Makerbot leaders of the new school
History of MakerBot hardware at its Brooklyn HQ.
When MakerBot chiefs look back on the decade, the company's second year in business to its tenth, it’ll exhaust them.
The company came onto the scene in 2009 under the leadership of Bre Petis, Adam Meyer and Zach Smith, quickly becoming the face of the industry as it soured in a period of hype. It had attracted millions of venture capital dollars through 2011 and established a community of consumers who enjoyed the company’s open source approach. A complete 180 degree switch on that policy would be greeted by severe backlash by said community, who, by and large, still haven’t forgiven the New York-based company. Smith, a critic of becoming closed source, left in 2012 before Stratasys acquired the company in 2013. What followed was a muddled few years which saw product development stagnate, three different people occupy the CEO role left by Petis upon the acquisition, and a company that had been left behind as the industry’s focus homed in on manufacturers. The company remained, and still do, successful in the education space, but as other desktop vendors will tell you, there’s room for them on factory floors as well.
After the last 12 months, MakerBot can now tell those stories too. The company has undergone a strategic shift in the back half of the decade that has culminated in the launch of its Method series of 3D printers which, finally exhibiting some perks of being a Stratasys company, is being implemented for tooling applications and end use products.
“I’d say this is the first machine that we’ve come out with that actually shows the benefit of working as a Stratasys company,” MakerBot’s Vice President of Engineering Dave Veisz told TCT at Formnext. “There’s not much organisational alignment there in product development, but we know the people, who our counterparts are, and I think it took a couple of years after the acquisition to really learn how to work together but now it’s great. It’s a totally unfair advantage that I have and I’m happy to use that.”
Makerbot METHOD
MakerBot Method.
The Method was unveiled on December 11th, 2018 - the Method X followed eight months later - and features a Circulating Heated Chamber, designed off the back of Stratasys IP to recirculate hot air inside the build chamber and ensure good layer strength and dimensional accuracy. This is something Stratasys has pushed for a while and, with other IP like precision dissolvable supports and dry-sealed material bays also incorporated into the Method offering, has resulted in a ‘mash up of MakerBot and Stratasys technology.’ It has also opened up MakerBot to the printing of materials that it previously couldn’t process on earlier platforms and, in turn, new users, partners and applications.
MakerBot’s materials approach is two-pronged. It has, these last 12 months, made available PLA, PETG, Tough, Nylon, ABS and ASA filaments, the latter two only for the Method X platform with its 100°C build chamber capabilities. But at Formnext, the company revealed this range is to be supplemented by more specialised grades developed by partnering outfits like Mitsubishi Chemical, KIMYA, Polymaker and Jabil Engineered Materials, all of whom exhibited material products in Frankfurt.
“The idea, here, is that these are more niche materials that we want to provide a solution for but maybe they don’t justify the resources that it takes to spool up, ship and go through our reliability programme,” Veisz explained. “However, if we see that [for example] the [Mitsubishi Chemical] DURABIO material takes off and a lot of people use it then we’ll go through that exercise and we’ll sell it as a MakerBot material or Mitsubishi/ MakerBot material.”
The Mitsubishi DURABIO material highlighted by Veisz here is a bio plastic that is used in the automotive sector for parts like bumpers and dashboard panels. It was exhibited at Formnext alongside Jabil Engineered Materials’ PETg ESD material, KIMYA’s ABS Carbon, PETG Carbon and ABS ESD grades, and Polymaker’s PolyMax PC and PC-FR products.
'We wouldn’t have been able to achieve the Method platform had we not had technical consultation from the giants of FDM at Stratasys.'
These materials, for the moment at least, are to be purchased directly through MakerBot’s partners, as opposed to via the hardware vendor, but have been put through a MakerBot-designed validation process before their launch at Formnext. This process can be completed within a month or two and involves 3D printing a series of parts of escalating difficulties. Once the partner has proved that there are no issues with warping, delamination or other common print defects – basically that the customer will be able to achieve some success with the material – they begin to market it.
For this immediate expansion of specialised materials available on the Method platforms, MakerBot sought some familiar faces.
“These are mostly materials providers that we talked to in the past or have some kind of relationship with, so they were interested straight off the bat. They’ve also been quite excited by it because with some of the features of the machine, like the extrusion system, heated chamber, they’re able to get much better prints. It’s mutually beneficial. They see it as a platform that can handle their materials and we see it as a value add to our platform. We’re meeting with several materials companies to grow this; we really want to have a wide funnel of materials. It’s important, though, that we’re not just throwing materials out there.”
MakerBot
MakerBot Method All Axis
The MakerBot Method X on site at All Axis Robotics.
The roadmap for materials is long, per Veisz, and the aforementioned quartet will continue to work with MakerBot to make sure the portfolio is broad. It will be music to the ears of the likes of engineering consultancy Pensa, design company Smart Design and machine shop All Axis Robotics, all of which have adopted machines from the MakerBot Method series.
All Axis Robotics was revealed as a user of the technology this autumn. The company sits its Method X platform right next to million-dollar CNC machining equipment, additively manufacturing custom end-effectors on-demand for the robotic arms that have been implemented to streamline its manufacturing operations. One application it has achieved significant success with is a robot sander, which requires flat faces, needs to be precise and airtight, and must be durable. It was additively manufactured in ABS, with support structures printed in Stratasys’ SR 30 material, in one piece over the course of 66 hours and 15 minutes. The cost is said to be between $5-10 for a part like this, a huge reduction from the $3-9,000 it would take through CNC machining when taking into account the cost of tooling and time it takes to set up and run the machine, according to All Axis Robotics.
For Veisz, who previously worked for a fire protection equipment company prior to joining MakerBot in 2013, this is the kind of application he likes to see.
“In my manufacturing past, I’ve sent so many things to a machine shop to machine this [part] out of plastic or machine it out of aluminium, when I could have just printed it overnight. Applications like this make me really happy, because this is exactly something that I would have designed out of a metal, split up into parts and spent thousands of dollars on.”
Robot sander part 3D printed in ABS on the Method X by All Axis Robotics.
How times change. He now, despite conceding he does not have great experience in the designing and manufacturing of low-cost plastics, heads up a team of engineers that do. But he is harnessing his experience from a heavier industrial background to help establish the standards MakerBot needs to reach with its product portfolio. The advanced capabilities of its Method series represent a big step up for a company who, for much of its ten years in business, has focused primarily on the consumer and educational markets.
It mightn’t seem like anything ‘new’ when MakerBot launches a Nylon material like it did last month, but for MakerBot, one of the most recognisable 3D printing brands around, it is. Add to that capabilities like the Method’s heated chamber that none of its competitors can offer until at least 2021 when Stratasys’ patent expires, plus partners like Mitsubishi, KIMYA, Jabil and Polymaker enabling high-performance materials, MakerBot looks to be edging back on track.
The company entered the decade dominating the desktop 3D printing market, lost its way in the middle as the industry maintained steady progression, and now, coming out the other side of a long-term reorganisation and strategic shift subsequent to the Stratasys acquisition, is again making progress. Veisz’s team of engineers is working hard to improve the Method platforms further, looking to develop new intellectual property. Patent applications have, more than once, been knocked back on the basis such technology already exists. But thanks to a deal struck in 2013, the people whose names are on those already-granted patents are just a phone call away. It’s those conversations that are helping to establish MakerBot in more professional, more industrial, markets.
“Every issue that we hit, that we don’t solve pretty quickly or don’t see the light within a week or so, then I send emails, I pick up the phone, and there’s a handful of really experienced engineers that were essentially instrumental in the invention of FDM (fused deposition modelling) that I can talk to. It’s been hugely advantageous for us,” Veisz emphasised. “MakerBot is great at taking a technology and making it accessible; really good design, good UX (user experienced), software implementations, designing for low cost. But we wouldn’t have been able to achieve [the Method platform] had we not been able to get technical consultation from some of the giants of FDM at Stratasys.”
