The next step in rapid prototyping.

As mentioned in the previous blog, the biggest innovation I’ve read about concerning rapid prototyping, so far is about the water-based material used for support that dissolves in the contact of water. These gave a lot much more freedom to designers to create parte that were impossible to print before, or rather at a high cost.

This method makes the manufacturing cost and time to be reduced considerably, because companies that use printing as a daily process can “easily” acquire one of this printers and work on-site. Having a machine available immediately accelerates design process, corrections are less expensive and precision is achieved faster.

There were some pieces of advice on the reading, which I think are very useful to have in mind some of these things at the moment of designing components or parts of our products. We have to think of how can we reduce parts, this will make our product more effective, faster to produced and cheaper to sell. Also, we have to think about scale. Maybe we can scale it down, see how it works and then move on to the real thing, but the corrections were made on the scaled model. Easier to manipulate, easier to detect problems.

All these can resume to the fact that this new technology can save thousands of dollars in production and can reduce manufacturing time to about half of what it used to be.