TCT 2019 NEC Birmingham

[curious aardvark]

Well that was different.
Tct is changing year on year. Pretty much 99% totally geared towards print bureaus and industrial machines this year. There were a couple of chinese startups with desktop machines and creality had a small stall.
The cr10s is actually decently put together machine - why they don't use a direct drive extruder I don't know. Add that and you've got a really nice machine.

Most impressive was a totally unknown company called Goofoo. They have a variety of fdm and resin machines. Very well built, good components and good prices. Put it this way, they use a 16mm ball screw on the resin machines - most use 12mm.
Apparently this machine with a 200x120x250mm build volume was under £500.

goofoo-resin.jpg

http://www.goofoo3d.com/

Most years I fall in love with an fdm machine (the leapfrog bolt is still my favourite fdm printer) - given that there were very few there this year, I fell in love with the xact xm200c metal printer. Should i get round to buying a lottery ticket and winning - I will buy one.

The size of a small floor standing cupboard, with a build volume of 127x127x127 mm. it clocks in at UNDER £75,000. Uses a 200watt fibre laser (around £30,000 right there) and is just the cutest and loveliest little printer you could ever hope to own !

minimetalexterior_342x600.jpg

minimetalinterior_800x461.jpg

Add a bottle of nitrogen or a nitrogen generator and you've got a full metal printer for 1/3 the cost of a desktop metal setup and about a 10th the floor space !
This thing is a real game changer, both in cost, running costs and ability.
I WANT ONE !
https://xactmetal.com/

Oh yeah and I nearly killed a prusa mk3.
See there's this video on youtube where josef prusa, grabs the moving carriage of a mk3 and moves it around. The machine then resets itself and carries on printing as though nothing had happened.
I've really wanted to do this since I saw the video.
I asked the guy if I could and he didn't say no.
So I stopped the carriage for a bit.
Thing is, apparently they didn't have the 'collision detection' thing switched on because it doesn't actually work properly.
Um, yeah.
I bet I'm not the only person who does it either :-)
The woman on the booth was quite annoyed, oops.

Duet had their 6 extruder beast there - the print head weighs around 2kg. So to stop the machine walking around when it's printing at speed. It has a counter weight on top that moves exactly mirroring the printhead and counteracting the inertial forces.
Seriously clever. The guy who makes these monsters for duet is a genuine technical genius !

What was missing this year was anyone giving filament samples away - none.
Nobody really giving anything away bar sweets, pens amd the odd canvas bag.
My mate got over 40 pens and half a dozen bags. I only had the 3 bags and 10 pens.

Ultimakers amazing news - was fairly anticlimatic. basically this:

ultimaker-newstuff_286x768.jpg

Also they had new software for streamlining production process. Okay it's useful for using lots of filaments and making sure you don't run out on a long print run.
But industry changing ? hardly.

Nothing really new at all.
There were very few people either. The sensors show - next door. Was 1/4 the size it usually is and totally deserted.

It seems that these types of corporate industry exhibitions are dying out. Firms just aren't sending their employees to them, when they can get the same information simply by spending 30 minutes online.
IT is a shame as - I personally believe - having a hands on experience makes a huge difference when choosing something that will be a large budget item for most companies.

It also seems that the companies who have the stands, clearly just aren't seeing the benefit either.
Between the cost of the stand, travel and hotels for the staff - you've also got the cost and hassle of transporting the machines around.

One of the companies I always expect to see is Mcor - their machines make - essentially paper-mache - models in full colour. Not only no stand this year, but none of the many print bureaus had any of their machines either.

Whether this is an indication that the company is struggling or not - no idea. I always thought the company should have pushed them selves at schools.
A genuinely innovative machine.

A whole bunch of other mid level companie where absent. Even the previously big guys like 3DP were only represented by a single machine tucked away in the corner of a print bureau's stand.
As I said, NO filament companies at all.

There were no giant deltas this year either. In fact I can only recall one large volume fdm.
Couple of large resin machines. One came with 20kg of 'free' resin, which gives you some indication of the volume of its reservoir. Didn't take a picture - retailed around £20,000.

There was also a lack of: 'hey look at this amazing thing what I done with my 3d printer'.
There was a bike with 3d printed parts and a couple of formula student cars with some printed parts. Also a motorbike that looke pretty awful. Just not finished properly at all. Rush job maybe ?
No idea who made it.
But on the whole the booths were very widely spaced and the space inbetween wasn't filled with either people or things.

Oh yeah, apart from the mini metal printer there was another desktop machine I was bowled over by.
A neat little injection moulding machine.
Designed for very short production runs. You printed the mould as a single piece on a resin machine using a special high temperature resin. You then injected the part and dissolved the mould in a special solvent, leaving the part behind.
Ingenious - I'll stick some pics up later.
But a really ingenious piece of lateral thinking.