3D Printing Custom Car Audio Speakers

As I was searching to find what can I print for my car, I found Mark and his company. It is an excellent example how 3d printing can help a small company to make custom products. They use 3d printing to make custom car audio speaker boxes, pods and attachments that look vary cool.
They may run out of business when 3d printing spreads and Maker / DIY culture becomes mainstream ;-) Probably not, as they certainly have creative spirit which will enable them to thrive on the market.

3D printed A-pillar speaker pod:



3D printed car subwoofer box:




Here is the company page:

http://www.caraudiofabrication.com/

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Printocracy Quotation Web Application For Your 3D Printing Business

Printocracy started as a quoting aggregator for 3D printing, uploading and quoting parts through iMaterialise, Shapeways, Scuplteo and other services. Soon they found out that there was a needs for small / mid-size service bureaus to quote parts for their own customers and drive traffic to their sites.

They developed an web based application that acts lik a backend CMS for your service bureau. After putting in some information about the 3D printers you have, the materials you offer and the finishes you provide, your customers can upload, repair and get quote for any model they want printed.

After building your shop on the backend through Printocracy manufacturer portal, you can drop one script tag onto your site and it will render a customizable quoting interface right on the page.

They have big plans to put in some quoting parameters that that take into account overhead costs, depreciation, error rates, support material, square footage, etc...

Currently it is in Beta and you can join in while it lasts, with 50 tester accounts for the closed Beta beginning in March. They will go live in next few months. 

Printocracy homepage:

http://www.printocracy.io/

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MakerBot starts to sell their printers in Home Depot. Is this the beginning of the end for Home Depot?

Red Pill Philosophy has an interesting opinion on this business move. The point is that the Home Depot is selling the technology which will drive it out of the business at the end.
Maybe this is unrealistic, because Home Depot and other retailers are adaptable. But there will probably be some measurable impacts on this sector from home digital fabrication soon. Probably the companies that base they business model on overpriced plastic pieces will go have massive losses. Ant there are many of those companies.

See example here: http://diy3dprinting.blogspot.com/2014/01/small-example-of-3d-printing-changing.html

MakerBot source: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2014/07/14/home-depot-diy-meets-miy-make/

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Is Makible in some sort of problems? Will Makibox 3d printer survive?

Is Makible in some sort of operational / financial problems? Will they (continue to) deliver and produce 3d printers?

From Makible press release:

Makible recently reached its third year of business, which is a very happy milestone for us as a startup company. We’ve been through a lot over that time and have been able to keep things moving forward while exploring the space of 3D Printing and small batch manufacturing. The team has been lean and has done a lot with what we have available. Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where we have needed to gather up additional resources in order to continue growing.

The Makible team have been working very hard to restart production of orders and get shipping again. As shown in March, we are able to ship around 800 boxes a month when everything is in full production. We ran into a classic issue of startup hardware companies of cash flow not matching up, leaving us short of funds to complete shipments.

We did see this event coming and worked hard to line up additional funding to keep things running smoothly, but nothing has been finalized and so we have been building consensus amongst our investors to implement a recovery plan.

We have put in place a more robust operations team, and will be appointing a new board and focusing on getting the outstanding orders shipped before moving on to other things. We are currently working on the fundraising to make this happen.

We have an initial consensus from our stakeholders and we thank them for their support, however we are working to wrap up this plan before we can announce the updated shipping schedule of outstanding orders. We know that it is important to be able to clearly set and follow up on expectations on when this will happen, so we will announce the details as soon as we have them.

We would appreciate the continued support of customers who have placed orders to refrain from cancellations because we have most of your parts in stock so now only need to finish the final assembly and shipping.

The team appreciates that you have given us your trust to deliver product to you in a reasonable time period. We will do everything we can to see that commitment through, and hope that we can regain that trust.
Thanks,

Sarah Tong
Director, Makible Ltd.

Source: http://www.makibox.com/blogpost/items/makible_update

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Dell and conflicting marketing messages in 3d printing

So, Dell bought 5000 Zortrax 3d printers from Poland for their own engineers. That surprised even Zortrax. CEO of Zortrax said:

“Frankly speaking, we were surprised that any company, even a company like Dell, wants to place such an order! But after a while we realized how many printers we use in our own office… For a designer who prints a large number of prototypes it is much more useful to use 10 smaller printers on one desk, which operate simultaneously, rather than one with a larger build volume,”

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/22/polish-3d-printer-zortrax-sells-5000-units-to-dell/

After some time they made a deal with MakerBot to sell their Replicators.

Maybe it's only me, but isn't that some sort of conflicting message?

When we buy for us we choose Zortrax, but when we sell to you, we sell you MakerBot.

hmmmmmmm.....

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/sna.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~topic=3d_printing

Sure, average buyer will probably not follow all the news in such a detail ...
Some news sources even reported that Dell will sell Zortrax printers to public ... who knows ...

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Rolls Royce is getting into 3d printing of jet engines (or how the competition is growing in aerospace additive manufacturing industry)

GE is getting heavily into 3d printing, so it is unavoidable that other big companies such as Rolls Royce will have to get in it also in order to remain competitive.  It will be interesting to how this industrial manufacturing technology will develop and what will it mean for technological development and for the labor force.


From i.materialise article:

"The Merlin Project is a 7,120,000 EUR research project that will be conducted by Rolls Royce in conjunction with other aircraft engine manufacturers. The aim of the project is to over the course of three years explore the use of 3D printing to make aircraft engines in order to reduce their environmental impact. The project aims to use 3D printing “to allow environmental benefits including near 100% material utilization current buy to fly ratios result in massive amounts of waste, no toxic chemical usage and no tooling costs, to impact the manufacture of future aero engine components. All of these factors will drastically reduce emissions across the life-cycle of the parts. …. Light-weighting, and the performance improvement of parts will result in reduced fuel consumption and reduced emissions….Impacts will include the development of high value, disruptive AM technologies capable of step changes in performance which will safeguard EU companies in the high value aero engine manufacturing field. AM will significantly reduce waste in an industry where materials require massive amounts of energy and toxic chemicals, in-process toxic chemical usage will be massively reduced, and emissions will drop because of the reduced amount of material involved.”

Source:

http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/rolls-royce-is-going-to-3d-print-aircraft-engines

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/10448147/Rolls-Royce-looks-to-make-jet-engine-parts-with-3D-printers.html

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Cyclopital3D - company using 3d printing to produce for 3d video and photo market

Here is a perfect example of a small company using 3d printers to make highly specialized and customized products for 3d video and photo recording and viewing. Some of them are add-ons for existing digital recording devices some are new innovative products.

Cyclopital3D designs, manufactures and sells custom hardware solutions for use with 3D cameras and camcorders.
Now you can add creative filters, close-up lenses, wide-angle lenses, lens hoods and even widen the stereo base of your 3D camera and camcorder! Increase your creative options and achieve fantastic results! Cyclopital3D makes lens adapters for: Sony, Panasonic, JVC and Fuji cameras and camcorders.We also offer three options for portable 3D viewing of your 3D images and videos.

http://www.cyclopital3d.com/

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Improving production process, reducing cost and shortening time in high-tech production by using 3d printers in Seuffer company

This video shows how German midsize high-tech company is using 3d printing to optimize it's production process, cut costs drastically and reduce time needed for component manufacturing.

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Future business opportunities with additive manufacturing by Christopher Barnatt

Futurologist Christopher Barnatt gives his insights in the future of 3d printing business development and additive manufacturing business opportunities.

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