A buyer's guide to ordering 3D Printed parts:

Having worked with many OEMs quite a lot of whom are new to purchasing 3D Printed or additively manufactured parts the process for ordering can be a little different to ordering machined parts.  There are some prerequisites that are slightly different to obtain a quote, this guide aims to simplify and demystify the process.  The guide is broken down to give fundamentals and nice to haves for each section.

Required information to quote 

Type of print required: For machining a part, as a minimum, a drawing and material are supplied and the machine shop will determine how to make the part. 3D Printed parts will need to be specified which type of print.  The main types are as follows for polymers:

• Powder bed fusion (including MJF, SAF and SLS)
• FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling)
• SLA or DLP (Resin printing)

Hopefully as a buyer your specifiers will have selected a process type. If not please feel free to get in contact and we can advise on this.

Material:  Most commonly for PBF this is Nylon (Pa12)

Quantity: pricing does vary with quantity as there is time spent on each print file for orientation, placement and fixing.  The more copies of this file that are made the cheaper it will be as these costs are amortised over a greater number of parts. In addition, fewer bigger orders require less admin overhead than many smaller orders.

Print file: This is a must have.  Service Bureaus do not like to quote based on a drawing alone.  This is because our systems are set up to read 3D files and quote based on a variety of parameters that can be difficult to pull from a drawing such as part volume, surface area and bounding box.  The most common file formats (look at the characters in the name after the “.”)  used are as follows:

• STEP or STP – A well used file format that contains high resolution 3D print information
• STL – Direct print format, a slightly historical format that can be a little low resolution if not prepared carefully.
• 3MF – A newer format that rapidly becoming popular due to the small file sizes for transfer and the high resolution information contained.

Finishing: As with machining parts various finishes can be added to the raw printed part.  Commonly these will be one or more of the following:

• Dye (usually Black but we do run other colours).
• Polish (usually carried out on dyed parts to enhance the colour and bring a light lustre to the parts.
• Vibro-Polish (subtractive process that removes outer material to yield smooth parts).
• Vapour polish (Fully seals the surface of printed parts and reduces the textural roughness)
• Paint
• Cerakote (Thin film ceramic “paint”)
• Screen Print (please supply artwork in AI or PDF format)

Post Production: (generally parts with these services need to be quoted manually)

• Thread tapping
• Threaded inserts
• Bonding
• Assembly

Nice to haves:

• PDF Drawing: This can be useful for us to check printed sizes, add threaded inserts etc.
• Indication of A-Surface.  This will be an area of the part that will be most visible to your users.  With this information we can aim to achieve the best possible finish on that area.
• Toleranced features. If no drawing is available it is useful to indicate features that are critical as during orientation and nesting we can aim for the best result.

On-line or Quoted?

For a rapid non-binding quote of a smaller number of items please head over to i-am3d.com

For a production quote please send files over to contact@incrementalengineering.com either by email or a file transfer service such as WeTransfer or DropBox. Alternatively, you can share a Goggle drive or OneDrive folder with us.

Quote / Order check list

• Process (MJF or SLS)?
• Material (Nylon - Pa12)?
• Print file (STP / STL / 3MF)?
• Finishes (Dye / Polish / Vibro / Vapour)?
• Post Processes (Threads)?
• Quantity?
• When (Let us know the urgency, hint: the longer the leadtime the cheaper the parts)?

If you have any questions or head scratching moments please do not hesitate to get in touch either by phone or email.