Beyond the Printed Finish

In this episode, the hosts, Justin and Dustin, discuss the importance of considering factors like time, cost, and quality when deciding on the finishing of 3D printed parts. They introduce Paul DeWys, the owner and sales engineer of Forerunner 3D, a service bureau in western Michigan. Paul shares the background of his company's transition from SLA to HP MJF printing and the challenges they faced with limited color options. He explains how they discovered and adopted Cerakote, a ceramic-based coating from the firearms industry, for 3D printed parts. The discussion emphasizes the balance between achieving a perfect finish and meeting the practical needs of customers who prioritize functionality over aesthetics.

Transcript

EP3 
[00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of the AM Insider podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Dustin Klemken. I'm really excited about this next speaker and podcast that we're going to be diving into. But Justin I'm curious, you know, this is kind of your brainchild here. I'm curious, you know, what, what spurred you to kind of.
Explore down this topic and, and what makes you interested in this subject? And I'll let you kind of elaborate on what we're hoping to cover today. Yeah, absolutely. So, well, what made me interested in the topic today is going to be about finishing and specifically Sarah coat you know, working at HP for about seven years, we've seen many different finishes that parts have gone through.
And specifically painting, you know, when you have customers come and ask about painting there, they talk about how much work it is to go through that. And then I would say about maybe 5 years ago, we, we had seen a customer actually Cerakote some parts [00:01:00] and like, wow, man, this looks, this looks great.
Right? It looked like a powder coated part. And just seeing the durability of, of the parts in the, in the conditions that that particular customer's applications are undergoing. It's like, this is something that we need to start investigating and looking at. And it would some, it was something that I suggested to multiple people, but throughout the years, it's been, you know, seems like it's been developing and it's One of those things where you know, there needs to be more knowledge around it and the information needs to be spread.
So I think that's sort of the basis of the topic today is, you know, they're coding parts and how does that work? Is it expensive? What kind of. Durability do you get out of it? And, and our guest today Paul DeWise from Forerunner3D if you ever go check out his website, I mean, it's the most amazing videos that you see within LinkedIn of all the different testing procedures.
And we've, we've. Share those with many people, but it's always fascinating to see all the setups that he does. But yeah, what do [00:02:00] you, what do you think Dustin? Yeah, you know, so I think it's a great topic because it's something that frankly, I don't find a lot of people have experience or even know exists out there.
So I'm excited to dig into that, but even more generally I think this is going to be an interesting discussion because a lot of times people will, will come to me and say, Hey, Dustin, you know, I want to make this amazing part or look what this person did and which is great. But I always think about the logistics of what it took to get to that point.
You know, how much cost, how many different pieces of machines and equipment. And so the question or discussion I have a lot of times with people is just because you can, should you do it? And, and where's that fine line between good enough versus perfect. And it's not meant to, you know, poo poo anyone's approach.
Cause there's certainly times when that's appropriate, but I think sometimes people get so caught up in the, the million dollar looking part that they, they expect that that always has to be the case. And [00:03:00] so I'm kind of curious to explore that with, with Paul today to kind of figure out how he works with his customers and clients to help.
Guide them to the best solution considering time and money and quality and all that you run into pretty often, Justin. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's always a question of how hard is it to do and what is the cost? And basically, like we said, with any sort of finish or any, even printing the part itself, it's like.
Does it make sense to do it? And should you do it? And I think that's a, a good starting point to, to invite Paul to come in and give us a little bit of background about who he is, where he came from and forerunner 3d and, and let's, let's get into Cerakote and finishing and the capabilities of what forerunner does.
Guys, thank you so much for the opportunity to come on here and chat with you today. For those listening who don't know me, my name is Paul DeWise. I'm the owner and sales engineer here at 4Runner 3D printing. We are a service [00:04:00] bureau and additive manufacturer here in western Michigan, kind of right by Lake Michigan here.
And yeah, we you know, we, we, we started out in the SLA space you know, probably about seven years ago and pretty quickly moved into HPMJF printing. And the reason we moved into MJF printing is we saw, you know, The possibility of, of end use parts that could be made with, with, you know, the HP product.
So, you know, we were, we kind of came into the industry right as we were sort of shifting from, it's a prototype it's, you know, maybe you're doing some low
volume production, but you're probably using cast urethane or something like that. And there was a real sea change happening of like directly 3d printed parts being used in end use applications.
You know, we, we got into it and, and we started having a lot of success with it. But you know, we worked off the Henry Ford color system. You could have any color you wanted for your part, as long as it was black, because black dye was the only thing that would [00:05:00] really, you know, take to an HP part at that point in time.
And of course, you know, customers, they, they, they want different colors. They want different finish options. And so, you know, I've got a, a long history in the firearms world. And so I was familiar with a product called Cerakote. So Cerakote is a thin coat, a ceramic based coating that comes out of the firearms world is used for a lot of different things, but that's kind of where it started.
And and it's, it's extremely durable coating and and it goes on extremely thin and that was, that was kind of the two criteria that we really had when we were looking for a coating. You know, we'd experimented with like automotive 2k paint and it works and you can make really nice looking parts, but, uh, It's not terribly durable and it you know, it, it can add considerable thickness to your parts, especially if you're going for like a high gloss look, or if you have to do a bunch of primer work before you put it on the part.
And we kind [00:06:00] of started, you know, basically what happened is I, I, you know, bought a Cerakote starter kit and we literally just got it in house and we just started experimenting and we were literally using like the oven in our break room for like curing parts after we had coded them. Like it was, it was just OSHA violations as far as the eye could see, but pretty quickly.
We're like, holy crap, this coding on a HP nylon 12 part is just incredible. And for our, for our type of customers you, you would brought up at the beginning, you know, that there's kind of a Delta between like good and perfect when it comes to part finishing and for us, like. You know, perfect is the enemy of done like, like we, we, our customer based isn't, you know, we're not doing trade show parts.
We're not doing stuff that needs to look injection molded. These are end use parts. The customers are buying 3d printed parts. They [00:07:00] understand, you know, Hey, it's going to have a grainier finish. It's going to have, you know, potentially, you know, some, some cupping or layer lines or things like that. They're okay with that.
But. They need it to be OD green, they need it to be Kydex tan, they need it to be armor black. And so, you know, Cerakote puts a really, really nice coating that will last and hold up to a lot of abuse onto a 3D printed part. And for our customer base, they just ate it up. They just, they thought it was the greatest thing ever.
And so, we went all in and I sent a couple of my guys out to Nick Industries, which is the parent company of Cerakote. Sent them out for Cerakote training. We were one of the very, very first 3D printing companies in the world to go to get that training. And then from there we started, you know, doing Cerakote on 3D printed parts.
And like I said, customers have just gone nuts, gone nuts for it. And so, and now we even Cerakote parts for other 3D printing service bureaus that don't [00:08:00] have it in house. So so that's kind of the, the story of how we got into Cerakote. Well, that was quite an intro, Paul. That's a really good story.
Really interesting. Before we keep peeling back the onion a little bit I just want to be cognizant of the people who are newer to the additive space that might not have as much experience as all of us here. So given again, that Justin mentioned, you have such a great website kind of. Going over a lot of different things.
Could you just give like a airplane view of summary of. All the different types of post processing and finishing that you can do with, with additive manufacturing. I know you probably won't be able to cover it all, but just for people, some sense for what's possible. Cause I don't think people always think that you can go beyond just printing a part.
Yeah, yep. So, um, you know, obviously there is at this point quite a range of 3D printing technologies. [00:09:00] It kind of breaks up into two main categories in my opinion when you're talking about polymer printing. We're not even going to talk about metal printing. Just leave that to the side. Yeah. You've got, you've got powder bed.
And then you have kind of the SLA, FDM DLP PolyJet kind of world. And and then on the powder bed side, you've got SLS and MJF and and a couple other different technologies, but they're all basically powder bed. And so, you know, talking about the powder bed side of things you've, you know, you print your part.
You pull it out of the, the, the, the build cart or the powder cake. And the first step is you need to bead blast it because you need to strip all that excess powder off the outside of your part. There'll always be some residual powder on the part after printing. And so you bead blast your part and now you have a raw, a raw part basically.
And now you, this is where your, your optionality begins. So the, the basic finish that we [00:10:00] apply. Would be dyed black. So we, we have a dye machine. We use a custom built machine and then we also have a Gerbau DY 130. And then we just use RIT ProLine black which is a powder based actually clothing dye, but it works great on on nylon parts specifically also TPU parts.
Doesn't work at all on polypropylene though, for, for just a heads up for anyone listening. Yeah. And so what was that? Chemical resistance, right? Very chemically resistant. That's the whole point. That's the whole point with the polypro. So so anyway, so our, our standard finish in house, our standard finish, if you, if you order a part from Forerunner.
We quote our parts dyed black and quite honestly, we don't even really charge extra for it. It's so automated and so cheap that we feel that dyeing the parts black make them look really nice. And and so we, our standard is to dye parts black. We can leave them gray, [00:11:00] but, but we have to, you have to request us to leave them gray, actually.
Hmm. And then another option is you can take and you can vapor smooth the parts. So you can basically use a machine and a chemical and it remelts the outside of your parts to fully seal them. And it gives it a smoother finish. Some vapor smooth companies will tell you it's an injection molding like finish.
I will argue it's not even remotely close to an injection molding finish. Other than the fact that it is glossy. And, you know, it's still not perfectly smooth, but it will fully seal the part. It will make the part a little bit glossy and a little bit smoother and lower friction. So there's, there's that option.
And then there's also, uh, shot peening. So there's a couple companies that make automated shot peening equipment. Quite honestly, if you do a little bit of Googling, you can figure out what media they're using and you can just do it yourself in a hand blasting cabinet and save yourself like 40 grand.
That's how we do it. And so you can shot [00:12:00] peen, which basically takes and uses a, a hard spherical media to pound on the surface of the printed part and to give it kind of a semi gloss look. But it also helps the parts from
scratching. So, when you, when you get a part off of an MJF or an SLS machine and let's say you dye it black, you can then take your fingernail and like rub it on the outside of the part and it will leave.
And it's not like a scratch, like in paint, but what you're doing is you basically have a surface finish. That's that's at a microscopic level, just a bunch of, you know, nylon particles that are all sort of melted together. So you have like an exposed face with a bunch of high points of those nylon particles.
So when you take your fingernail. And scratch along it, you're really just, you're just like basically deforming those high spots. And so you can leave a mark in the part. So shot peening basically goes in [00:13:00] and just deforms all those, those high points as in a, in a bulk operation. So it makes the parts a lot harder to scratch.
Vapor smoothing basically does the same thing. But like I said, vapor smooth is more of a gloss, whereas a shot peening is more of a semi gloss look. So those are kind of like your three options. After you were to, you know, dye the parts and now with dye, there are certain processes and techniques for using different colors of dye.
We don't do any, any color other than black, so I can't speak in great detail to those, but there's companies like Dimansion or the Dyeformer machine. They both have formulations of dye that will, will do colored MJF parts and colored SLS parts. So that's in there too, but I, we don't do it. I can't really speak to it.
So now moving kind of up the chain again. So, so we've printed our parts, we've stripped the powder off. We potentially have applied a finish like, you know, vapor smoothing or shot peening. [00:14:00] Now we can look at coatings. And so with coatings and in our business, you really have two options. You've got Cerakote and you've got like 2k automotive paint.
And so with Cerakote. I like to call it like a wet coat, powder coat, because like with powder coat, you bake it on now there are air cure versions of Cerakote in our opinion, they're not that great. They're not nearly as durable. So I'm going to just talk about the actual oven cured version, which is H series Cerakote.
I think it's H Series. I think C Series is air cure. I always get them mixed up. If you Google it, you'll figure it out. But H Series I believe is the oven cured version. So you use a normal automotive like spray paint, like spray gun and it's a two part. So there's an A and a B part and you mix them together.
And then that is a catalyst. So there is a pot life like that, that once you mix them, there's a, the, the, the stopwatch is running and eventually that material will, will be done. Like you won't be able to spray it anymore. It'll [00:15:00] cure up. And so you start applying it and you spray it on just like automotive paint.
There is definitely a technique to it. Now I'm not our Saracote guy. I have a very, very, very excellent Saracote tech who's awesome at it. I don't understand all the techniques and everything, but there's definitely a technique to it. And that is why if you're thinking about doing this, I do highly recommend going out to, to Saracote and getting trained by them.
They're, they're excellent at, you know, teaching that technique. And yes, you could learn it on your own. But it's going to take you a lot of trial and error and a lot of scrapped parts Versus drop a couple thousand dollars. Send your guy out to Cerakote or to Nick Industries and have a three day Cerakote course and he comes right back and can kind of hit the ground running.
So I just want to stop for a second right there is because something that people ask me a lot and I'm sure Justin, you run into it too, is, you know, you can do this stuff, but. How long does it take to get, say, a new person to be [00:16:00] good at a process like this and are these people hard to come by to hire or that are willing and wanting to do something like this?
And if you're talking just about this example right here, you know, yeah, they went to training, but after training, were they. Good to go off to the races, or is this something that kind of takes months or maybe years to perfect? And you also mentioned one other thing. You said the clock is ticking. So like, will this harden inside of your spray gun?
And do you just use like a normal HVLP gun, or is it a different kind of spray gun that you might use? So, I can't speak to that, I don't know that's a great question, and I would have to ask my Cerakote guy, I know Cerakote sells specific guns, but I think, I think you can also run them through like a normal gun you'd use for automotive painting, but, you'd want to fact check me on that one as far as like hardening up in the gun, I believe it will, you'd want But again, I'm not entirely sure.
I know it has a pot life. I know that I think after 30 minutes, [00:17:00] it's basically game over on whatever you have left over in that gun. Like you definitely can't just like mix up a batch, put it in the gun, shoot apart, walk away
for an hour, come back, pick the gun up, shoot another part. Like once you mix it, it's game time.
You know, we, we literally have a rule like. When our Cerakote guy is working, like no one bothers him because he's on the clock. If he's spraying, he's on the clock. Wait till he's done with that run and then go ask him a question because he doesn't have time to stand there and chat with you when he's got a Cerakote gun in his hand.
So I can tell you that much. Now to your question about you know, how long does it take to get up to speed? I guess so I'll give you a little bit more backstory of how we got into Syracuse. So I think it was 2020. Basically I, I had this idea. I wanted to try it and my bookkeeper was like, no, no, no.
Like, you know, let's not go and spend any money. It was the end of the year. It was basically the, and it was about this time of year in [00:18:00] 2020. And she's like, no, no, no, like, let's not invest any money in this. Like, let's, let's wait until next year and we'll do, you know, we'll put it in the budget and this, that, the other thing.
And I was like, okay, you know, that's understandable. And and then I was sitting there trying to figure out what I wanted to buy myself for Christmas that year. And I was looking, I think it was I I'm a bit of a bad driver. So I use a radar detector. And I was looking at new radar detectors and I noticed that the price of the radar detector I was looking at literally was the same price as the Sarah coat, six color starter kit.
And I thought to myself, I thought to myself, you know, I got a radar detector and it seems to do just fine. I haven't gotten any tickets this year. Do I really need to upgrade? Or, why don't I just buy this Cerakote kit and, and, you know, I'll have them, I'll have them Cerakote a couple of my firearms and you know, I'll, even if we don't do anything with it, I'll at least get some guns coated out of it.
And so, yeah, so we, I literally ordered it and it showed up and my bookkeeper was like, I thought we talked about this and I was [00:19:00] like, no, no, this is for me. I bought this for me and you know, you, you, you know, this is not gonna, this is not costing the company any money. This is costing Pauly D some money.
And so we got it and I walked downstairs and I walked up to my, my 3d printing tech at the time and I just kind of dropped it on his desk. And I said,
Hey, I said, I don't know anything about this, but here's a YouTube page. Why don't you guys hook this up over Christmas because we're going to be slow and you guys just start playing around with it and let's see what we can come up with.
And that was literally it. And my 3d printing techs just kind of started experimenting with it. And they'd done some automotive painting in the past. So it wasn't like a complete cold start, but they, they just went on the YouTube page and they went on the Sarah coat website and started playing around with it.
And and pretty quickly they started bringing me MJF parts with coatings on it. And I was like, wow, you know, this, this actually looks pretty good. And now, granted, if I looked at those same parts today, I'd be like, well, these, these look like shit. But at the time, at the time I was like, [00:20:00] wow, like, I can't believe you guys are pulling this off just basically watching YouTube videos.
Well, what year was this? You know, yeah, 2020. So, you know, still earlier days of finishing, I would say at least for, for powder technology. So what happened is I said, you know, I think this is something that our customer base, especially our defense customer base is really going to like. And so. I sat down and I had the guys paint up and you can still find if you go on, on YouTube and you look up Forerunner 3d printing, you'll find our YouTube page.
There's, there's a whole bunch of videos on there. And if you scroll back to around the probably beginning of 2021, you'll see a video clip where the thumbnail is an SR 71 painted SR 71 model painted in gold. And that was our first Cerakote, like, example video, and basically I took it, and I, I went after it with a razor blade and a wire brush, just in front of a camera to show how durable the coating was.
And I [00:21:00] posted it on LinkedIn, and like, two days later. I get a call and I look at my caller ID and it says Nick Industries, and I'm like, huh, and I pick it up and it's Tim O'Malley who's in the marketing group at Nick. And he's like, Hey, are you the guy who posted a video of a 3d printed part with Cerakote on it?
And I'm like, yeah, that's me. And he's like, okay, well, we've been getting inundated with people reaching out to us from 3D printing service bureaus, wanting to know how to put Cerakote onto 3D printed parts. And they keep talking about some gold plated SR 71 model, and I found your video, and I'm calling you.
We need to talk. And so me and Tim had a nice long conversation. And if you go to the, if you go to the Cerakote website and you go to their 3d printing page, you'll see my gold SR on there with a link to the forerunner 3d printing website. Because we were, we were basically Nick industries was like, what are you guys doing?
Who is this? What, why are you putting this on 3d printed [00:22:00] parts? And then it just kind of exploded and now tons of people are doing it. So so yeah, I mean, I, I think anyone could just go buy their starter kit. And if you're willing to like, you know, put some R and D muscle behind it, like you can do halfway decent parts.
And then from there, go get training and and you can do some really, really nice parts. So this is actually a perfect time to ask this question. Cause I get this a lot because a lot of people can do this stuff. But what I found is at least when it comes to finishing, it's both a science. And an art.
So I, I'm curious, you know, if someone were to just be starting with finishing of 3d printed parts, what are, are they not thinking about? And what do they not know that you think they should know ahead of time? Set realistic expectations with your customers. If a customer comes to you and drops an injection molded part on your desk and says, I want to use AM [00:23:00] production and it needs to look like this.
You need to very politely hand them that part back and say, does it really need to look like that? Because if it does, you are going to hate the price and you're going to hate the lead time, even worse. And a lot of times what I run into is if you're dealing with companies that have only ever used injection molding or machining or metal fabrication to make their parts, they, they have an expectation of what they want for finish.
But a lot of times if you really push them on it. They don't actually need the parts to be that highly finished. You know, a lot of, a lot of what we do is you know, end use parts, but they're for industrial applications. They're for defense applications. Like, these are things where like, no one's pulling You know, no one's pulling a helmet out of a box and putting it on their head and going into a war zone and then like, you know, taking that helmet off and going like, well, I can see a couple layer [00:24:00] lines in the corner of this part and, you know, I'm not really happy with that.
It's like, no, the parts looks, the part works great, the functions there, and it's the color I want. Now there are industries that I avoid like the plague that are a
hundred percent cosmetically driven and based, and those guys are just going to hold your feet to the fire and make it really, really difficult on you.
So, you know, I, I, whenever I come into one of those customers. I set the expectation. I give them sample parts. I show them sample parts. I say, this is what you can expect for this price. And if you need it to be better than this, you either, you either need to go get this part injection molded, or you got to be prepared to pay two or three X for this part.
But if you want a part that's actually Economically viable. We can do that for you, but you have to have the correct expectations for finish. And sometimes customers are like, yeah, I can't work with that. And so it's like, okay, then additive is not the right solution for you. You need to go do injection molding, which immediately they're like, well, our [00:25:00] volumes are only 200 a year.
We can't afford an injection mold. Okay, then let's meet in the middle. What level of of cosmetics are you willing to, to live with? And that's, that's something that I can actually perform for you consistently at a price that works. So I think setting expectations is a huge part of, of this type of finishing.
Yeah. 'cause I, I get that all the time where they say. Hey, you know, we, I have this part here in my hand and I want the same exact looking one from, you know, name your process, but we only need 500 of them. And the injection molars won't take my order cause I only need 500 of them. And there's a six week backlog for CNC.
You know, so there's like this gap where people want something that just, you know, you can have it, but you're going to have to pay accordingly. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Everybody wants a unicorn for sure. Right. They want that perfect thing for no cost. Exactly. And, and, [00:26:00] you know, and, and I think that there's some customers that you're never going to be able to get over that hump with, but more and more, I'm finding customers are willing to play ball.
You know, I think COVID COVID changed a lot of things, but in the world of additive COVID really opened up production opportunities and you know, we, we bailed out a lot of companies over COVID with bridge production because China wasn't picking up the phone. And their box was somewhere between, you know, you know, Shang Shanghai and LA on a, on a boat that may or may not be moving.
And so, you know, a lot of people that wouldn't have ever given additive a a a chance gave it a chance and realized like, oh wow. Like there's real opportunity with this technology and it also kind of forced them to say, you know what, we are willing to sacrifice our typical standards for cosmetic finish in order to make sure we don't go lying down and not [00:27:00] be able to produce product.
And then that kind of turned into, Oh, you know what, these finishes are pretty good. Probably good enough for what our customer expects and they, they were fine with 2020, 2021, getting parts like this. So now, you know, it, it kind of reset a lot of people's, I think, thought process of like how cosmetic their parts really need to be.
And like I said, I'm in, I'm in some very specific industries where it's, I'm not doing jewelry. I'm not doing, you know, home appliance or anything like that. Like a lot of my stuff is industrial facing or defense facing or. You know, off road racing or, or Marine, like they're, those, those types of companies have really come around to being okay with the finishes we can provide them.
So do you think the traction will continue? Cause maybe it's the start of it, right? Where people it's, it's, it's not, it's never going backwards. And, and there's also a demographic shift happening too. So I'm, you know, I'm 35 I'm, I'm towards [00:28:00] the. Older end of the millennial spectrum. And a lot of my guys, I guys and girls that I went to college and I went to high school with are now in leadership roles in, in a lot of companies.
And, and then you got the even younger generations coming in behind them that are now in these junior roles and we all. We all came up in a world with 3d printers, whereas the baby boomer generation 3d printing was that amber colored thing that sat on the conference room table and no one freaking touch it because if you do, it's going to turn to dust and the boss is going to scream.
Okay. Cause it cost him 10 grand and he waited three weeks for it. Okay. Well, those, those days are far behind us. You know, a lot of the older demographic, like still kind of harbor some of those, you know, assumptions and, and the younger do not. And and so, you know, I'm seeing a big break along demographic lines of people being okay with the finishes we can provide as well.
And I think that's just because. [00:29:00] You know, so many of us remember in college or high school, having a maker bot sitting there and having it churn out, you know a desktop pencil organizer or a doorstop or a replacement part
for, you know, a video game controller. And it's like. Yeah. Maybe it didn't look the best, but it worked.
And you know, if you hold up the parts we produce next to a maker bot part, it looks awesome. So I think that there's also a demographic change happening. So it's not going backwards. That's that's we're, this is the future. Yeah. I mean, back to kind of your statement earlier about, you know, you're not going to like the price if I have to match this, like an ejection molded part.
No, you get that question a lot from our side. It's like, can you do it? It's like, yeah, it can be done. Right. But are you willing to pay for it? Yeah. And is it worth it? Right. It's like in the end of the day, it's usually not right. Because they're, they're used to process. I mean, you know, you look at like a lot of applications, like, like automotive [00:30:00] is big for us too.
You know, we're in Western Michigan. We're an automotive state, you know, so much of what like well, I probably shouldn't say that. I, I wish I could, I wish I could drop some names, but let's just say. Electric delivery vans are really a thing right now. And, you know, these electric delivery vans, there's a lot of components that the The end user never sees they're in, they're under the, they're under the hood, they're in the, the battery pack they're in the, you know console, you know, it's, it's B side parts.
So normally these would be injection molded, there'd be ejector marks all over them. They'd be, there'd be drag marks from them coming out of the mold. They wouldn't have any texture on them. It would just look like a B side injection molded part. And. I constantly go back and forth with customers who are like, oh, I need it to look injection molded.
I'm like, yeah, but look at this injection molded part. It looks like crap. [00:31:00] It's it's, it's not a beautiful part and no one ever sees it. Once the vehicle is put together, the only person that's going to see it is the guy repairing the vehicle. If he's like, you know, crawling under the dash to replace something, do you really need it to look injection molded or.
Do you care about the fact that you can order 500 of them? There's no tooling costs and the fact that we can have it to have them to you in two weeks and they'll be black. So they'll blend in with everything else. Like, do you really care? And more and more people are realizing like, I guess I do. I don't really care.
I don't need it to look injection molded. You absolutely nailed it, Paul, because that happens all the time. It's so easy to fixate in on your, your baby, your little project, your thing that you've been working on for months and you just want to get it to be perfect, which is fine and honorable, but when it comes down to it from a production standpoint, a cost standpoint, all that, sometimes that's not always the best approach and it's okay.
Yeah. No. [00:32:00] And if anything, you know, take, take your part or take just a, a part like you say you could produce and give it to a couple of prospects and show them and say, would this be acceptable if we were to launch us? And I would bet more often than not, they would say, yeah, this is just fine. Yeah. Well.
Go ahead. Go ahead, Justin. That goes to a couple of things. I mean, Dustin's one of Dustin's first questions usually is, is, you know, what does, what are we really trying to accomplish here? Right? I feel like I hear him ask that question quite often to, to customers, right? Because, because of exactly what you guys are talking about.
And then. You know, trying to think about like one of the biggest applications in MJF, the dental aligners, right. And when small direct vacuum forms, their aligners they're, they're frosted. Right. And we recently have done a study and they always have promoted it. It's like, you know, you have a line here.
It's perfectly clear. It's. Smooth, you know, as clear as it can be, right? And then you have this other product over [00:33:00] here that is, is frosted essentially. But at the end of the day, when it goes in your mouth, the frosted one is essentially invisible and the shiny one reflects too much light and you can see it.
So like if you, if, if you don't bring it up and you show it to someone and you put it in their mouth, it's like, which one do you prefer? It's like, well, I like the one that I don't see. Yeah. If you set them on a table you know, the orthodontist or the dentist is going to go, I want that clear one. Right.
Why?
Yeah. Who are you trying to appease and why, because you can get it perfect. There's no doubt you can. But there's going to be a lot of time, money and effort and long nights associated with that. And I think that's really, Paul, probably the role that you feel you have to play a lot of times is it's not about necessarily solving the technical problem, but more so saying what is good enough and is it meeting the needs of your main problem that you're really trying to solve?
Absolutely. Yeah. I, I could not [00:34:00] I could not agree more. So dipping back into Sarah, Sarah coat, you know, you, you said that it's thin. So does it like impact threads or anything, or is it so thin that, you know, you stop all threads or what is the benefit of it being thin? Yeah. So the, the thinness kind of, again, comes from its heritage in the firearms world, you know firearms have close tolerance.
You know, faces. And so, you know it's not uncommon to be able to, you know, Sarah coat, like a semi automatic pistol and not even mask between the interface between the slide and the frame. And, you know, it, it goes, you know, the thing goes right back together. And so, you know, when done properly, I tell customers, you can, you can, you can count on between one to two thousands of coding on your parts.
And and yeah, like if you're doing threads, you know, we do a lot of night vision parts and there are really, really fine threads on some of these night vision parts. You know, [00:35:00] we've, we've done it both ways. We've seracoded over them and we've masked them off. They both work. We tend to mask them now, just because there's also like O rings and things like that, and we're also vapor smoothing those parts, so we want like a glossy surface for that O ring to seal on.
And Cerakote has more of a like kind of a it's not a rough finish, but it's, it's not a glossy. I mean, you can do glossy Cerakote, it's kind of tricky. But, you know, it has kind of a, it almost feels kind of like a, like a stone or like, cause it's got ceramic in it. Right. So it's, it's got like a ceramic feel to it.
And so, you know, but you can go right over top of fine threads and and we really haven't run into issues. I mean, in the early days when we were just kind of like figuring stuff out on our own, we definitely screwed up some parts with threads on them and just put it on way too thick, but once you kind of understand.
How thin you can actually get away with and still have a good finish. You can, you can generally go right over top of threads. So we kind of do it both ways. Some parts we [00:36:00] mask, some parts we don't. But like when we're doing a, like when a customer comes to me and is like, I'm doing assembly operations.
You know, we have a, another defense customer that a Cerakote parts wind up in much larger assemblies with fairly tight tolerances. And this. This actually goes back again to like setting the expectation around 3d printing. So, you know, this customer historically has done everything with machining. And so,
you know, machining billet plastic, a lot of their tolerancing are plus or minus five thousands plus nothing minus two and a half thousands plus minus 1000, you know, and.
A part straight off an MJF machine, in my opinion, you cannot consistently hold something less than plus or minus five thousands. And so, you know, it's going to that customer and educating their engineering department and saying, Hey, I know that you have plus or minus five on this dimension, but why?
And a lot of times they start looking at it and they go, well, that's what we've always done. That's our standard dimension. And it's like, okay, but does [00:37:00] it need to be plus or minus five? And then they look at it and go, well. No, no, it doesn't, it could be, it could be plus or minus 15 and I'm like, okay, you know, well, if it's plus or minus 15 and I throw a thou to 2000 Sarah code on top of it, plus the underlying, you know, accuracy of what the MJF machine's capable of, you're going to be just fine.
But it's, again, it's educating and having a conversation with your customer. And again, like I, I like to say at forerunner, like we're an engineering led. Additive manufacturer. So we, long before forerunner existed, I, I owned and started an engineering company, which is the wise engineering. And I still have that business unit today.
It's the sister, the sister business unit to forerunner. And you know, I come from an engineering background. That's, that's what my education and my upbringing through, through kind of the factories and shops. And so, you know, When I'm looking at a part, a new part for a customer, the first thing I'm doing is I'm looking at the print going, what tolerances are [00:38:00] there and then going and actually having a conversation with that customer going, Hey, I see these are the tolerances you need.
Let's talk about what you're doing with this part and let's talk about what tolerances are achievable with MJF and then if you really do need. Plus nothing minus, you know, a thousandth on a bore or a face. Well then let's talk about cleanup machining, you know, let's talk about, you know, how we can get that tolerance that you need in that one specific area.
And not, you know, and then not care about the, not, not, not care, but put less emphasis on the rest of the part where you really don't need that dimension. And then Sarah coat becomes a part of that conversation too. How is Sarah coat going to affect my tolerance stack up? And that's why. Again, we're, we're really, really engineering centric.
And when we talk to our customers, let's really understand what you're trying to do and what this part really needs to do to perform. And then what are the implications of using additive and what are the implications of finishing with like VaporSmooth or Cerakote? [00:39:00] Yeah. And Paul, I think that's a fantastic story and I just kind of want to give a shout out to the audience too.
People who might not be, might not have a 3D printer today, but maybe they're buying parts or considering to buy parts. To, to Paul's point, you know, I worked with a major automotive company in your area and they were adamant that they had to meet a certain spec, plus or minus a certain amount. And we went back and forth.
I kept saying, well, why does it need to be that way? You know, like I, I, I'm not questioning that you need that, but like why, what is the technical reason? And so finally the gentleman decided to go down to his shop floor and ask some of the engineers and he asked them and they're like, well, you know, we have that spec because.
That was a spec that was defined by the company that we used to buy the parts from before we started making them in house and then they talked around a little bit more and they said, well, do we really need this? And is it okay if it would be open a little bit bigger and they talked [00:40:00] about it and they're like, well, for this application, I think we can do that.
And so it took a long time to kind of go through that process. But the reason I bring up that story along with Paul's is just for the people who are listening in, you know, if you're wanting to go with multi jet fusion or another SAF technology or some other technology, it doesn't really matter what really try to have.
Ahead of time, if you can, to know why you need a certain spec, because odds are, sometimes it's just something people have already been doing for a long time and they just continue to go with it. No one's, no one's ever gotten, no one's ever gotten fired for doing it the same way as the last guy. Well, and think of like, if you had to have a really, really tight tolerance for CNC, if you were to go CNC route and have really, really tight, you're going to pay accordingly.
You know, and it's no different here in this technology. Yeah. And I think to your point, Dustin, like if they don't know the answer immediately, it probably is that they don't [00:41:00] need it. Right. Typically exactly what you said. Well, that's what we were already getting with, with another type of manufacturing.
That's usually what sets those, those expectations. Yeah, it, it's, it's worth having a conversation and, and you will, and you will come into customers who are just like, nope, gotta have it gotta be that we're not even going to consider changing it. And it's like, okay, then I'm sorry, but additive is not the solution for you.
Like if it has to be plus or minus 1000. It just isn't, and you're not open to machining it, then this is what it is. Yep, exactly. So to, to circle back to, you mentioned shot peening and dying. So I had this question actually recently, and I feel like I get this question a lot. And I think different bureaus and different people do it in different orders.
Would you shot peen before you die, or would you die and then shot peen the part? What do you [00:42:00] think is the better way to go? I've heard it both ways. I've heard some people make the argument that if you die and then shot peen, shot peen, I'm not going to say it seals the part, but it definitely helps close up pores in the part versus vapor smooth, which will fully seal the part.
So, I've heard the arguments made, like, dye your part, then shotpeen it, and and, and you're going to, kind of, help to somewhat seal the dye into the pores of the part a little bit. But then I've heard other people make the argument of like, no, we, we shot peen first and then we die. We, we don't do it that way.
The main reason we don't do it that way is when you die, the parts, they tend to bump into each other and you tend to get marks in the parts. Now if you have a gentle dye machine, like our D Y one 30, you know, we've got that pretty well dialed in where it doesn't really like thrash the parts against each other.
So. They, they don't, they're not all [00:43:00] beat to crap. You know, our, our, our custom built die machine is a little bit more aggressive. And so the benefit of die and then shot peen is they come out of the die and they might have marks or they might have quote unquote scratches. The shot peening completely removes those and makes the part look really nice.
So for us, we die, then we shot peen. I know other people do it the other way around. I can't speak to why I know they do it, but we, we don't.
And then did I see a video one time where you guys kind of made your own vapor smoothing machine? Yeah. Yeah. We we got let's see. So we run Lubrizol M95a TPU. And none of the vapor machines on the market, now, I think this may be changing. AMT has been saying forever that they're going to bring a solvent out that will actually vapor smooth it.
But historically, AMT and Dimansion have not been able to vapor smooth the Lubrizol [00:44:00] material. And so, we we're a very, very large user of this material for industrial applications. And we had customers coming to us saying like, we love this material, but we really want a vapor smooth finish. And again, another kind of funny story I'll, I'll tell you guys.
So, you know, I talked to AMT, I talked to the, you know, dimension and it's a lot of, we're working on it and it's coming, but no one will commit to a date. And I got really frustrated and so I was out on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving out at the bar in my, my high school town. So seeing all my, my high school friends and a girl walks into the bar and she looks really familiar.
And I'm like, man, I know this girl from somewhere. And I promise this is going, I promise this is going somewhere. This isn't a joke. It is not a joke. So I walk up to her and I, I, we start chatting. And I realized that we went to high school together. I hadn't seen her in like 15 [00:45:00] years. Okay. And, and so we chat and, and and I'm like, Hey, you know, you know, what are you up to?
You know, and she's like, Oh, I just moved back into town. I just I just finally, you know, wrapped up getting my PhD in organic chemistry. And and I'm kind of between jobs. And so I'm moving back home with my parents. And so I came to the bar to see everyone and I said, I was, I'd had a few, I'm not going to lie.
I'd had a few. And I said, you know what? Let me ask you a chemistry question. And And it led to, it led to me going out to my truck and getting a piece of TPU that I had sitting in there just randomly from a customer meeting and standing half, half in the bag in the bar on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, talking to this girl who's a PhD in organic chemistry saying, I need to figure out how to melt this, but not melt it too much.
I need the Goldilocks, Goldilocks range. And so I actually hired her on contract and it was basically like breaking bad in our shop for like a month. She was [00:46:00] down there with like respirators and Tyvek suits and pots of boiling chemicals. And, and I just was like, I'm either, I mean, we're, they're going to figure this out.
We're going to blow up the building or we're all going to suffocate. Like one of the three is going to happen. And she came into my office and she slammed a block on my desk and said, what do you think? And I'm like, holy crap, you did it. And so and so then I, like I said, I have an engineering group and we're machine designers.
That's our biggest business that we're, we're in. And so I sat down with my engineering team and I said, let's design a machine that can do this. Because she had done it pretty rough, we'll say. And and so, yeah, so we built the machine and we have our chemical that we run in it and we're basically one of the only people that can vapor smooth the East Stain M 95, a TPU.
Now granted, I, I, AMT keeps saying they have a way to do it. I don't know if they've ever commercialized it. I know they have a new chemical that just came out that I think is supposed to do it, but I don't really care anymore because we can do it ourselves. This is why I [00:47:00] really like your team because you guys are, are, are doers and just saying, well, let's, let's try some stuff.
You know, it leads to new discoveries and processes and creativity. And to me, that's really the bread and butter of the whole additive industry of those, you know, you mentioned the old timers earlier on, you know, they, they very much had that culture and mindset because they were birthing the industry.
So they had to. Dude, there, there are so many great stories that came out of like the early days of solid concepts, like the first mega service Bureau, like I've, I've talked to a number of people that worked there or were technicians that were maintaining machines there. Like those guys were so far out in the weeds, trying stuff, experimenting with stuff.
I mean. There's a million great stories from like the late nineties, early two thousands, 3d printing space of people doing this type of thing. And I don't know why anyone ever stopped. We just, that's what we do now. Like this is when we have a problem, I'll, I'll throw some money at it. Let's see if we can figure it out.
And, and believe [00:48:00] me, there's plenty of times where we don't figure it out and I just wasted a bunch of money, but every once in a while we catch lightning in a bottle. Well, you have the right mindset because I knew, or I worked alongside the inventors of the original vapor smoother for FDM technology.
And they told me that when they were figuring it out, or when they figured out what chemical it was, like you're talking about, they used to vapor smooth parts in the back parking lot. So it was completely open air and they basically had, you know, a dish with the liquid in it and they, they took the FDM like ABS part with like some tongs and dipped it in there and then pulled it out and let it dry.
And you know, I've actually done that before in Mexico at a foundry where they need to have a really smooth part as well, but they didn't have a sophisticated setup. So we just poured a bunch of chemicals into a bath and dipped it in there. And yeah, it's a, it's a little crude and isn't, doesn't always look the nicest, but it does the job.
I, I, it's funny you say that, that reminds me. So back in our, when we were just an [00:49:00] engineering company in 2012, I bought a maker bot just to kind of play with around the office and we had read about God, what is it? I think it's acetone vapors. Yeah, that's what it is. Yup. And and we had read like, Hey, do not do this.
Like in a, like doing an extremely well ventilated space. Right. And so we literally in our old office, it was like a rented building. And there were all these other just like, you know, like dispatch trucking, dispatch companies and like mobile pharmacy company. So there's all these like office workers.
And we just went out in the parking lot, like in the middle of our green space. And we had like a Bunsen burner and a, a pot, a beaker of acetone. Yeah, an FDM part suspended on paper clips and it looked like we were cooking meth in the parking lot and all these people are standing in the windows of this office building.
Just like what are these maniacs from Dwye's Engineering doing in the parking lot? So yeah, I mean, you know, you got to do what you got to do sometimes. That's how it starts. You know, and it's messy, but you know, then, I mean, [00:50:00] if you look around at that of industry in general today, to me, how sophisticated it looks and these like really nice looking machines with actually a decent user interfaces, it's like, wow, we're, we're really making an impact and headway as an industry.
Oh man, I mean, it's, so I, I mean, I have the oldest machine we have in our fleet is an SLA 5, 000. It's a 1997 machine. Funny, funny little aside. If you, if you guys remember the movie toy soldiers from like, I think like the late nineties, there is literally the opening scene of that. Of one of those little toys coming out of an SLA 5, 000.
I about fell out of my chair. I was my, my niece was watching my brother and me, like make, make our niece or his daughter. My niece watch all of these old movies. We liked when we were kids, toy soldiers got thrown on. I'm sitting there and that came up and I about fell out of my chair. I'm like, Oh my God, there's an SLA machine in this movie.
But you know, it's, it's a 1997 machine. And man, it. It, it feels like a [00:51:00] 1997 machine when I walk from that to our FDR, our MJF lab, it's like, it's like going through a time warp. Yeah, I bring it up every time I see a machine in a, in a show or a movie. My wife's sort of like, well, why do I care? You know, like, have you seen that Apple TV show?
I think it's called severance. Oh, not yet. I've heard about it though. Yeah, there, there's a scene where they go into this lab and there's a bunch of like, well, they're probably not dimensions, but they're, they're similar to like dimension machines. And they're just like lined up. And I'm like, look at those Stratasys machines.
My wife's like, Oh my God, just shaking her head. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you need to take another trip to that bar and solve a dying polypropylene force. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she well, yeah unfortunately her fancy chemical job has has started and she no longer lives around here. We, we still actually talk fairly regularly cause she just, she thought it was hilarious.
She was like, I'm just sitting at home [00:52:00] anyways. She's like, if this. It's maniacs willing to pay me cash and have me come in and mix chemicals. I'll do it. So yeah, it's not, I'll tell you what, it's not about what, you know, it's about who, you know, that's right.
So Paul, we're getting towards the end of time. And before we get to our last bit of sections, I just wanted to offer up to you any thoughts, comments, or ideas that maybe you didn't get to cover that you might want to, to bring up at all. Well, I guess if I'm, if I'm gonna leave the audience with something if I haven't already made this immensely clear, don't be afraid to try stuff.
And you know what, like things fail, but you learn by failure. Like I tell everyone, like. All my success is built on a mountain of my own failures. And every time I fail, I drop that on top of the mountain and I stand another, another inch higher. And you know, and, and that's what we've built our business on is just throwing stuff at the wall and [00:53:00] seeing what sticks and I, I think that.
You know, when I, when I came into this industry, I didn't, I literally didn't know anything. I didn't know anyone. I just bought a failing 3d printing company, got their equipment and basically just learned 3d printing through, you know, trial and error. And so, you know, I think that people need to be okay with like.
Trying something and then it either works or it doesn't. And, and the people that do that, I think are, can find themselves very successful and, and with interesting niches and interesting things they do. And then everyone else, it's kind of me too. And so if you want to set yourself apart, like get out there and try some stuff and it might not work, but you're going to learn something every time.
And every failure gets you a little bit closer to success. Well, and it might also manifest into something better than what you could have envisioned initially. Absolutely. At least that's what I've run into a lot of times. All right. Justin, any other last questions before I jump [00:54:00] into the last few? sO where do you think, or where do you think the business for you is going?
Like where, where are you seeing traction as far as applications go? End use, low volume production parts are really a thing. And, and COVID for it as weird as it is to say. You know, it really, really pushed a lot of people to give 3d printing a chance. And I'm seeing a lot of return customers that I bailed out during the COVID days that are now coming back to me, not because they have to, but because they want to, and they want to figure out how to use additive in their new products that they're developing because they saw how great it was kind of shoehorned into existing products.
They were just trying to. You know, keep production going on. So, you know, about, you know, I mean, at this point, I bet easily 50 percent of our business by volume is end use parts. Now that some of that is production. And some of that is what I would call [00:55:00] job shop. Like, you know, it's not a part you're ever going to make again.
But it is a part that's going to go get used and do something. It's not just a prototype. It's not like it's going to get used for one meeting and then thrown in the, in the trash. It's going to be put on a machine. It's going to be put onto a piece of equipment and it's going to get used every day. So at least half of our business now is production and end use and use parts or job shop parts.
And then the other half still is. Prototype and and like, you know, some like very low volume production that is going to get iterated on over and over and over as they kind of dial in their, their, their designs. So it's production, but it's never going to be commercial production. It's, it's just production to get them enough prototypes to, to, to kind of get their products figured out.
And that's just going to continue to grow. There, there is, I mean, if you look at. If you look at the, the manufacturing economy worldwide, it's just massive. It's
just absolutely, I mean, we're talking trillions and [00:56:00] trillions of dollars. And additive is, I mean. A minuscule part of that ecosystem. And so people, it's funny, I had someone asked me last, last night, I was talking to someone and they were asking me like, you know, what do you think the opportunity is around, you know, service bureaus nowadays to, you know, continue to grow and for new service bureaus to come into the market.
And, and I'm like, you know. It every year, it, you know, every year, the, the space gets a little bit more crowded, but every year the space gets bigger. So, you know, we're, we're all, there's always more opportunities. There's always more things that, that new entrance can do and existing entrance can diversify into.
So I, I just think that the, the, the additive manufacturing world, and I'm only talking about polymers. I'm not even talking about the metal side of things. That's a whole nother conversation, but. Specifically polymers is just on track to continue growing. And yeah, you'll have some years where you [00:57:00] grow really fast.
You'll have some years where you grow a lot slower. You know, maybe even stay flat that happens, but you know, it's all trending in one direction and that's up into the right.