‘Going Dutch’ will be the theme at stand E50, where FELIXprinters will exhibit alongside customer and partner S-CAN 3D. Attendees will be able to see for themselves FELIXprinters’ Pro series of 3D printers, including the recently introduced Pro L & XL larger build volume solutions, all of which are easily upgradable, meaning that they will continue to meet evolving demands and requirements without the need for additional large scale capital investment.

In addition, FELIX will be unveiling its customizable 3D printing solution for biomedical applications, an area in which the company has invested considerable resources to launch a viable option for an array of bio-printing applications.

The theme of the FELIX booth at TCT will be “Going Dutch”, reflecting the company’s heritage in the Netherlands and its culture of quality and innovation. Visitors to the booth can take home 3D printed mini-clogs or a coloured 3D printed tulip, can help themselves to a typical Dutch “stroopwafel”, and will see the impressive 3D printed FELIX windmill.

FELIXprinters is respected throughout industry for providing top-end, robust, reliable, easy-to-use, and competitively priced additive manufacturing (AM) solutions for industrial applications, and sets itself apart from other technology providers by the extent of the relationship that it encourages with its customers. FELIX believes that for customers to get the best from their use of 3D printing, they need to work as a strategic partner and advisor, ensuring that the use of the technology is optimised for each individual application.

FELIX recently introduced the Pro 3 platform which has been developed to integrate seamlessly into industrial workflows, whether that is in an office, a workshop, lab or factory environment. The priority with the Pro 3 is to deliver a 3D printer that produces optimized print results — every time!

Guillaume Feliksdal, Founder and Director at FELIXprinters says, “Our team at FELIXprinters all have technical engineering backgrounds, so we know that “quality in” equals “quality out”! We have sourced extremely high-quality components to ensure that the Pro series of printers are both robust and reliable – and these are the cornerstone of the FELIX Pro 3 and we are looking forward to discussing the possibilities with visitors at TCT in the UK.”

The Pro L and Pro XL have been designed specifically to be easily portable — at installation or within a manufacturing setting. Both can be easily transported through a normal office door opening (900 mm).

These 3D printers come with a range of automated and intelligent features that remove many of the tedious and time-consuming hurdles often associated with additive manufacturing and speeding up the overall process. A stand-out example of this is the design of the dual nozzle. When the dual extruders are printing together they are at different print levels, avoiding any collisions and minimizing print failure. Moreover, if one nozzle is idle, it is automatically rotated out of the way so that there is no interference with the printed part, again avoiding damage to the print (and print failure).

An exciting “first” at the TCT show will be details of the FELIX 3D printing solution for biomedical applications. The FELIX BIO 3D printer is designed to simplify the printing process by guiding the user through every step. It also gives users numerous options and a great deal of control, with the ability to print with a wide range of biomaterials that mimic the native environment of each specific type of cell. Users can optimize the process for heart tissue, skin, cartilage, bone, etc., thanks to special features such as exchangeable print heads that offer multiple options for heating and cooling according to the needs of the material. The dual extrusion FELIX bioprinter is capable of producing heterogeneous tissues.

FELIXprinters is adept at developing tailor-made advanced 3D printing solutions bespoke to specific applications, the company encouraging the formation of strategic partnerships with clients and other technology suppliers to further advance innovations in 3D printing. Attendees at TCT 2019 are invited to discuss any tailor-made solutions that they feel would benefit their projects with our team of expert 3D printing innovators.

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FELIXprinters is established as one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of highly accurate, reliable, easy-to-use, and price sensitive industrial AM machines. As many industrial sectors have shifted their manufacturing workflow to incorporate AM, FELIXprinters has positioned itself and its portfolio to serve the changing needs of industry. This is achieved through careful attention to detail, listening to what customers say is important to them, and developing products and features to meet their needs. The company’s Pro 3 & Tec 4 series of AM platforms — and the newly introduced Pro L and XL models (with larger build envelopes) — have cemented FELIXprinters’ position in the industrial use of AM, and has opened up an array of options for manufacturers previously unavailable.

Customer & Partner

A customer of FELIXprinters is S-CAN 3D Ltd, based in Attleborough, United Kingdom offering a 3D scanning, CMM inspection, and precision manufacturing bureau service for international customers. The company specialises in 3D scanning for reverse engineering, but also has its own product range which include RetroSport (billet aluminium performance parts for classic Minis) and S-FIX (accessories for precision measuring equipment).

S-CAN 3D was founded in 2012, and over the last number of years has invested in a large arsenal of equipment to be able to take a customer’s component, reverse engineer it, and then re-manufacture it. The company uses FELIXprinters AM platforms for prototyping, creating casting moulds and masters, and manufacturing jigs.

James Senior, MD at S-CAN 3D says, “We have found FELIXprinters AM platforms to be very easy to use. You can be up and running within a few minutes of getting them out of the box. We run all of our printers through Simplify3D software so you load the profile, pick a material and you are ready to go. In-house we now have the first machine we bought from FELIX back in 2015 (the Pro 1), and a Tec 4.1, a Pro 3 and the new Pro XL. Our first Pro printer has paid for itself 10 times over.”

FELIXprinters has a range of machines that are aimed at industrial prototyping and production applications, key among these being the Pro 3 and Tec 4 machines and the more recently introduced Pro L and XL platforms.

The Pro 3 & Tec 4 machines are supplied with automated and intelligent features to maximize productivity and efficiency. The importance placed on intelligent 3D printing is really at the heart of these machines, with functionality that removes many of the time-consuming hurdles that characterize many 3D printers. To this end, Pro 3 & Tec 4 machines are characterised by automated motorized calibration; an innovative quick-swap print-head solution; extremely fast rotation of print-heads in the dual head configuration (less than 10 seconds); and a dedicated flexplate, supplied as standard to easily and quickly remove printed parts.  Moreover, the Pro AM systems also offer extremely quick heat-up and cool-down of the print heads, meaning that the dual head print times are reduced by a factor of 2.

Scaling Up

The more recently introduced Pro L and Pro XL machines cater for FELIX customers that want bigger build envelopes but without compromising on quality. Delivering on this was not just a case of scaling up the architecture of the Pro 3D printers. With the Pro L and XL, FELIX has used all of its experience in precision engineering to develop what it believes is an offering to the market that demonstrates te company’s commitment to robust and reliable 3D printers. These bigger machines can fit seamlessly into any workshop, lab or factory environment because they can fit through a standard doorway, to make the logistics of installation quick and simple too. The Pro L and XL have build envelopes up to 144 liters.

Senior discusses S-CAN 3D’s use of the FELIX 3D printers. “The Pro printers have been our workhorses for the last few years. The original Pro 1 has over 400 days of continuous build time logged on it. 
We were interested in the Pro XL from when it was announced, and we certainly haven’t been disappointed with it since it has been installed. It’s averaged over 20 hours per day run time since we have got it, making everything from show display pieces to casting patterns. We’ve done week long and maximum build area builds so I can only really talk positively about our experience with it so far.”

Senior continues, “Internally, S-CAN 3D use FELIX 3D printers for prototyping designs. We might do five or more different concept designs of a particular part or component, as it’s much easier to visualise a part when it’s in your hand. 
We are putting a lot of work through the newly purchased XL printer and it’s opening up things which we wouldn’t have been able to do before (at least to the same quality and size), so things are very encouraging.
We have found FELIX machines to be very repeatable which is our most fundamental requirement for any application, and we also haven’t noticed any accuracy degradation over time.”

It is specifically because of the gap between supply of lower cost, reliable and accurate 3D printers and the demand from companies such as S-CAN for affordable industrial platforms that FELIXprinters has developed it Pro series and L & XL machines. Throughout its history, FELIXprinters has achieved a strong reputation for developing and delivering robust, reliable and accurate machines, servicing a growing client base with solutions that are far in excess of their requirements in terms of accuracy but at a price that is comparable with inferior alternatives.

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Over the last 12-18 months, FELIXprinters has undergone a transition as a business with an intentional repositioning towards industrial 3D printing. The visible result of this is the introduction of the new Pro Series platforms, which include the Pro 3 and the Pro L/XL. This family of machines incorporate all of the latest engineering know-how and expertise from the FELIXprinters team, all with engineering backgrounds that have listened to what their industrial clients have been telling them about the pain points often experienced with 3D printing.

Time and again, the feedback came through — reliability, consistent accuracy, ease of use and a good return on investment through a reasonable price | performance ratio were the factors in the 3D printing equation that industrial users want and need to perform their daily tasks.

There is no denying that companies considering 3D printing as a manufacturing tool are confronted with a dizzying array of choices and voices, particularly when it comes to desktop 3D printers, like the FELIX Pro 3. Many of them saying the same thing, along the lines of “Our 3D printer offers the accuracy / reliability / ease of use that you are looking for.”

Some of them do live up to the rhetoric, but many, particularly those at the lower end of the pricing scale, do not.Thus, once the 3D printer is put to work the lack of reliability, poor print output, high failure rates, and time-consuming operation become obvious and create frustration from the time and effort required to make the system function — even at a basic level. Within an industrial environment this is just not good enough.

Throughout its history, FELIXprinters has achieved a strong reputation for developing and delivering robust, reliable and accurate 3D printers, at a price that is comparable with less functionalalternatives. The company is aware that these words may sound the same as other 3D printing companies out there, so here we explain what we mean by reliability, consistent accuracy, ease of use and accessible pricing with particular reference to the FELIX Pro 3 platform, part of the Pro family. Furthermore, we will provide insight into how we achieve this and go on to back up our words through our post-sales service and lifetime upgrade options.

Reliability & Consistent Accuracy

The FELIXprinters Pro 3 builds on the previous generations of the system with new, novel features engineered from the ground up. The Pro 3 was the first FELIX platform to incorporate an innovative dual head printing system. It has been built from the ground up to enable a significant improvement in print quality as well as consistent accuracy. This claim can largely be attributed to sensors located in the printing head for filament flow detection. If a problem, such as filament running out or a clogged nozzle, arises the print is stopped immediately, the issue is raised and a failed print is avoided. This saves valuable time and prevents wasted filament.

Other key features of the Pro 3 that contribute to its reliability include the optimized extruder heater, which reduces dual head printing time by 50%. Moreover, print repeatability, that can be relied upon, is improved through achieving temperature stability in the heater blocks. This is coupled with a dual radial blower which provides three times more cooling power that is distributed homogenously and enables the extruder plastic to cool down faster and more evenly. This produces accurately defined print details, including overhangs.

When we say reliable, we mean reliable and invite you to challenge us.

Ease of Use

Right out of the box, the FELIX Pro 3 3D printer is straightforward and can be ready to print within minutes. We have tested this over and over – with our team and with users. Again there are a number of feature details, specifically built into the platform by the FELIX team, that ensure the 3D printing experience with the FELIX Pro 3 is pain free.

This starts even before the first layer is printed with the Pro 3’s automatic and motorized calibration capability, enabled by the innovative probe sensor integrated in the print-head and motorized bed. A high quality print starts with a properly calibrated machine, which requires:

• accurate measurement between the printhead and the print surface
• a properly aligned print surface
• correct height difference between print-head nozzles when using the dual head
• correct distance between nozzles in the XY plane when using the dual head.

By automating the calibration process, users can save up to an hour compared with manual tweaking of the machine, to achieve much greater productivity and much less frustration.

Another key feature of the FELIX Pro 3 is the proprietary QuickSwap printheads. The design of the printheads on the Pro 3 mean that users can literally swap out a printhead in 20 seconds or less. It has genuinely never been so simple, but it makes a huge difference to productivity, simplifies and speeds up maintenance, and provides users with the ability to switch materials quickly and easily and use different size nozzles as required, without having the change the set-up of the machine.

The FELIX Pro 3 also comes with a Flex plate as standard. This saves users time — at least 2-3 minutes per print — which adds up. The Flex plate also prevents damage when removing the printed object

The Pro 3 Touch is also supplied with an intuitive and easy to use touchscreen, which also allows multi-users, that can connect directly to print-file management capabilities and print-server.

Accessibility

The accessibility of the FELIX Pro 3 is two-fold, firstly through its ease of use, as described in the section above, making 3D printing accessible to engineering and manufacturing professionals that may not be experienced with 3D printing. However, the second way the FELIX Pro 3 is accessible for companies engaging with 3D printing is through its excellent price performance ratio, which provides superb return on investment (ROI).

The perception of 3D printing for industrial applications often involves high capital and running costs as well as high consumable costs.FELIXprinters has logically leveraged its capabilities and made an intelligent and concerted move to provide industrial AM solutions, at a price that makes them much more accessible to many industrial customers for a range of product development, engineering and manufacturing applications.

The Pro 3 has been designed and manufactured by FELIXprinters to offer the highest possible price / performance ratio in its class, and is available under €3000.  The emphasis is onexcellence in the build to ensure quality output — a system developed by engineers for engineers.

The Pro series, including the Pro 3, are a serious industrial tool that dependable and upgradable. These are just words, but we can back them up with high level service and support guarantees, and invite you to challenge us on any of the points in this article.

The post The FELIXprinters Pro 3: Industrial 3D Printing Capability with Reliability, Accuracy and Ease of Use Built In appeared first on FELIXprinters.

As such, from the end of 2018, FELIXprinters has launched the Pro 3, L, and XL platforms for industrial production applications.

The Pro 3 was developed to integrate seamlessly into industrial workflows, whether that is in an office, a workshop, laboratory, or factory environment. The priority was to deliver a 3D printer that produces optimized print results repeatably. This is what customers told FELIXprinters was most frustrating for them in their day-to-day operations with 3D printing, and these are the issues the company set out to address with the Pro 3.

FELIXprinters L & XL platforms have been developed with greatly increased build volumes, up to 144 Litres (the Pro L can build parts up to 300 x 400 x 400 mm or 11.8” x 15.75” x 15.75”; while the Pro XL has a build chamber of600 x 400 x 600 mm or 23.62″ x 15.75″ x 23.62″).

To ensure the quality and reliability upon which FELIXprinters has built its reputation, both of these larger systems incorporate highly engineered print chambers, which incorporate an enclosed warm zone and a cold zone. The warm zone supports consistent temperature control during the build, which is particularly important when printing materials with a high shrinkage factor, such as ABS, carbon fiber or Nylon. In contrast, the cool zone is where the electronics are housed, to prevent overheating and subsequent machine/build failure.

With these industrial production AM platforms, FELIXprinters has introduced affordable solutions (€3000 – €15,000) to manufacturers that at the moment have to rely on injection moulding, with all this implies in terms of expense and lack of agility. FELIXprinters AM platforms provide a cost-effective production process with shorter design-to market times for low to medium volumes than injection moulding.

Injection moulding is still the go-to technology for high volume plastic part production, but it is characterized by significant up-front capital investment in tooling, which is also time-consuming, and difficult and expensive to adapt.

3D printing requires no tooling and is agile which facilitates quick production turnaround, but for high volume runs does have a prohibitively high cost per part. The key is an AM technology that makes the manufacture of short – medium volume applications viable, and it is here that FELXprinters has focused its attention.

Through the use of FELIXprinters’ industrial production AM platforms, manufacturers can produce high-quality parts repeatably in a range of thermoplastics and other innovative materials. An additional advantage exists through the use of 3D printing for production, and that is that part cost is not connected with part complexity. As soon as complexity is introduced to an injection moulded part, the requirement is for more and more expensive mould tools, which leads to an exponential increase in costs.

Beyond non-costly part complexity, FELIXprinters’ AM platforms for production also facilitate nearly unlimited geometric freedom, exhibit very low to zero iteration costs, and have low downtime in the production cycle.

Conversely, injection moulding makes design iterations costly, and beyond the high cost of upfront tooling which increases with increased part complexity, means that production is restricted to the location of the production tooling. As FELIXprinters’ AM platforms — in common with all 3D printing technologies — manufacture direct from 3D CAD files, the location of manufacture is much more flexible.

Also, as AM is a digital process, it can be stopped and started again at no cost, meaning that production volumes can be exactly aligned with demand day to day, week to week, month to month. With injection moulding, once the production process is initiated, it needs to fulfill the full run immediately to remain economic, which therefore necessitates the need for warehousing which itself increases the cost per part.

Through the use of FELIXprinters’ Pro 3, L, and XL AM platforms, OEM’s have a highly reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use production technology to that in some short to medium volume applications can rival injection moulding. Manufacturers can benefit from the fact that through the use of additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping and design complexity-without-penalty are accessible, and now also the usual issues that prevent manufacturers from using AM in production (namely cost and speed) have been addressed.

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