- My name is Jordan Myerberg,
I'm a co-founder and CTO of Desktop Metal.
And what we've done is
developed and launched here
a 3D printer, for metal,
that is safe and capable
of printing metal parts
in your office.
(synthesizer music)
A lot of the state of
the art metal 3D printers
use a powder bed, powder
bed fusion technique.
Problem with powder bed is
that it's messy, it's unsafe
and sometimes you have
to suit up completely,
to operate with a machine
and with the powder.
We wanted to get away from that.
It's expensive, it's dangerous,
it's not as accessible
to everyone as say, FDM printing.
So we took a very similar
approach to an extrusion technique
to bind the powder into a
polymer matrix, extrude it,
and then consolidate it in a furnace.
Everybody knows FDM
printing, understands the
techniques and limitations
that that process has and
it's very easy to operate.
We've designed the software
from the ground up.
We've started with a
slicer and the technique
that's used to print the
part, to support the part
layer by layer, were telling the part,
the operator the best
way to build that part.
That is then transferred through
the cloud to the furnace.
The furnace knows exactly
what has been printed
and therefore knows the profile
of which it needs to
center the blobject as.
That creates a solid
part when you print it.
Once you come take it out
of the furnace, the part
can lift right off its supports.
(mid tempo jazz music)
So this is a step towards
direct manufacturing.
We're talking about a
prototyping process here
where you can develop a functional part
with the same materials
that you're gonna use
in mass production.
And then we've launched
the production machine
that you can then take
those same materials
and launch into mass production.
Printing process is
gonna be competitive with
high volume manufacturing processes like
metal injection molding for instance.
So what you're seeing
here, the studio system,
is not scalable to mass production.
We're talking about one to
100 parts, so low volume.
The Desktop Metal production
system is 100 times faster
and it's designed to
compete with the high volume
manufacturing processes
that are commonly used in
consumer electronics or in
the automotive industry.
It's designed to be a
mass production build box.
So in other words,
printing hundreds of parts
nested on top of one another.
Not hundred of print beds,
but layers, so multiple layers
with multiple parts on each layer,
separated, on top of each other and then,
when you take the parts
out of the printer,
you put them into the furnace
in the same kind of way, on layers,
of kiln furniture and the
parts are consolidated.
Very similar to the way
that metal injection molding
is done, with the same materials
as metal injection molding.
So if you're a customer
and you want to become more
flexible in your designs,
you wanna use that in your manufacturing.
You don't have to change your alloys,
you don't have to change your systems.
You're using 316 or 17 four stainless now,
you can use that exact same
material in our printers.
