3D Printing for Engineering
Design, print, break it, change it, print it again — before Friday. Additive collapses the loop between a decision and the evidence for it.
Trusted, recognised and featured
Iterate in days, in the real material
The value of a prototype is how quickly it tells you that you were wrong. Anything that adds a week between the decision and the part — tooling, a supplier queue, a minimum order — is buying that answer at a bad price.
Printing the part in the polymer it will finally be made from removes both the wait and the translation. A polycarbonate part behaves like polycarbonate; a carbon-fibre nylon bracket is stiff for the same reason the production one will be. What you learn transfers.
What Engineering Teams Print
Functional prototypes
Full-size, in the production polymer, tested rather than looked at.
Fit and tolerance checks
Printed gauges and mating parts to settle a clearance argument with evidence.
Test rigs and fixtures
The bracket that holds the sensor that proves the thing works.
Short-run end-use parts
Tens to low hundreds, where a tool would never pay back.
Design verification
Scan the printed part against nominal and see the deviation as a colour map.
Design reviews
Something on the table instead of something on a screen.
Which Process for Which Part
| The part | Process & material | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Early form study | FDM · PLA | Cheapest and fastest; shape only |
| Functional prototype | FDM · PETG, ABS, PC | Real polymer behaviour under real load |
| Stiff structural part | FDM · CF-Nylon | Highest specific stiffness we print |
| Complex geometry | SLS · Nylon 12 | No supports, so the geometry is not the constraint |
| Appearance model | SLA · resin | The best surface finish we can produce |
| Pre-production run | HP MJF or vacuum casting | Ten to twenty-five, with a moulded look |
What We Would Put On the Floor
Dragon
High-speed industrial FDM to 600 mm/s, in three sizes up to 700×400×400 mm.
Twin Dragon
Independent dual extrusion to 600×600×400 mm — two materials, mirror and duplication modes.
Volterra
450 °C hotend and a 90 °C heated chamber for the toughest engineering polymers.
Julia
Connected desktop printing for labs and classrooms — IoT, integrated camera, 60 µm resolution.
Apollo SLS
Production-grade laser sintering — nylon parts with no supports and full geometric freedom.
Not Ready to Buy a Machine?
Vacuum Casting
Moulded-looking parts in colour, without a steel tool.
Finishing & Assembly
Sanded, painted, inserted and assembled before it ships.
Put additive to work in engineering
Tell us the part, the quantity and what it has to survive. We will tell you whether to print it, cast it or machine it — and what that costs.