3D printing is a powerful tool, that has achieved some incredible things, and still has vast potential yet to be tapped into. At Formnext 2023, the TCT content team asked the question: “What is the best thing about 3D printing?” and there was a common theme amongst the majority of the answers, design freedom.
Monica Smith – Product Line Manager Metal Systems, EOS
“The best thing about 3D printing? Freedom, freedom of design.”
David Moodie – Founder and CEO, Foundry Lab
“Geometric freedom.”
Frederic Larouche – General Manager, GE Additive
“It’s really all of the new designs, that are giving superior performance.”
Kartik Rao – Strategic Marketing Director, Additive Industries
“The amazing designs, it has to be.”
Norbert Gall – Head of Marketing and PR, Lithoz
“I think its seamlessly limitless design freedom. I would say that it really opens up a new dimension of building things that previously was not possible and was unachievable.”
Joel Telling – 3D Printing Nerd
“The best thing about 3D printing, at least in my eyes is the ability to make something. It’s really great when you’ve got yourself a technology that lets you make something intricate, something that you’re proud of, something that you’ve designed yourself, when you don’t have the skillsets to make things in other artistic ways.”
Cora Leibig – Founder and CEO, Chromatic 3D Materials
“Short run production, no capital costs, its fantastic.”
Alain Dupont – Chief Commercial Officer, GE Additive
“The future. Simple as that.”
Andrew Sink – Senior Applications Engineer, Carbon
“The ability to compress time right? The ability to go through multiple iterations really, really quickly, and get a good feel for what works and what doesn’t, that’s just such a big benefit of using additive manufacturing.”
Francesco Pantaleone – Executive Vice President of Business Development, Roboze
“The best thing about 3D printing, for me personally, has always been the ability to showcase and materialise things fast. I think the largest value we can deliver as an industry is speed, being able to produce faster, being able to be more agile in a lot of different environments, like sometimes we try to fit additive manufacturing into manufacturing, maybe forcing it too much, while we need to think of manufacturing really, in additive, being an enabler of the renaissance of manufacturing in that sense, where supply chain struggles. But as well, better ways to produce cars are enabled by the technology.”
