Solder is such a soft material that it would probably find few virtues, and little advantage over thermoplastic materials, if any, to make it worthwhile. Besides, solder requires that one use fluxes and solvents to clean up after the flux.
I would probably put new R&D money in software. The first efforts would probably be to make the software as user friendly as possible and to minimize the number of oops, " doesn't fit the page, cancel print gotta start over" incidents. I have yet to see a CAD application that enables the user to preview printing and avoid wasting paper and time. Without ever having seen an SSYS product, I would venture a bet that it suffers from the same problems. They arise either from the lack of foresight or lack of money on the ppart of management.
The second efforts would probably go into performance optimization and speed enhancements in the stratification part of the software. Usually, it takes many iterations and generations to get performance optimized in complex 3-D numerical algorithms.
Probably, in parallel with the optimization efforts, I would work to make the software perform really well in a parallel processor platform. Such a move would take advantage of the low-cost multiple pentium P200 platforms out there today.
3-d CAD does wonderful things but, I find that there is an almost insatiable need for more performance in the more complex design situations where it really shines. I doubt that a small company like SSYS in a niche market has been able to give their software development the level of effort that would really make the product take off. |
