Custom Tips for Rapid Prototyping

One of the questions we encounter a lot is “how should I paint my stereolithography parts?” That is a good question.  As you may be aware, a stereolithography part is created using a vat of liquid UV-curable photopolymer resin and a UV laser to build part one layer at a time. This creates a “stair-stepping” feature in the [...]

So what is Design for Manufacturing? Why do I care? 
These are a couple questions we hear in the development phase of a new product.  The brief description according to wikipedia.com is that DFM is the general engineering art of designing products in such a way that they are easy to manufacture. The basic idea exists in [...]

Quickparts.com (www.quickparts.com) has launched a new video series starring Johnny Quickparts. He will be sharing his adventures in product development. Johnny is the star engineer in Better Be Running! Tools to Drive Design Success, an “almost” best selling book on product development and manufacturing.
A video series with a common character is a very unique approach [...]

Recently there was a great piece wrote by David Maltz providing tips on selecting a rapid prototyping system.  The piece included some great information on the differences between the systems and benefits of each system.  I found the most useful information was the ilustration of the various finishes a user can expect from each machine.  [...]

We recently launched a new alternate rapid prototyping process at Quickparts.  Machined Plastic Prototyping (MPP). 
What is Machined Plastic Prototyping?
MPP is a subtractive rapid prototyping fabrication process for creating plastic prototypes. The plastic material is removed from a solid block by Computer Numerical Control (CNC) equipment that cuts away the unwanted material.
The MPP process is offered [...]

The Crittercam was envisioned and invented by marine biologist and filmmaker Greg Marshall. National Geographic introduced the first generation of the Crittercam back in 1987 and has continually been improving it. The Crittercam has been used in March of the Penguins, National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles and many other National Geographic DVDs.
With this new version, Greg [...]

Yesterday, we launched the new email instant quoting for custom designed parts and rapid prototypes.  Quickparts was the first to provide online instant quoting for rapid prototyping and that has always mainstay foundation for the company.  But we heard from our customers that we needed to make it easier for them to start the quoting [...]

A very important step in producing a high quality prototype is to design with the process tolerance in mind. Each rapid prototype process has build tolerances that will affect the accuracy of the CAD model provided. If tolerances are not designed into the model, parts will not fit together as intended, wasting time and money.
The [...]

In the beginning before Rapid Prototyping….there was the evolution of 3D CAD.
CAD was first developed over 20 years ago with the development of personal computers. The first company to become a leader in the CAD world was Autodesk with a product called AutoCAD. This was the first software product that allowed the user to produce [...]

Standard Tessellation Language (STL) is a file format native to the Stereolithography software created by 3D Systems. This file format is supported by many CAD software packages and is widely used for rapid prototyping and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM).
STL is a facet-based representation that approximates surface and solid entities only with triangles (i.e., STL files describe [...]