Posts Tagged ‘Video Interview’
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022
We recently spoke with Lasse Guldborg Staal, CEO, Addifab about his take on his company as well as the state of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry – where it is and where it’s going.
Based in Denmark, Addifab is a global company built on market knowledge and high ambitions. Based on its experience, the company has developed a unique soluble mold tool enabling a process known as Freeform Injection Molding (FIM).
With its innovative Print→Inject→Dissolve process, the Freeform Injection Molding technique is free of any design or material choice limitations. By printing the tool, you can create unseen designs. You can mold unseen products and business potential by injecting virtually any available material before dissolving the molding tool.
 Staal kicked things off by saying, “Addifab was founded in 2014, December, 2014, by me and two other co-founders. We have a background in the hearing aid industry, and decided to found Addifab to create better 3D printers for high-precision manufacturing. Early in the life cycle of the company, we got into injection molding, and we now believe it to be the best possible alternative for injection molders wanting to adopt 3D printing for support of their processes.
MCADCafe Interviews Lasse Guldborg Staal, CEO, Addifab
“Injection molders work with plastic materials and normally use metal tools to produce parts. Metal tools are expensive and time consuming to produce. So, what we do with the 3D printing is to create injection mold tooling that is faster and cheaper, and it’s actually also greener than the conventional metal tooling. If you want to have a low cost injection molded prototype, I think the Addifab technology freeform injection molding is probably your best and most cost effective alternative.”
___________________________________________________________________________________
“At Addifab, we are committed to helping innovators capture the full potential of their ideas, and to bring their products to market faster. With Freeform Injection Molding, we deliver on this commitment; start-ups bring their ideas to market using our technology, and global industry leaders adopt our technology to boost their product development.”
Lasse Staal, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Addifab
___________________________________________________________________________________
“What we’ve tried to do with our technology freeform injection molding is to reduce the costs and reduce lead times. We also want to provide injection molders with a new level of design freedom. And for this reason we have created injection mold tooling that is soluble because if you can dissolve your injection mold tooling, you can create geometries that are impossible to mold with any other method.”
(more…)
Tags: Addifab, additive manufacturing, AM, FIM, Freeform Injection Molding, injection molding, Lasse Staal, Nexa3D, Video Interview
No Comments »
Tuesday, April 12th, 2022
We recently spoke with Frédéric Jacqmin, VP Worldwide Business Development, Spatial Corp. about specific recent developments within Spatial and the industry in general.
From its inception in 1986, Spatial, a Dassault Systèmes company, has developed software components – modular software packages that perform a set of specific and related functions. Software components are also known as software development toolkits (SDKs). This class of software is designed to work as a functional component of a larger application, such as CAD, CAM, CAE, and far beyond. The goal of component software is to standardize the interfaces between software components so that they can work together efficiently.
SDKs are used by almost every CAD/CAM vendor in one form or another. Popular host applications include 3D geometric modeling, data translation, visualization, metrology, toolpath generation, and simulation.
In 1986, Spatial had a primary product: ACIS, the first commercially available 3D geometric modeling kernel. Over time, Spatial added other products to its portfolio that enabled independent software vendors (ISVs), primarily in the engineering software industries, for building host applications. These components include extensions and updates to the ACIS modeler, other design and visualization products, as well as acquisitions in translator technology.
(more…)
Tags: 3D Interoperability, 3D modeling, CAD, CAM, Frédéric Jacqmin, SDKs, software, Spatial, Video Interview
No Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
We recently interviewed Ed Walsh, VP of Global Sales at Sigmetrix for an update on the company, its technologies, and the state of the industry. Like our previous discussion, during the interview, he spoke how the company continues to be focused on helping customer design and build better products through mechanical variation management. “Sigmetrix is unique because it’s not just a software company, but also a service and training company that together provide a comprehensive solutions approach for our customers,” Walsh said.
When asked for a little background on himself and Sigmetrix, Walsh said, “Over the past 20+ years in the industry I’ve witnessed a need that customers have conveyed – they want to get the most out of their technology investments with the most efficient use of their resources. This includes things like having solutions that scale to multiple skill levels in an organization. We address this need by having our cornerstone tolerance analysis tool (CETOL 6 Sigma) that is used for advanced applications because it’s very powerful, but also a 1D tool (EZtol), that’s relatively simple to use. We are seeing an increased demand for tools that teach people geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) as they use them by incorporating training solutions in all of our tools. We feel that that education helps establish a use case, or ability to be used, by that whole spectrum of users”.
Reflecting on his first job, Walsh said, “I worked for a company that was an OEM to heavy equipment manufacturers, such as John Deere, Caterpillar, Case, and New Holland. Mostly John Deere, but we also built operator enclosures for the other companies. The company I worked for itself had, up until me starting there, really did more contract manufacturing and not much design work. At that time, the engineers were doing design work on giant sheets of vellum and using pencils and manual drafting tools. I was part of the first dedicated team of designers using a very early version of Pro/ENGINEER. We were given a general idea for CAD with functional requirements, but no design parameters”.
MCADCafe Interviews Ed Walsh, VP Global Sales, Sigmetrix
“The great part for me was that I had the ability to go out to the pattern maker that was right next to our CAD workstations and say, ‘Hey, I want to make something like this’, and they could mock it up, and I could see how the parts were fitting together and where are they going to fit, and did it make sense from functional and manufacturing standpoints. If we needed something bigger, we could go down to the production line, but it gave me a really good idea of what actually was happening once the design concept left my CAD station. Overall, it was a really good experience for me”.
(more…)
Tags: CETOL Sigma 6, Ed Walsh, EZtol, GD&T, Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing, MBD, MBE, mechanical variation management, PMI, Sigmetrix, tolerance, tolerance analysis, tolerance stack-up, Video Interview
No Comments »
Thursday, April 8th, 2021
With new and innovative techniques for 3D printing/additive manufacturing continuing to emerge, we recently interviewed John Kawola, CEO of Boston Micro Fabrication, a unique company that specializes in (as its name implies), micro components and machines that produce them.
Boston Micro Fabrication (BMF) was co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Nick Fang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Xiaoning He, a serial entrepreneur. BMF manufactures high-precision micro 3D printers. The company’s microArch system uses a 3D printing approach called PμSL (Projection Micro Stereolithography) that leverages light, customizable optics, a high-quality movement platform, and controlled processing technology to produce accurate and precise high-resolution (2μm printing resolution and +/- 10µm tolerance) 3D prints for product development, research and industrial short run production using polymers and composite materials. Today, BMF is the only industrial 3D printing company that can match the quality of high-resolution injection molding and CNC processing.
John Kawola, BMF’s CEO, should be familiar to readers of MCADCafe, as we have written about him and some of the companies he’s been associated with over the years.
“I’ve actually been in additive manufacturing longer than most people, about 20 years. I was at another MIT startup called Z Corp, which was about 20 years ago. That did very well, and sold the company to 3D Systems. I spent about three years helping Ultimaker build their business in North America, but I was interested in getting back into an early-stage company and saw opportunities with BMF”.
“I wanted to get back into the early stages of an additive manufacturing company, but at the same time, I know that it’s a crowded space. There are lots of companies, and many of them are doing the same thing, whether it’s a desktop 3D printer companies or companies producing very large-scale parts. There’s also several metal companies now, too. What I was really looking for was something that was high value, and a portion of the market that had not been well served in the past. That’s really the whole theme behind our company, and so I was excited to join BMF about a year and a half ago”.
(more…)
Tags: 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AM, Boston Micro Fabrication, DPL, John Kawola, Materialize, Projection Micro-Stereolithography, stereolithography, Video Interview
No Comments »
Friday, February 19th, 2021
Since in-person meetings are still not possible, we recently interviewed Blake Teipel, CEO and co-founder of Essentium, an innovative additive manufacturing organization that sets itself apart from the competition in several ways.
At its core, Essentium is comprised of builders, designers, and engineers who have experienced the divide between 3D printing and manufacturing and asked the question, “How can we bridge the gap in manufacturing?
Essentially, Essentium was born out of a desire to open new possibilities for builders and designers. It began in 2013 when four friends gathered around a kitchen table and thought about the possibility of what could be. The initial group wanted to create a new paradigm for using additive manufacturing in the industrial world. Simply put, they wanted to change how things are made.
Essentium exists to help propel its partners forward by addressing additive manufacturing, at scale, by delivering a supply chain solution that entails machines, materials, and processes. With its High Speed Extrusion (HSE) Platform, FlashFuse plasma technology, and its industrial-grade materials, customers are ensured they will receive a no-compromise solution for their needs.
MCADCafe Interviews Blake Teipel, CEO and Co-Founder, Essentium
When asked about some company and technology background, Teipel said, “Essentium is an additive manufacturing solutions company. What that means is that we make very fast 3D printers and we make materials for printing parts, particularly of an industrial variety. We are serving clients in the manufacturing space. You can find Essentium solutions anywhere from planes to trains, to cars, to computers, to shoes, so we’re sort of the stuff behind the stuff in terms of where we fit”.
(more…)
Tags: 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AM, Blake Teipel, Essentium, High Speed Extrusion, HSE, Video Interview
No Comments »
|
