At Formnext 2019 in Frankfurt, Germany, Desktop Metal unveiled the Shop System, the world’s first metal binder jetting system designed for machine shops and metal job shops. The system prints end-use metal parts with unparalleled speed, print quality, and productivity (view photos in gallery).
Starting at $150,000, the high-speed, single-pass print engine introduces high-quality binder jetting to an entirely new market of machine shops and metal fabrication job shops, a nearly $180 billion global industry.
With the Shop System, shop owners can eliminate many of the constraints previously seen with traditional manufacturing methods like CNC machining and tap into new opportunities to reduce their costs and increase revenue.
The platform includes a printer, powder station, and furnace, and can integrate with existing shop operations. Users can print end-use metal parts that span a variety of industries, including manufacturing, tooling, automotive, consumer, electronics, and marine, with the quality, surface finish and tolerances needed to co-exist with machining - up to 10 times faster than laser powder bed fusion and at a fraction of the cost per part.
The Shop System is able to print a batch of complex parts every six to 12 hours, enabling tens up to hundreds of near-net-shape metal parts to be printed each day - as much as 70 kg of steel per day.
Because parts on the Shop System print fully supported in their powder bed and feature hand-removable sintering setters, users will avoid hours of labor machining or wire EDM off support structures typical of laser-based systems. This in turn, reduces the total number of manufacturing steps needed, increasing shop productivity and capacity without requiring additional headcount or machinist hours.
With a spot size of 16 microns per drop, 1600 native single pass DPI and distributing up to 670 million drops per second, the Shop System is the highest resolution single pass binder jetting printing system on the market - delivering 33 percent higher resolution than comparable single pass binder jetting systems.
Also offering the smallest droplet size for single pass binder jetting systems at approximately 1pL and automated drop multiplexing up to 6pL, the system allows for superior surface finish, bleed control and rich feature detail at high speed.
The system’s 70,000 nozzles per line have built in five times redundancy - 25 percent higher than other single pass binder jetting systems - to help to avoid jet-outs resulting in enhanced quality and reliability for shop owners. A revolutionary recoating system delivers unprecedented powder bed uniformity for ultra high accuracy parts.
With variable configurations (4L, 8L, 12L and 16L), the Shop System is designed to scale to each shop’s throughput, including:
- Mixed-volume production of various geometries
- Production of various part geometries simultaneously without the need for multiple setups.
- Production of low volume batches
- Cost effective production of low volume batches of complex parts due to elimination of tooling.
- Mid-volume production of hundreds of parts per day
- Production of hundreds of near-net-shape parts every day with dramatically reduced labor costs and expanded geometric flexibility.
General availability for the Shop System is Fall 2020. Pricing starts at $150,000 for the 4L (350 x 220 x 50mm) and scales to $225,000 for the 16L version (350 x 220 x 200mm).