3YOURMIND Gets Into Metal and Goes on the Road

3YOURMIND is a fascinating Berlin-based 3D printing startup that has recently announced a couple of interesting developments. 

The company acts as a kind of meta-service that sits above 3D printing services in a way to add value. The problem they’re solving is the difficulty in choosing an 3D print service provider that’s most suitable for your application. 

Sometimes it is challenging to compare services because there are now so many – and you may not even be aware of the existence of some services. Online quoting methods are tedious to use repeatedly in order to compare pricing. 

3YOURMIND does all that automatically for you and presents results in a consistent fashion. 

But there’s more: 3YOURMIND also provides a number of functions to analyze and optimize your 3D model BEFORE you send it off for service quotes. This dramatically increases the probability of successful 3D printing. 

Recently 3YOURMIND announced a vision for future supply chain logistics by partnering with European delivery service DPD. The concept begins by having DPD deliver the printed parts from the factory to the requestor, but that’s only the start. 

The future vision is to install remote 3D printers ON the delivery vehicles themselves. 

This idea isn’t as crazy as you might think. Consider that a delivery truck leaves the depot in the morning with a collection of packages to deliver to a particular area of town. This delivery sequence takes hours, perhaps all day to complete. Now imagine if a mobile-capable (as in “resists shakes and bumps”) 3D printer was installed on the vehicle. 

If a 3D print request arrived, it could be digitally dispatched to the delivery vehicle whose daily route is closest to the requestor’s address. The print could commence immediately – perhaps assisted by the driver, who doubles as the 3D print operator. While the delivery vehicle continues its daily route, the print can continue. After some hours of deliveries, it’s entirely possible that the print has been completed and can be delivered to the recipient. 

The second interesting development from 3YOURMIND is a new quoting capability. There are several “universal” systems for providing online quotes for plastic and ceramic items, but it turns out that accurate instant quoting on metal 3D printing services is very challenging, likely due to the variable amount and types of finishing required. 

Their new metal quoting system takes this into account as the requestor is able to specify the types of finishing required. For example, if electroplating is requested, the system can figure out how long it will take to complete and account for that in the pricing. 

The result of this new capability is that we could expect to see a much easier path to use of metal 3D printing services, which are far more common than plastic 3D print services per print, simply because the metal machines are vastly more expensive and fewer users have their own. 

If you’re seeking 3D printing service quotes, you might want to check out 3YOURMIND. 

Via 3YOURMIND and 3YOURMIND (logistics)