Speaking at the 3D printing conference TCT in Birmingham, the UK, last year, industry veteran Todd Grimm told his audience to be wary of the hype. “Additive manufacturing and 3D printing are a poor substitute for conventional manufacturing,” he said, “the opportunity lies when you change the game. Stop looking at it as a direct substitute to injection moulding or die casting.”
One company hoping to change the game is The Flexiscale Company, a start-up based in Oxford, the UK, which makes 3D printed model railway kits from intricate 3D scans of actual railway engines. The company’s founder and Boffin (he eschews the more traditional “CEO”), is Chris Thorpe. A railway enthusiast with a background in major IT projects – he was the CTO of the team that built the phenomenally successful children’s website Moshi Monsters – Thorpe started Flexiscale because of his own frustration with etched brass model kits.
Origami with jeopardy
Thorpe explained: “They’re incredibly delicate and incredibly fiddly. I always describe them as ‘origami with jeopardy’ because you have to hold all the pieces together and solder or superglue them. The number of times you burn your fingers soldering them or stick your fingers on to what you’re doing when you do this kind of thing is huge.
“Because of the cost of injection moulding and because of the decline in model shops, people tend to only make etched brass kits nowadays. It’s not cost effective to make injection moulded kits, if you’re working in the niches of a hobby. That injection moulding will only work for one scale and that’s really frustrating because you get someone coming out and saying, ‘well I model in 5.5mm to the foot [305mm], can you support me?’ … because of the way we’re doing it, we can say, ‘well, probably, we’ll take a look at the files’.”
Flexiscale’s first 3D printed model was of a slate wagon used in the historic Dinorwic Quarry in Wales, the UK. An actual wagon was photographed from all angles and turned into a CAD model using photogrammetry. This was test printed on the firm’s MakerBot fused deposition moulding machine, with a resolution of 100µ. Thorpe said: “That resolution is okay but I wouldn’t sell it. However, it’s really useful for us to test parts out really, really quickly and check they fit together properly. It gives us good enough fidelity that we can check that we’ve got all the lugs in the right place.”
Prototypes were produced in laser-sintered polyamide. And the finished kits are printed by PD Models in Hertford, the UK, in UV-cured resin using a 3D Systems Projet HD 3000.
The next step was to produce model locomotives.
In summer 2012, the steam locomotive Winifred was repatriated to her native Wales from Indianapolis, the US, where she was kept in storage by the owner of the eponymous motor racing circuit. She was scanned by Flexiscale using a Faro laser scanner with a resolution of 1mm from 1.8m.
More recently, Flexiscale has been using a Surphaser laser scanner, with a resolution of 0.2mm from 1.8m, to capture the engines of the Festiniog Railway in minute detail. These kits will be available from June 2013.
Decisions about future models will be based on public demand. Flexiscale has a proposal website. When support for a particular model reaches a critical mass, the company launches a Kickstarter (crowd funding) campaign to fund the scanning and prototyping for that particular kit.
Most model companies concentrate on a single scale, or maybe two. But because Flexiscale is exactly that, flexible with scale, models can be printed to whatever scale their customers desire. And the models can be absolutely authentic, without having to be designed for ejection from an injection moulding tool.
Currently Flexiscale sells 3D-printed models through its website and ships them across the world but this might soon change.
“At the moment we’re posting kits made here to Australia,” explained Thorpe, “we would consider finding a 3D bureau in Australia, that has the same printer, and making kits there. But, before we know it, modellers and modelling clubs will have their own printer. Depending on what happens with the whole Form 1 patent spat with 3D Systems – we may have a really good stereolithography printer that can do 25µ resolution for about £2,200 [€2,595].
Fetish objects
“The point is, we are nearly a year or two away from where a wealthy hobbyist will say ‘I have one of these printers at home’ or a modelling club says ‘you know what, we’ll invest in one of these printers’ and at that point we will happily sell them shapes. You want to make 30 of these wagons? Fine, we’ll give you a licence, you can do 30 of them.”
Although the issue of piracy of 3D files has made headlines, Thorpe isn’t unduly worried about letting his 3D scans into the open: “The only sane and sensible thing to do is to sell something for the right price and build a community around it who love it. So if you look at what’s now happening in the music industry, you now have bands who are engaging their audiences through things like Soundcloud. They’re giving away music free so that people will love them. And then they’re selling them physical things – they’re selling them CDs, or 7-inch singles – almost fetish objects, things that their fans really, really want.
“The same thing will happen in the 3D industry. You’ll have some companies who engage with their consumers really, really well. And as a result of it, their consumers won’t be interested in filesharing because they want the authentic thing. So if you look at Moshi Monsters, this was our play right back at the start. We gave away images of all of the characters for kids to colour in, for them to print out, for them to stick on the walls. But they always had the logo on there, they always came from us. And, as a result, there’s virtually no piracy in that space. Because the kids don’t want the pirated things, they want the real things and they’ll pay for it.”
Source Article from http://www.europeanplasticsnews.com/subscriber/featured2.html?cat=1&featuredid=2823
