My name is Daniel Isler.
I'm the Technical Director here at D Squared Product Development.
We provide outsourced product development
to clients from across the consumer,
medical and industrial sectors.
We work with people from universities,
hospitals,
corporate clients,
start-up companies and even individuals and inventors.
We originally purchased a Form 3 from SolidPrint because it is by far
the best stereolithography 3D printer that you can buy for the price.
We've upgraded that to a Form 3B+.
The main reason behind that is it allows us
to print with an extended range of resins.
What Formlabs did
is they've really turned the whole 3D printing market on its head
by allowing small organisations like
ourselves to bring that 3D printing in-house
and have the quality that we used to
have to go to an external company for,
but in a desktop package.
To say over the kind of two decades I've been in product design,
I've really seen 3D printing
become probably the core tool for prototyping
and testing of designs that we're working on.
The tool that we use most day-to-day is the Formlabs printer.
Now that can be for designing actual components.
So this is an example of a charging dock that we did
for a customer for a piece of wearable technology.
And we've printed this in two different Formlabs resins.
Final components would be injection moulded.
So that's an example of how we would use
the printer to prototype an actual product.
But very often we're also going to do things like
design fixtures for testing that we're going to do.
And this is another good example here where we've
used a combination of prints from the Formlabs,
some standard off-the-shelf components,
O-rings and some acrylic tube,
to develop a test fixture for one of our medical clients.
A little side project we worked on for a lady
who's based in the building next door to us.
This was actually a prosthetic leg for a racing pigeon that she had.
She's had its leg amputated.
The addition of 3D printing has really helped
improve our process.
And I think primarily that is from the point of view of being able
to iterate designs much quicker than you would be able to normally.
Before,
when we were outsourcing our 3D printing,
we could order parts and they would be with us in three days.
But now with the Formlabs in-house,
we can do build overnight.
We can do a build during the day.
So within a three-day timescale,
we could have already iterated and designed three or four times.
Clients are generally very impressed with the
quality of the prints that come off the Form 3.
We often finish those prints,
sand them back,
apply logos with dry rub transfers,
spray finish them.
And very often,
you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference
between the prototype and the finished product.
So we've been working with SolidPrint 3D for a number of years now.
We purchase a Form 3B+,
which allows us to do an expanded range of resins,
including the Biomed resins.
SolidPrint have also supplied us with resins,
resin tanks and all of the consumables.
This seemed like a natural progression because
we were already buying our primary CAD software,
SolidWorks,
from their sister company,
SolidSolutions.
So the fact that we're getting our CAD software and our 3D
printing from under the same roof works very well for us.
We now have three members of staff.
The intention is to grow that team slightly,
maybe up to four or five people,
bringing in a few different capabilities.
One thing that would be nice would be to bring in one of the larger
Formlabs printers so that we can do bigger parts in single builds,
particularly now as we're moving towards working with
some clients who are doing some larger consumer products.