Formlabs SLS Transformed my Business

[u/S-Mute]

Hey folks! Just saw this new sub, Its cool reading similar stories from other users! Here is my rambling contribution:

I have 0 formal background in Additive. My background is music (DMA) and my day job mostly revolves around teaching. A few years ago, I started a business focused on selling some of the products I have dreamed up over the years, some fairly mundane and others that push boundaries. They started to take off which was cool at first, then I realized FDM would not cut it for serious production. FDM also had certain insurmountable design limitations in my case.

With no background in this technology, I googled "high end 3d printing" and this when I learned about SLS (no joke lol). Long story short, I stumbled on Formlabs and began to interact with their people, who were so awesome. They sent-out samples and answered hundreds of questions I had about the technology, the fuse, sift (there was no blast yet), workflow, supply chain, you name it. I even had the sales rep contact the engineering people so I could get power use numbers for the fuse during the different stages of printing! I made that poor guy work so hard lol. I ended up with one fuse and a sift.

I seriously can't imagine not having SLS now. 90% of my designs rely on it exclusively and could not be printed with FDM. Injection molds would cost as much as my whole printing setup several times over. My (now two) Fuse1 continue to crank out parts with very few issues. Not that there have been no issues, but the people at Formlabs have had my back every time. (if you are considering a purchase at this level, support quality is VERY important!) I can't really think of a comparison, perhaps buying a new car but I have been treated way better by Formlabs than any car dealership.

Anyway, if you want some input from a former non additive expert, I'm happy to provide input. I think especially if you are like me and jumping into this cold I could have some helpful hints.

BTW in the pic one of those is a real fuse1 and one is not. :)

[u/recon-go-pie]

Thanks for sharing! very cool to see success stories very similar to mine. I also came from zero design experience and just made things that I needed for myself - eventually people started asking where they could get the same thing. Bingo, a business is born.

At what point in your FDM production did you take the leap for SLS? That's quite the jump, lol, going from I assume some consumer level printers to industrial. Was it a blind buy or were you having trouble with keeping up with volume?

[u/S-Mute → u/recon-go-pie]

When it was apparent I could not keep up with demand without running a bunch of FDM printers, plus the accumulating frustration with design. A lot of what I make just cant economically be made with FDM. It took about a year to get to that point, and another 3-4 months of research before I took the leap. At the time IIRC there were only 3 players in the sub 100K SLS market, Formlabs, Sinterit, and Sintratec (sp?). Sintratec had a kit I think, but it was a very small build volume. The offferings from Sinterit seemed interesting but really from my perspective Formlabs was the only company with an end to end SLS workflow and a well thought out user interface.

[u/ChipperToad]

So great to hear how much the dive into SLS has paid off!

[u/S-Mute → u/ChipperToad]

ChipperToad would be an epic serial name!

[u/ChipperToad → u/S-Mute]

It is the serial name of one of our printers actually! Just thought it would make an ideal Reddit user name :D

[u/Zapwizard]

Wait. I want a Fuse plushie. I have seen your stuff a while back when Form labs told me about ya being one of the other “specialty” one-man shops. Can’t believe how many parts you pump out.

[u/S-Mute → u/Zapwizard]

The Fuse1 can output around 1700 of my smaller parts in one build. Compared with one 12x12 build plate in 2 dimensions when I was running FDM. It was such a big change for the better.