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Technology Stocks : 3-d Systems (TDSC)
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To: Will who wrote (17)2/3/1997 12:44:00 AM
From: Brian VanHiel   of 132
 
Will,

Yes the brittleness of SLA has contributed to the popularity of FDM. Other arenas in which FDM is better vs. SLA are cost and ease of use (non-toxic, etc.). FDM cannot compete with SLA on part quality. Actua is priced similarly to FDM (I think they are both in the 50's) and produces parts faster and with better surface finish. The trade-off for the Actua is that the parts are made out of a thermowax which has a soapy consistancy. I think all of these machines have a niche:

SLA-high accuracy masters.
FDM-semi-usable one-off prototypes.
Actua-Fast visualization.

If your building a prototype for visualization then the material isn't that important. I think people bought FDM because it was cheaper, not because they were going to build stuff with the output. While FDM parts are stronger they still do not accurately replicate the end material and so are useless for mosts tests (like UL approval etc.). I don't have any data, but many (about 1/2) of the prototypes we built when I worked at Compression (a service bureau) were intended to be masters for RTV tooling so the customer could get a group of prototypes for testing. The rest would have been for visulaization and a few (built on a SLS machine) were used directly as functional prototypes. By the way, has DTM gone public yet?

Later,

Brian
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