Merit3D

One of these printers has googly eyes, and the one next to it goes by "Mega Man," written in marker on the door. You get fond of the machines you work beside every day. Keeping them all busy is the hard part.

A survey out this month found that close to half of smaller US manufacturers (under $50 million in sales) are running under 70% of their capacity, even though most manufacturers say they have more orders waiting than last year. The company behind it thinks buyers just keep calling the shops they've always used.

If you've only ever priced a part with your usual supplier, you can price it with us in a couple minutes, no phone call: https://merit3d.com/quote/small-factories/facebook

Alaska Guide Creations is a Price business too, and we print their bow hangers. That's the clip that carries a bow on a pack. The logo and the Made in USA line come right off the printer with it, 128 to a plate.

A mold for a part like this would cost somewhere between $15,000 and $80,000 and take 8 to 16 weeks before the first one came out. Skipping that means they can change the design whenever they want and order what they'll actually sell.

Run the numbers on your part: https://merit3d.com/quote/bow-hangers/facebook

No drawing. No CAD file. Often no idea who originally made the thing. Just an object, and somebody who needs more of them.

So we measure it, rebuild it in CAD, and print it.

Have a part and no file? That is a project we run most weeks.

You can see every layer on this one, and a couple of loose strings too. It's a wheel for a three-wheeled wheelchair, printed back when we still had a large format machine, and it went through a lot of versions here. About four hours a print, then try it, tweak it, print it again.

A design contest that opened at the end of September is built around this kind of work. People with disabilities named 24 real needs, some as ordinary as brushing teeth or putting on socks, and designers are making files for them. The best ones get shared free with volunteers in over 70 countries.

These days we print in SLA resin and SLS nylon. If you're working on an assistive device that fits those, you can price it here: https://merit3d.com/quote/wheelchair-wheel/facebook

Nobody buys a cooler because of this part. The cooler does not work without it.

Hinge pins for HappiOutdoor, 300 to a build plate, with the logo printed into every cap.

This is most of what a contract manufacturer actually makes. Not the product on the shelf, the piece inside it that has to fit a hole within a few thousandths and survive being slammed a few thousand times. When it works, no customer ever thinks about it. When it fails, it is the whole review.

We like these jobs. The spec is unambiguous, the volume is real, and the part either fits or it does not.

Have a component inside somebody else's product? https://merit3d.com/quote/cooler-hinges/facebook

Every one of these textures cost the same to make.

Knife handle scales, 24 to a build. Smooth, stippled, marbled, skeletonized, and a few we were just curious about.

On a molded part, surface texture is cut into the steel. It gets quoted, it gets approved, and then you live with it for the life of the tool. Changing your mind means a new tool or a compromise.

Here it is a parameter. A maker can run six textures in one build, hand them to actual customers, and find out which one sells before committing to anything.

That is the part small brands underuse: printing is not only cheaper at low volume, it lets you stop guessing.

See what a textured run costs: https://merit3d.com/quote/knife-scales/facebook

The face of this paddle is mostly holes, and that is the whole point.

Thousands of honeycomb cells, every one open front to back. A two-part mold cannot produce that, because there is nothing for the tool to pull away from. The shape has to be built up in layers or it does not exist at all.

The second paddle on the table has a coarser cell. Same file, one parameter changed, printed the same afternoon.

Got a geometry that tooling keeps rejecting? https://merit3d.com/quote/pickleball-paddle/facebook

Medals for the Utah High School Cycling League.

Made and finished here, across places and divisions. There are several designs in that pile, not one blank with a different number stamped on it. On a printer, a new version is just a new file.

Awards for a field this size normally get ordered overseas a season ahead in one shape, because a couple hundred medals is nowhere near enough to justify a mold. Printing here means a design can change between seasons, or between divisions, with no mold in the conversation.

Made in the same state the races are held in.

Got a small run that tooling says no to? https://merit3d.com/quote/cycling-medals/facebook

We printed a cinder block, which is a strange thing to do on purpose.

It was a test piece. Eighteen hours, three millimeter layers, carbon fiber reinforced polypropylene, one to a plate on the large format machine, just to see how it handled something big and blocky.

The lesson was not the one we went looking for. A cinder block is already shaped the way we spend most of our time teaching people to shape parts. Hollow where it can be, webbed where the load runs, no material anywhere that is not doing a job. Block makers got there a hundred years ago without any help from software.

Most of our design work is pulling material back out of parts that were drawn solid because a mold could make them that way. The block never had that problem.

Sometimes the optimization is already sitting in the supply yard.

Price a large part: https://merit3d.com/quote/large-format/facebook

Nobody has touched this plate yet, and there are hours of work still ahead of it.

The coating has to come off. The parts have to finish curing. Supports get cut, and every piece gets looked at by a person before it is allowed to ship. None of that happens unattended.

When people compare a printed part to a molded one they compare machine time, because machine time is the number that is easy to find. The hours after the machine stops are where the real cost sits, and they are the hours most quotes never mention.

We price them in, because somebody has to do them.

Run the numbers on your own part: https://merit3d.com/quote/wet-build/facebook