Inventables - The Material and Technology Marketplace

Tipster Zach points us at a new service: Inventables. Here's the premise:

Inventables exists to make it easy for vendors of materials and technologies to get an initial introduction to potential buyers. These buyers (engineers, designers, marketers) browse our online marketplace with the hope to find and work with vendors that manufacture materials and technologies ranging from water dissolvable labels to scented plastic. Microsoft X-Box, PING Golf Clubs, and Kraft Foods are examples of buyer companies using the marketplace. Dupont, 3M, and Eastman are examples of companies participating as vendors.

The site operates like a search engine. A large, friendly search box appears immediately, where you can quickly type in your materials search term, like "Rubber", "Polyether-Block-Amide Thermoplastic" or "Lego". Each material has a page describing its primary and secondary applications.

Materials vendors can register with Inventables and create a profile that describes their specific product. Then:

When a potential customer is interested in your product, they make direct inquiries. Inventables will email you the pre-qualified lead.  You decide it’s value and only pay for leads that you choose to connect to.

That's correct: you can contact the vendor of the material right from the search result page.

Inventables seems to have an enormous variety of materials available, including several relevant to 3D printing:

Printing 3D Flexible Parts
One-Off, 3D Decoration
3D Lamination Stamping
A variety of Thermoplastics

Inventables is an interesting approach to materials marketing, and their site design is highly functional. You might want to check them out!

Via Inventables (Hat tip to Zach)

One Blue Ring

The guys at Open3DP seem to have made a breakthrough in their quest to develop glass-based 3D printing. Every week they seem to make progress, and this week we see a "semi translucent blue glass ring". 

 

There's no details on their blog to describe how they managed to create this magical item, but if this is the future of glass printing, we like it a lot. Color 3D printing is wonderful - but translucent glass colored printing is simply stunning. We can imagine a plethora of applications for this, not the least of which will be jewelry. 

 

Well done, Open3DP! (Does it make you invisible?)

 

Via Open3DP (Hat tip to Mark)

Full Color 3D Printing

Yes, that's right - Shapeways now offers full color 3D printing. They've scored a ZCorp 650 3D printer, which provides the color capability. The "Full Color Sandstone" material is able to handle color texture maps. 

 

It's obviously more work to prepare color models. You must create a texture map in your 3D modelling software for your object, and then export it as a VRML97 or X3D file. Zip it and the texture map images and you're then able to upload to Shapeways. But we think it's worth the extra effort. 

 

This is a big change in the 3D print services environment. Now full color printing is available at relatively low cost to practically anyone through Shapeways' popular print service. In fact they say:

 

This is our least expensive material and the pricing is $0.99 per Cubic Centimeter ($16.22 per cubic Inch + $ 1.50 start up costs per model, these prices include worldwide shipping)

 

One can imagine the items being pulled out of their 650 over the next few months. 

 

At the rate Shapeways keeps adding new features, we're figuring that by end of 2010 Shapeways will offer food printing too. In color. 

 

Via Shapeways and Shapeways

New Image Plastics

Need some plastic for your 3D printer? Unsatisfied with your current choice of print media? There's another option for you to consider: New Image Plastics, who manufacture a variety of different thermoplastic rods:

We manufacture and stock a vast inventory of the finest quality, zero porosity (voidless) plastic welding rod and welding wire for all of your thermoplastic welding needs

Their product line includes a wide variety of plastic types:

• (CA) Cellulose Acetate
• (CAB) Cellulose Acetate Butyrate
• (PVC) Polyvinyl Chloride
• (HDPE) High Density Polyethylene
• (HMW) High Molecular Weight Polyethylene
• (UHMW) Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene
• (LDPE) Low Density Polyethylene
• (LLDPE) Linear Low Density Polyethylene
• (ULLDPE) Ultra low Density Polyethylene
• (MDPE) Medium Density Polyethylene
• (HPP) Hompolypropylene
• (CPP) Copolypropylene
• (TPU) Thermoplastic Urethane
• (PETG) Polyethtlene Terephthalate-Glycol Modified
• (ABS) Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene
• (HIPS) High Impact Polystyrene
• (FPVC) Flexible PVC

Via New Image Plastics

Material of the Year!

Last month blog Material ConneXion announcement the winners in their new MEDIUM Award for Material of the Year. This is the first annual presentation of this award, and it was given to Concrete Canvas's Concrete Cloth material. This innovative material mixes fabric with concrete that "allows it to be quickly and easily molded and set into shapes" when you add water. That's the cloth in the image here. Very cool indeed!

But what does this have to do with 3D printing?

Among the eleven Honorable Mentions for the award was Objet Geometries, manufacturers of the Eden, Alaris30 and Connex printer families. Specifically the award was directed to Objet's PolyJet tech, which permits multiple materials to be jetted during the printing process. We believe this is the only commercially marketed technology to do so.

You'll be able to see all twelve award winners at a special exhibition in January-February 2010 in New York City.

Via Material ConneXion and Objet (Hat tip to Rachel)
Image credit: Material ConneXion

3D Ping Pong by Materialise

Materialise, one of the larger 3D print services recently did an experiment using their new "Extreme" stereolithography material. They call it extreme because it's quite robust, with an impact strength of 0.45J/cm.

How robust, you might ask? Apparently strong enough to make ping pong paddles from the material and play a real game with them: "Even smashing is possible!" Don't believe us? Watch the video.

The material would be great for snap-lock parts or extra-durable cases. We're wondering when this robustness will make its way from stereolithography into 3D printers.

Via Materialise

Shapeways Expands Materials

As they've done many times in the past, the Shapeways 3D printing service has expanded the materials available for builds. This time they've announced some very interesting options for makers:

• "Grey Robust" is a rigid material similar to their previous "Cream Robust". But let's face it: "Cream" just doesn't sound very robust, does it? Accordingly, they've rebranded their rigid material in a very iron and steel-colored grey shade. We think this is a great move.
• "Black, Strong & Flexible" accompanies their current "White, Strong and Flexible" material. We think many more applications will be possible, simply because of the new color.
• "Antique Bronze" is a new metal material that can be used on selected models from Shapeways. We're hoping this material is available for general use in the future, because one can imagine a variety of interesting applications.

Why are we so interested in a few new colors? Simply because people resonate with colors. When people see objects they immediately register some feelings based on their initial impression. Consider a comparison between identical objects, one made from Antique Bronze and the other from primitive semi-transparent cream, as typically emerged from earlier 3D printers? What would the general public think? Yes, we think so too. More materials definitely equals better.

If you want to tell Shapeways what materials to provide in the future, you might want to join this discussion.

Via Shapeways

Get Ready for Printed Electronics

We were all quite impressed when the RepRap printer managed to reproduce itself some months ago. But in fact the reproduction was only of its structural members, whereas the metal bits and electronics were not actually reproduced. No worries, it will eventually happen. Metal printing has emerged in several 3D print services, but what about the electronics? It's hard to do because conductive material typically has very high melting points - so high that it would burn or melt surrounding 3D printed material if you tried to print the wiring.

Recently a big step towards electronics printing occurred. Xerox has invented a new type of "Silver Ink", purportedly for 2D inkjet-style printing. However, we suspect this might also be ideal for 3D printers. Imagine an Objet printer (capable of handling two different print materials simultaneously) loaded with plastic and "silver ink". You could theoretically print objects with embedded (albeit simple) electronics. Well, wiring at least.

Via PhysOrg (Hat tip to Micah)