14: Our 3D Print Evolution, Ep. 14

Hello, and good day to you from episode 14 of our podcast series Project Breakaway, a metaphorical and literal time in the day when we here at Predator Cycling take some time away from working in the back shop to come and share with our listeners what we're doing, how we're doing it, what it takes to do it, our ideas, our innovative success stories, and even our missteps and failures. If you find yourself with an interest in bicycles, composite manufacturing, out of the box design, or even curiosities beyond, I encourage you to stick with us, settle in, and learn a little. I'm Courtney B., co-owner and project manager of Predator Cycling. I'm here with my partner, Arm Goganian, the other co-owner, CEO, lead design and engineer, and 3D print tinkerer of Predator Cycling. How's it going, Arm? It's going pretty well. That's pretty accurate. Tinkerer. I like it. You're a tinkerer. 3D print and everything else. I was going to say, a tinkerer of many trades. Yes. You should change that as your LinkedIn title role role here at the shop. Lead tinkerer. Lean I like that. I could work with that. Yeah. It's accurate. Yeah. All right. Change it later. Okay. So, as I said, you are a 3D print tinkerer. So, I wanted to focus on this episode on 3D print. Yeah. So, we've discussed about the simulation side of design, and last week we launched our 3D printed water bottle cage, the Gene is. But I wanted to talk a little bit more about the nitty-gritty of 3D print. Yeah. Um Project Breakaway is a platform to discuss what we're doing here in the shop, and aside from my daily accounting and customer service emails, and your Google Slide presentations for the onslaught of video conferences you have coming up, the only other movement in the shop today is that little laser going back and forth over there. Yeah. That is that is true. So, let's do I I googled 3D printing in case anyone isn't quite certain what it is. And it's defined as a process of making three-dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The creation of a 3D printed object is achieved using additive processes. In an additive process, an object is created by laying down successive layers of material until the object is created. Yeah. That sounds about right. That's that sounds right to me. Okay. So, 3D print has obviously been around for quite a while, but um and it is available to, you know, in the smallest forms to to a person. I don't think a lot of people actually have 3D printers. So, um people you use 3D print for many new and interesting applications. And past conferences, we've personally seen 3D printed aerospace parts. Um they were 3D printing a bridge. Yeah. Where where was that? Sweden? Sweden? I want to say Norway. Maybe Sweden. Norway, Sweden-ish. They're in the same area as each other, right? Yeah. Um it's up there. And then yeah, they were doing it with welded. It was like welded with robots. The robotically welded bridge. It was just a foot footbridge, yeah. A pedestrian bridge. And there years ago, I read an article about printing tools, 3D printing tools on the space station, so they don't have to ship those things up. Um there are concepts of 3D printing food, which I still don't quite understand. I mean, I understand, but I don't understand. I get it. I don't. I understand, but I'm you know, to me, I'm like, oh, 3D print a taco. It's not it's not going to happen. A tasty one. I don't know. You know, somebody will come up with something. And then Have you seen those 3D printed like cake decorations or like the 3D printer that makes pancakes? Uh Those things are cool. Anyways. A 3D printer that makes pancakes? It makes pancakes on the skillet, and it literally dispenses the pancake. It's a dispenser. It's not printing the food. It's dispensing the food. Right. But what was the definition? Isn't it dispensing in layers? Oh, yeah. But you're you're not using like the material. You're just adding pancake mix into it. Right. But that's actually what most of these printers are just doing. They're just adding material. That's why I don't understand the food thing. I'm thinking like, oh, plasticky base food. Oh, no. No. Yeah. You could I mean, you could they print with icing and stuff and like Yeah, I get I get that. That's cool. And then there's a lot of just a lot of people make little parts at home and tools and All kinds of stuff. And even um my parents. Um they didn't 3D print, but they overpaid to have themselves their personal and physical bodies 3D printed. Yeah. And they gave them to my brother and I as a Christmas present for whatever reason they thought was I think that cuz I've seen those 3D print stores at you know, yeah, they scan you and in you know, areas and they're like, oh, I'll 3D print your body for some reason and for posterity give to your children. I don't know. I don't really want to 3D scan myself and have a cast. I mean it's cool concept. I guess you want to make one of like your kids or something. I don't know. Anyway, so there's a lot of applications is what I'm saying. Yeah, I know there is. So, um, our printer, uh, is currently printing the water bottle cages for standing orders. Um, but let's discuss the evolution of, uh, the use of 3D print in both our applications here at Predator, um, but also maybe in the sporting industry as a whole. Yeah. And, um, then we can cover how we used it in the past mostly for tooling and kind of as a physical design board for prototyping Mhm. And figuring out how we wanted to use our products and then, um, eventually segueing that into uh, using 3 3D print for mold mold inserts. Yep. And then, uh, currently we're now using 3D print uh, material direct to consumer products with the Genius water bottle cage. Yep. So that's kind of the, um, overview of the evolution. So our first 3D printer was an FFF, which is a fused filament fabrication, uh, back in 2015 2016-ish. Uh, it it Yeah. It served it yeah. It served its purpose when we we got it and we kind of learned with it. Um, but it quickly, um, after a lot of mechanical errors and, um, A lot of hacking and putting back together and you couldn't replace parts at that point because the company went under. Um, Yeah. That was a disaster. Yeah. We we decided we went all, um, Office Space on it and, um, if I had a baseball bat here I would have given that cup a year, um, the treatment in the parking lot. Um, because that's basically what we did. We we literally we trashed it. Yeah. I was I was done with it. I had rebuilt it like six times and the boards are going bad and it just it was it was done. So talk about how we used that printer. Yeah, for sure. So we used, um, we used the printer a lot for originally when we first got it, I mean my the initial intent was to do, uh, a consumer product with it. I mean that was what I wanted to do with it quickly, but it didn't work. As soon as we got it, we quickly realized that it was not viable. Um, and we started making, um, small parts in the shop. We started making little organization tools, um, um, you know, small little we needed tools to like hold, you know, a jig to hold a bike tube in the right spot or something that was kind of a complicated shape. Um, and and that's what the 3D printer kind of was used for right off the gun and we were um, printing in very simple plastics. PLA is was the the main thing that we were printing in, um, which is really easy to print and it's really brittle and like rigid. So for what we were doing it was great. Um, and yeah, that kind of like that's where it started. And then from there it just really started evolving into printing prototypes of of our parts. Uh, we started printing some of the the first major pilots that we did were all printed 3D printed and then to validate the shape and sizes and, uh, some of the more complicated parts that we've made we've we 3D printed to validate that the design was correct. Uh, and it worked really well. Uh, it was a great tool and for, you know, a relatively low cost printer, I mean, it's pretty impressive that we're able to do it. Uh, and then from there like you said we led into, uh, starting to 3D print, um, course. Uh, we started doing core systems that were 3D printed all low temperature stuff. So all for like vacuum bag vacuum infusion process Mhm. stuff. And then, um, recently in the last, you know, couple of years we've been starting to evolve that into some more, um, uh, engineering grade plastics and resin systems that can take higher temperatures and we started doing some high temperature prints so we can do some inserts for molds, uh, because there's some parts of our molds that are actually really complicated to do and it would require like a really expensive five axis machine to make the part and you can't actually get the part out of the mold if you did it like that. So we do inserts that are 3D printed so that we can actually print them, insert them into the mold and then they come out with the part and then they're removed once they come out of the mold. Um, and things like that. There's some other things that make sense to have in inserts instead of having them molded in, uh, as a single mold. Mhm. And those were all 3D printed and like you said we started now, um, doing our first our first product that's, you know, direct to consumer, um, 3D printed, um, is the Genius water bottle cage. Well, before we get there, Yeah. After we trashed that first printer, which I feel like the material you said it was really brittle, it that material well I don't know what kind of it was PLA It was PLA, yeah. Uh, yeah. You could like put that on the floor and smash it with your foot. Like it was not it was cool to make a design of what we wanted to do for prototype but like function wise that just didn't really apply to anything that we could use it for. No. And it's, uh, I mean PLA has its benefits. It's very rigid. Um, it's very stable in like an open air environment. So like if you're printing in an open air printer, um, it's really stable. You're not going to have a lot of shrinkage or thermal expansion or anything. It's it's pretty stable for that. It's easy to print in. Um, you know, when you start getting to like PETGs and nylons and other things it gets much more complicated to print. Um, So that's what We we then purchased our new FFF printer. Yeah. Which is smaller but way better constructed. Oh yeah, it's way better constructed, better hardware. And this printer that we use, I feel like the material is different. We use the nylon and stuff for that because it's harder and Yeah, we use nylon materials for it. We use some other high temperature stuff. We use some PETGs, we use some hybrid materials that we have. We've been I mean we have an entire cupboard full of materials. Yeah. And that works really well for creating our our molds um and reusable. We don't have to break them every time they have you know Right. 10 uses or so before they Absolutely. Peter out. And then also like for some of the jigs and stuff that we're doing now like we have way more accuracy. Even some for them working prototypes for I mean 3D printing all kinds of stuff we can do. Um the other thing too that's really beneficial of having it is that because of FFF printers are really easy to change out the material you're working with. You could I mean like we have I don't know probably 15 different materials on hand that we we can print in for different applications and it takes like maybe 10 minutes to to swap out materials, 5, 10 minutes. It's not a super big deal. Um where some of like the the newer printers we're using take a little longer. It's a little more cumbersome to change out materials. And I like that the new this new FFF printer we have is made by other 3D printers. Like I've seen their Oh yeah. They're Printers making printers. Printers making printers. Like the parts are 3D printed by 3D printers. Yeah. Smart. Smart also like it gives you a a sense of like you know people are running these printers around the clock. Yeah. So it makes you more like oh like they're actually running a legit print farm. I mean we're not our our our little print farm setup that we have is very small but um you know that like I mean our our our FFF printers that we're running now are we I mean I've run them Mhm. For seven days straight. I like I like this new one. It's It hasn't broke or break. I don't have to go throw it in the trash. No and it's I mean we've had a couple of little issues with it like some of the bed height sensors and some little things going off but it's been always like very reliable. Yeah, it's been super good. Um really happy. Cool. And then so we then segued recently into a UV curing type of printer. Yep. Uh it's a high resolution SLA SLS printer which I googled the definition of and it's stereolithography apparatus optical fabrication photo solidification or resin printing. Could is there like a Did you say that five times faster? Absolutely not. But is there okay so that's like So hard to understand. Basically is there a little laser and some goo and it hardens when it the laser hits it? Yeah. Okay. So basically what happens is you have a it's a it's an inverted like what you're normally when you see like a a FFF printer where you're having like that plastic dispose onto the bed. Mhm. This is the same thing except upside down but instead of like a heated um heater that's running and extruding the plastic you have a laser that's curing resin. Yeah. So basically what happens is you have a bed that's basically dumped into a tank of resin and then you have either a laser or an LED screen that basically layer by layer creates the image and slices it together into the part. Um Mhm. And so the cool thing is is you're dealing with um uh curing with UV rays so you you can the materials that you can use are a lot more interesting. Right. It becomes Now this printer is a lot it's more costly and It's much more costly. The materials are way more expensive. It's Talk about these materials are like an array of materials that Right and it's so okay so there's a there's a lot of things that are interesting here. So one of the things that and we've talked about this a lot in previous podcasts is the concept of designing for 3D print and simulating. One of the problems with FFF printing is that you're dealing with um layer by layer and layer adhesion from each layer adhering to the bottom layer. So being able to accurately and intelligently simulate and design for that is is almost impossible. I mean it's it's not impossible but it's very difficult to simulate it. Now um UV cured systems because it's a it's much more isotropic material. It's essentially fully isotropic. So meaning that the material properties by layer if you're going like um parallel to the lay the layer or perpendicular to the layer the material property is the same. Um so because of that you can simulate that much better. And because you can do that that opens us up to our entire software suite of software that we can run to simulate and design the part um to be printed. Right. Does that make sense? Right. This this has a lot more functionality. However, it also has a lot more maintenance which we've Yes. Learned Yes. We're still learning we're still dealing with um Yeah, no, for sure. We been we've been definitely I mean we're having growing pains getting things off the ground. Um but um and that's why we're starting I mean we have I no joke we have we have three four products designed to release that are the designs are done. Um the only thing we're working on is getting the production side of it ready and that's why we started with the with the water bottle cage because it was it's it's an it's a very interesting part. It's also um printing wise was one of the easiest parts to do. So, we started with that. Which is still a hard part. It's still very You don't like to ease our equipment into running and operating. You like to just like be like uh do this amazingly difficult design. Yeah. Perfect first time. Yeah. Which just never happens. No, but like the thing is is like then it's like it's like then it's a cakewalk after that. Then it's like oh you did the hardest part. Oh when is this cakewalk? Where's the cake? I want to have the cake. Uh where's Mika? Mika likes cake. Um yeah no so this is it's definitely hard um it's definitely a complicated part. Any I mean it's funny because a lot of there's a handful of people that bought the first the pre-release the pre-orders for the the cages. A bunch of people are like pretty hardcore 3D print people that bought them. Um and a couple people commented on like how are you printing this like because it's not if you look at the part it's not something that's super simple to get and go oh yeah I could print that. Um especially in production it's very challenging. There was there's a lot of software and simulating and trying to figure it all out and nesting everything and there's very complicated steps to get it to work um and be able to scale. But that's the point and and the for us the concept is is like once we get that system set up um the next products come pretty quickly. I design are done. You've done your job. You've done my job. It's just the the machines need to be better. The machines need to be better. It's also like you know there's there's a lot of it's complicated. I mean there's not there's a lot of things that are variable. There's a lot of variables in the print. Um I was actually talking to some of our uh simulation vendors a couple weeks ago and I was saying like you know we need simulation tools for for you know SLA like they make it for um laser sintering systems like like powder bed laser sintering systems powder bed laser sintering systems printers um they have simulation for. Now, they don't do it for UV cured stuff. They don't do simulation yet for it. I'm waiting for that. That would be a huge game changer for us. That would just make life so much easier. I don't really know what you're talking about. So so instead of just like when I design a part I design a part I throw it through some printer like uh programs and I see if is it print-able. And then I start nesting it I start designing it I start modifying it based on feedback. But what if I could throw that into a simulation tool that actually simulated the entire mechanics of that printer printing the part. And I ran it through the simulator so I could say in instead of waiting 10 hours 15 hours 6 hours for a prototype print may or may not work. If it doesn't work I got to go Mhm. clean it all out and redo it. I could just throw it inside of the simulator and be like oh no that failed here. Oh look that's really How would it know to do that? Is that a whole other podcast? That's a whole that that's a whole other podcast built on top of the podcast we had. I don't understand how the computer would know how to Think about all the crazy simulation would happen. Well, I get that okay. Well, I mean think about the simulation Like the load so if you simulate something you know loads forces wind speed blah blah blah but how do you know the variables inside of a printer? How do you know how do you know if that mechanical arm is going to get stuck or fall or fail? That's that's what that's what people like at ANSYS do. That's why they got so many PhDs. Um but like think about the parts like when we simulate our bikes right? I mean think about how complicated it is all the layers of carbon that we have the epoxy system the molding processes that put inside of a fixture that's cycling and testing. I mean we're testing and calculating and figuring out failure points and our weak points. Mhm. It's doing the exact same thing with the printer. So it has the printer it has the bed the the the lasers the UV lights it has all of that figured out in side of it and it's actually simulating it and printing it with the model. Seems more difficult than I don't know. It's very difficult. It's not easy. You know how people ride a bike. How do you know how a printer prints? Well, somebody had to design it. How do you know what the printer's thinking? Somebody had to program it. Hm. I mean it's not It's something to think about. This is you're starting to talk about like now you're getting into the idea of like anyways it's a different conversation but like digital twins and data logging of parts and taking that and running some simulation with AI. Well, if it's possible then somebody should do it because I am tired of you know messing around with this you know printer and perfecting it every time. It just needs to be perfect every time. Yes. That's why I bought it. So like you should tell the people over at ANSYS to stop working on powder bed laser sintering printers and start working on UV curable printers. There you go people ANSYS start doing things I need. Uh yeah no that'd be cool. I mean like Autodesk actually just released their um they have Netfabb which is their uh 3D print tool. That's like Is that for Netfabulous? Yes. Oh, fabrication. I watch too much Bravo. But my point is is that they Netfab is a really amazing tool that's made for 3D printing. And they now just started bringing that into Fusion. And it has simulation for 3D printing built in. It just does it for powder bed. It doesn't do it for UV. And then okay, so then after we I think that people at ANSYS should talk to the people at Autodesk and have a nice conversation and integrate it all into Fusion. Yeah. And that would make my life so much better. Yeah. Set up that Zoom call now. Do it. Okay, so what do you think is next what do you think the next printer we're going to purchase is? I want or we're going to What you want and then I'll tell you what we can afford. What's in the budget? Um you know, to be honest, we're we're probably looking at realistically we're probably going to be looking at getting more of the UV resin printers that we have now. Just on a like feel like a larger scale. We're going to have to scale up to be based based on the Not more, just bigger. Um more and bigger. More and bigger, yeah. More and More and bigger. Because it just I mean with order volumes Yeah. And and the products that we're coming out with, we're just going to need more printers. And they should make the materials cheaper for me. Yeah. Yeah, they should. They should have Courtney pricing. Especially as much as we go through. Okay. So there are we've talked about a lot of pros and cons of these types of machines. Yeah. And to find the right balance of design and pushing the limits of a machine all while producing a functional object is really a game of chess. Yes. Or 3D chess. 3D chess or sometimes a game of Chutes and Ladders. Because when we think we're on to something and it all comes crashing down. Literally sometimes these print supports for these 3D printer are not so supportive. And I thought these were supposed to be smart. That's actually no joke. I one of the parts we were working on, I literally had this thing perfect. I had all the final parts done and then I was like, oh, we're done and I literally complete failure. No, I yeah, you always get me very excited. Oh, it's everything perfect. This is amazing. It's going to work. And then we open the printer and like a print support is failing and I'm like, what happened? Simulation. Yeah. Okay. I'm on board. Get it done. Anything else you want to talk about 3D printing? No. I mean, it's kind of 3D printing is a really big I mean, it's a big field and the thing about 3D printing too just it for people who are interested, it's super approachable. I mean, you can get printers now for like 300 bucks that are not amazing, but they're not bad. Like you can totally do a lot with it. And it's a super new field, so it's updating and changing by the hour. I think a lot of people get a printer because I have friends from college who got a 3D printer and then they're just like, what do I do with it? Well, Finding an application is difficult. Also, most people don't really always realize that you actually need to know how to model and like design things. Well, you can go on one of those websites and kind of download things, I guess. You can, but then like if something It's really limiting on Right. Like okay, great. I got a doorknob. Right. And it's the right size. So now what? That sounds like something I do. Measure, what? Isn't there a universal size? Right. Exactly. No, but like it's just it's just it anything it's Yeah, it gets a little more complicated, but it's a super cool tool and anyone that's interested you should do it. Yeah. Okay. 3D print stuff. Let's wrap her up. We thank you for choosing to take some time with us and we look forward to future breakaways. Look for us on Instagram and LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and in person here in Tennessee. We ask our listeners to please share, like and subscribe. We're available on all major streaming platforms. Thanks for listening. Have a good one and find some time to break away.