3D Printing is Amazing Again! CES 2022 Update

Marlo Anderson

Jeff Boehm representing Formlabs with “Guru of Geek” Marlo Anderson

Marlo Anderson (00:04)

3D printing. It’s amazing what has gone on in this industry in the last couple of years. A lot of people call it adaptive printing. I have Jeff Boehm with Formlabs next to me here. Jeff, thanks for being with us today.

Jeff Boehm (00:15)

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Marlo Anderson (00:17)

Tell me about some of the advances you’ve seen in the last couple of years in 3D printing.

Jeff Boehm (00:24)

We actually had three new things that we announced yesterday. That’s what we do here at CES.

Marlo Anderson (00:28)

That’s what we do.

Jeff Boehm (00:29)

So we have a new version of our desktop, our standard printer called the form three plus, that is much faster and also has so when you print with SLA, you get little support marks where sometimes there may be supports that are holding the part up. And with the new version of our printer, they are tear away supports that do not leave any surface Mark. And so it’s much easier. There is a new post processing thing called our build platform, too, that once this part is done, you actually just squeeze the handles and the parts just fall right off of the build platform, making it much easier to get these parts. And then the third thing we introduced was an ESD safe resin, electrostatic discharge. So electrostatic can cause a lot of problems if you’re in electronics manufacturing. And so this allows you to create parts that dissipate electrostatic charges so that they are safe for electronics enclosures or chips or things like that. Formlabs uses a type of 3D printing called Stereolithography that uses a laser to cure a photopolymer resin that creates an incredible array of products out of it.

Marlo Anderson (01:37)

Now you brought some samples, and I think these are interesting. So just go ahead and talk about each of these.

Speaker 2 (01:42)

Yeah, I did. This is the most typical sort of use case for 3D printing, where Oxo, they use us for rapid prototyping. So if you take that that’s actually two different materials and that they can rapidly prototype and iterate and sort of test out. Okay. Do I like this design? Does it feel good? Does it work? That’s amazing. I’ll give two more examples.

(02:01)

Okay.

Jeff Boehm (02:02)

One that I have in my hand and one that you haven’t realized yet, one that I have in my hand is this is actually electroplated. So this is printed in one of our standard materials, but it is then uses a process called electroplating just like that. But then it’s electroplated, and you end up with a metal like part, but printed at a fraction of the cost of metal 3D printing. And so it’s a much easier to print. So the last example is these shoes, and it’s going to be hard to see. Can I use this is actually directly printed on our printers, and it’s a special type of resin that we made with them called Rebound, that provides really good I use these for running, and it provides really good rebound. It’s extremely tear resistant I’ve been wearing these now solid for a year and a half app and they look great. And if we want to find out more information online if you want to find out more information, go to formlabs.com.