Treotham offers special parts production service

Motion plastics company igus is finding that the demand for customised special solutions is steadily increasing, whether for short-term spare parts procurement, for prototype construction or for the production of lubrication-free small batches.

“Due to the very high demand for wear-resistant special solutions through the 3D printing service, we have now tripled our capacities with new laser sintering printers,” said Tom Krause, Head of Additive Manufacturing at igus. The service is available in Australia through Treotham Automation.

If a user wants to produce an abrasion-resistant special part or a small batch then they can look up https://www.igus.com/info/3d-print-motion-plastics-printed, upload CAD data, select the desired material then call Treotham to make an order. Most of the components are manufactured using the laser sintering process. In this process, the abrasion-resistant laser sintering material iglidur I3 is applied on the entire working platform and sintered with a laser. After each work step, the plate is lowered and a new layer applied.

The advantages of the laser sintering process are obvious. The laser sintering printers can produce simple and complex types as well as mobile solutions. “In an installation space of 220 x 170 x 300 mm, for example, 5000 plain bearings with an inner diameter of 10 mm can be produced by laser sintering within 30 hours,” Kraus said. “Laser sintering ensures that we can offer the components not only fast, but also with a higher strength and more cost-effectively than the FDM process.” High costs, such as the production of injection moulding tools, are eliminated and possible design changes can easily be made on the computer, whereas in conventional injection moulding, entire moulds need to be changed.

In addition, there is no price difference between complex and simple shapes. If the user wishes to have wear-resistant gears made, they can use the abrasion-resistant laser sintering material iglidur I6, which was specially developed for gears, in the 3D printing service. If a series with up to 4000 parts have to be printed, injection moulding tools can also be produced in additive manufacturing, which are later used in the injection moulding machine. The advantage here is that the user can freely select the suitable material from more than 50 iglidur materials.