“Honestly, don’t worry about it. I live and breathe this,” Mitchell Barnes reassures.
It is take two of an interview that originally happened on the TCT 3Sixty show floor; the LANDR booth so busy, barely a sentence could be made out when listening back to the recording.
That footfall stemmed from the launch of a new 3D printing system, and a new company entirely as LANDR spun out from the RYSE3D contract manufacturing business based in Warwickshire. The LANDR 500 machine debuted at TCT 3Sixty and was being pitched at a price point up to ten times cheaper than some competitive machines on the market.
No wonder, then, it drew so much interest. Six weeks on, that interest hasn’t waned, but Barnes is familiar with things not exactly going to plan, so joins this Microsoft Teams meeting to repeat a story he first told in early June.
“Effectively, LANDR was born out of necessity,” the CEO begins. “At RYSE3D, we won a number of manufacturing contracts to utilise FDM 3D printing. Those contracts grew a lot larger than expected and continue to grow. Customers are taking a lot more FDM parts than we ever thought was going to be the case.”
Looking at the capital expenditure requirements to make this kind of investment, RYSE3D couldn’t find a suitable product on the market. Considering the electricity requirements, materials sourcing and speed of the machines gave the company only two options.
“The answer was either cancel all your contracts, pat yourself on the back, you tried, like everybody else who has faced the same scalability issues, or instead, bite the bullet and develop your own machine,” Barnes explains. “That’s where LANDR was born from, and we realised what we developed was really interesting and exciting.”
What had been developed was the LANDR 500 FDM 3D printer, which boasts a 500 x 500 x 500 mm build volume, a heated chamber that can reach 100°C, no material lock, and a heated filament storage unit. It is being made available for just over 11,000 GBP – inclusive of both VAT and the filament storage unit – with LANDR building out the machine with the ‘best components available.’
Those components include a Phaetus Repido Two Plus ultra-high flow hotend, Bondtech LGX Extruder, 140°C print bed, and Double Skin Gold Reflective Insulation. The latter of which utilises ‘non-active heat management’ by using reflectivity and insulation of the gold sheet to control the thermals and ensure the machine doesn’t get too hot.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
The machine also features an array of 3D printed components – including motor mounts, the hot end assembly, the gantry system, rear cabling bracket, and electronics enclosures – with LANDR keen to control the supply of parts as much as it can. Its sister company, RYSE3D, has been running ten LANDR 500 platforms 24/7, racking up more than 30,000 hours of utilisation time.
“The parts that we’re using the LANDRs to manufacture are really high-performance polymer components that have to sit in really tough areas: engine bays, turbo intake pipes, high pressure coolant flow parts, structural supports for different trip components, interior vehicle parts, carbon fibre tooling, vacuum form tooling, inspection fixtures, jigs, hand tools,” Barnes listed. “They are being punished in terms of the parts that we’re manufacturing; they are the guts of automotive products. They are parts that are abused on a day-to-day basis, and you just expect them to work.”
According to Barnes, those parts have performed ‘exceptionally,’ with the company now readying to ship printers to external users this summer. Already, the company has hundreds of pre-orders worth around 200,000 GBP, and used TCT 3Sixty to gather early feedback. Having spent the interim implementing some small tweaks to the design and componentry of the machine, LANDR is just about ready to launch.
While that initial shipment commences later this year, an eye has already been cast on the company’s next steps. An expansion into the US market is on the cards, likely through a resale channel, and the release of a larger, pellet-fed extrusion printer with a one metre cubed build volume will follow at some point too.
But first, the UK launch.
“We don’t want to run too quickly,” Barnes finished. “We need to nail the UK launch and the UK market and make sure our customers on home soil are happy with the product. We need to let the market find out what works and what doesn’t work, and work with those key customers, the first cluster, to make sure they have the best experience possible. And we make that product even better going forward.”
This article originally appeared inside TCT Europe Edition Vol. 32 Issue 4 and TCT North American Edition Vol. 10 Issue 4. Subscribe here to receive your FREE print copy of TCT Magazine, delivered to your door six times a year.
