A-Dec Uses HP 3D Printing Throughout Dental Equipment Production Transcript

A-Dec is a worldwide provider of dental equipment. We’ve been printing parts for over a decade but we soon found that there were really some limitations that we had. I learned about the HP Multi Jet Fusion and it was very appealing. I was absolutely excited to adopt this process. I thought the way they were melting the plastic together was great, and the speed at which it was doing it was amazing. I’ve used pretty much every type of additive manufacturing, going back to the mid 90s, and each had their pluses and minuses. What I like about MJF is it has very good geometric tolerances. It fits the parts very accurately but at the same time the material properties are better than everything else. We initially thought that this would really just be for prototyping and in-house tooling, but what we’re finding is when we need to make small volumes of parts, this is a very efficient process for us to be able to do that, and do it creatively. The machine is actually carrying 51% of the model shop workload. We’re supporting about 150 engineers with this one machine. We print anything from assembly fixtures, prototype parts, machine components. The fact that you can do an entire platform for the same time and price as doing a single part in other methods, that’s a big game changer. We’re able turn parts in 24 hours to our engineering team. What that means is we can make more iterations. We can fail faster and come up with a better product in the end. We can identify with color different versions. It helps our customers identify new revisions or it helps the assembly department with the placement of parts. It has definitely impacted our culture in that we’re able to think about solutions that weren’t possible before. Multi Jet printing has allowed us the freedom that we’ve been wanting for quite some time. This has really changed the way that we think about product design and I’m really excited for where this is going to take us.