TCT 2016 Review

[Sebastian Finke]

Today I visited the 2016 TCT Show at the NEC in Birmingham. In a few words: it was absolutely amazing and covered everything from home/desktop printing to high level, cutting edge industrial printing.

The consumer/desktop grade brands were represented in great variety i.e. printers, filaments, accessories and scanners. Printers were represented by Makerbot (all working btw ), Ultimaker, Zortrax, Up!, Lulzbot and many more. Some of the new printers were simply mind blowing. They are very well built and look the business. Much has changed in the last two years since I bought mine. Filament brands were certainly in abundance. I got much loot. Again there has been a lot of development in this area. I look forward to many weekends of 'product testing'. Accessories (steppers, belts, pulleys, etc) and scanners from 3D Systems, Einscan and others I already forgot were there too.

There were also a ton of industrial and commercial grade product available. To be honest my interest in these was fleeting as they are way out of my affordability. Laser metal sintering has certainly come a long way too. The prints and machines on show that I looked at were truly amazing. In particular the hybrid CNC mill and laser sintering machine. They made an entire cavity plate in one setup in 24 hours! This normally involves machining/drilling from six sides and EDM that could take days using normal procedures. Wow. Representing this sector were Stratasys, Renishaw, Sodick, HP and others. (Yes, HP was there and had working printers. Top shelf stuff)

I went mainly to see to companies. Polymaker and 3Dfilaprint. Polymaker make an amazing range of filaments come highly recommended. I got many samples to try and their Polywood and Polysupport are getting great reviews across the board. 3Dfilaprint have a reputation as the best filament supplier in the UK and it was great to finally meet the team. Beyond that I met many more great companies from across the globe.

To top it off I also got to meet Chris from 'Explaining The Future' and James from 'XRobots'. If Barnacules was there it would have beat Christmas...

To follow, some photos...

[Sebastian Finke]

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[Sebastian Finke]

A massive delta printer.
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This printer has a double gantry allowing it to print large prints in half the time.
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[Sebastian Finke]

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This printer fuses carbon fibre (left reel) with PLA (right reel). Made rock hard prints.
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A filament extruder
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This is the hybrid CNC mill/laser sintering machine
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[Sebastian Finke]

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[Sebastian Finke]

A full size truck engine block. 3D printed in metal.
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A 3d printed metal chair
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BB-8 from Start Wars. A fully functional droid built by James from XRobots.
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[Sebastian Finke]

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[Sebastian Finke]

And lastly... the loot! So much of it!

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This isn't just the run of the mill PLA stuff either. I have stainless steel infused filament, graphene infused filament, polypropylene filament, PET-G, ColorFabb N-gen, various flexible filaments, etc. Happy dance.

[Talon 3D]

That looks like a blast. I will have to get to one of the 3D printer conferences soon. I will have to get myself a press pass.

[curious aardvark]

loot looks good.
I think I have you beat for number of samples, but what are the the - looks like - full size reels on the left and right ? Look like colorfabb boxes.
Now that's some top class scrounging - nice :-)

Having been to the last 4 tct shows, the noticeable differences this year are in filament development ands the return of the delta !

The mymat guys who made the non-warp nylon last year were back with a vengeance this year. Filaments for food industry that can be boiled and autoclaved, flexible child safe filaments and a few more I'll go into later. Got some more of the nylon and soe of the new stuff.
Mass portal are marketing a range of fully enclosed deltas and had an fdm printed watch.
Not sure what nozzle size they were using for the really small parts, but I'd guess down to 0.1.
The gears were even smaller than the ones I made - but then I used a 0.4 nozzle.

Two filament extruders in evidence. One with three machines that looked like it had been thrown together in a shed. And one lovely looking all in one machine that would do 750gm an hour to a reel in a single box. Wasn't cheap, but very profressional bit of kit.

I've got a whole slew of filaments that are non-pla,abs,petg or any of the common bases.
Some with ludicrous looking statistics for impact, toughness etc.

Had a lot of good chats with material developers, trying to talk someone into developing a conductive filament that isn't based on graphite or graphene. One comoany said they were working on something like that :-)

Best company name: Sodick, really.
They were the ones with the £650,000 3.5 ton machine the size of a large shed. build volume: 150x150x150mm.
So why is the machine so big if the print volume is so small ?
because it contains everything from the tool heads to the atmospehere processing, gs tanks, filters, cooling etc.
What it does is truly amazing.

It prints in powdered metals: even stainless steel.
Prints 10 layers at 50 microns, then mills the part, then prints then mills etc.

So you can produce an item with complex milled interior and a non milled exterior, or any combination thereof.
And that's not possible with any other metal fabrication method.

The whole thing was just amazing.

Most impressive print at the show came from the nutter at 3dfilaprint.com
He printed a full size, fully working pinball table. Frame, bed, the lot. 85 different filament types used, about 1200 hours printing. Phenomenal !

We have no idea what he's going to do next year to top it :-)

Soon as I figure out hot to move pics from the ipad air to the pc I'll post some up.
Sebastien took a lot of the same ones.

Good day, couple of stalls I missed - didn't see the einscan and I didn't find the guys who are using standard lcd screen and daylight setting resin. They can make a resin printer with a 60inch screen !
Or one with 150mm for £700.
One of the guys who works for them is the son of the gateros electroforming chap.

For me, the best new light industrial fdm machine was the leapfrog bolt. Dual independant extruders, fully enclosed hot end that goes to 360c, large print volume and just a gorgeous looking beast of a machine at around the £5000 mark.
I can't think of anything in it's class that comes close for the price.

After 5 hours when your arms are aching from all the filament you're carrying and your feet hurt. it's time to go home :-)

More later.