Prague, but Slant 3D has an additional tool up its sleeve – the Mason 3D printer.

Slant 3D Printer Farm Beta will host 800 3D printers.

Despite Bentz’ reservations about personal 3D printing, the Mason is a desktop, polymer extrusion-based printer developed in-house to allow users to prototype and optimise their parts using Slant 3D’s technology on their desks before sending their file to the factory. It’s essentially a more consumer-friendly version of the machines used in the factory which allows engineers to substantiate their ideas before committing to a full production run.

“There’s no need for sampling or back and forth or design optimisation because the parts they're getting off the Mason are identical to the parts that they would get out of our factory,” Bentz commented. “If they did a prototype on a library 3D printer and now they want us to produce it with our printers, there'd be a changeover that has to happen there. So, we're eliminating that whole part of the process by just having the Mason there, which is a production viable machine.”

This year is set to be one of significant growth for Slant 3D as it plans to ramp up its production capacity to create one of the biggest 3D printer farms in the world. The company will soon open a second factory in Boise, dubbed Printer Farm Beta, containing 800 automated 3D printers, which will allow it to increase production to hundreds of thousands of 3D printed parts every month and propel that injection moulding breakeven to 100,000 parts.

Print Farm Beta is currently under construction but Bentz confirms it will start limited production at the end of March and be fully operational by the middle of 2020.

by Laura Griffiths

18 February 2020

16:28

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