Telford-based Proto Labs (
www.protolabs.com), a leading provider of rapid-manufacturing solutions, has extended its in-house 3-D printing capabilities, which now include specialist plating services for plastic parts built using stereo-lithography (SL) or selective laser sintering (SLS) technology.
By offering both SL and SLS with a secondary ‘plating’ option, the company is responding to customer demand for parts with the ‘aesthetic’ and inherent strength intended for the finished product.
These characteristics are achieved by ‘plating’ parts with materials including copper, nickel and chromium.
Daniel Cohn, general manager of Proto Labs Germany, said: “We are continually developing our capabilities to ensure that we meet the demands of our customers.
"We have become increasingly aware of the significant enhancements that plating makes to the capabilities of the resultant part, hence our move to offer these services.
"Now, with plating technology and operational expertise in-house, we can manufacture plated parts with increased capabilities that will support product testing and project progression even further.”
Plating offers an alternative finish for surfaces or shapes that cannot be milled (or where milling is too costly to be viable); the coating of finished components can provide shielding against an electric or magnetic field; and finishing surfaces with chrome can produce a prototype suitable for customer validation and presentation.