Desktop Metal (www.desktopmetal.com) — a company based in Burlington (Massachusetts) that is ‘committed to making 3-D printing accessible to manufacturers and engineers’ — has introduced Shop System, “the world’s first metal binder jetting system designed for machine shops and metal job shops that can eliminate many of the constraints previously seen with traditional manufacturing methods like CNC machining and help them tap into new opportunities to reduce their costs and increase revenue”.

Ric Fulop, CEO and co-founder of Desktop Metal, said: “Since the launch of our metal 3-D printing platforms — Studio System and Production System — we have changed the rules of traditional metal manufacturing solutions with innovative approaches that reduce costs and increase speed and print quality for our customers.

"Our technology has significantly ‘disrupted’ low- and high volume production in metal manufacturing, yet there was still a real need for a robust solution that also captures mid-volume production and enables affordable, reliable and flexible batch production of complex parts for machine shops.”

Shop System can print a batch of complex parts every 6-12hr, enabling hundreds of near-net-shape metal parts to be printed each day (using as much as 70kg of steel); and because parts are fully supported by the powder bed and feature hand-removable ‘sintering setters’, users avoid hours of labour for machining or wire EDM operations to remove the support structures typical of laser-based systems.

Desktop Metal says that with a spot size of 16µm per drop, 1,600 ‘native single pass’ DPI and ‘distributing’ up to 670 million drops per sec, Shop System is the highest-resolution single-pass binder jetting printing system on the market — delivering a 33% higher resolution than comparable single-pass binder jetting systems.

Bruce Ferguson, CEO of Hansford Parts & Products (a contract manufacturer of CNC machined parts for the automotive, aerospace, medical and electronics industries), said: “In our business, quality and response time are critical.

The ability to simultaneously produce multiple complex parts with no custom set-ups is a productivity game-changer.

"We are looking to additive manufacturing to produce geometries unattainable with conventional machining, free up CNC capacity, and reduce part costs.”