A little over a year ago, we launched Black High Definition Acrylate (BHDA), a high-detail acrylic material with added strength over our Frosted Detail Plastics. Since then, it has been enthusiastically adopted by our scale modelers and miniatures communities as a popular choice for wargaming, vehicles, trains and sci-fi. As this material family has grown, we’ve been able to reduce lead times by optimizing our production process. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve cut production time by three days. BHDA products will now ship to you in five days.
Some of the ways we’ve done this are:
- Since we have a lot more models to print than we did when we first launched, we can be smart about how we plan build trays. With more models to choose from, we can optimize “small” and “large” trays. Small trays are filled with only parts below a certain height. Since build time is driven by the largest part on the build plate, we no longer have a couple of large parts on a build plate filled with all other small parts dictating the build time. This means we can print those small parts faster and get them into your hands sooner!
- Planning denser trays. Optimizing our tray density has allowed us to fit more parts on a build tray, which in turn increases our machine capacity. With more capacity, we can get your parts into our printers faster.
- Increase and optimize build speed. We’ve been able to optimize our machines to print faster.
- We are printing around the clock, 24/7, in order to fully utilize our machines and print more parts in a day. Printing overnight means we now don’t have to wait an extra day to start printing your parts.
- Building out more efficient post-processing equipment.
- Building our own UV curing station that can cure more parts at a time and at faster speed
- Increasing our capacity to ultrasonically clean more parts at a time
We’ve been able to reduce the lead time through smart process optimization rather than cutting corners. Our team continues to perform a thorough quality inspection after each step in the process. As always, quality and customer satisfaction remain our top priorities.
Do you have a BHDA print you’re proud of? Let us know in the comments for a chance to be featured in the Magazine (like we did with this amazing miniature).
Hi ,
I hope to earn much money , using the 3 D printer to serve customers ? please help me to do it , what I need to get as equipment and material.
Regards.
Dr cherfaoui
Hi Dr. Cherfaoui!
Shapeways provides access to industrial 3D printers for business owners and shoppers alike. If you would like to find out how 3D printing can support your business, please visit https://www.shapeways.com/for-business and our business development team will get in touch with you ASAP.
Thanks!
This is really good news (further reduction in ‘print time’), and a good write-up on the material; I myself have a few figures printed via ‘Hero Forge’…while technically that should still be ‘Shapeways’ (HF uses SW as its ‘engine’ for printing), they don’t seem to see themselves as part of it (they, for some reason, don’t seem to except SW coupons). Wish there was a more ‘formalized’ agreement between the two groups, a more symbiotic one…