A Dutch Company in Boston—Ultimaker’s 3D Printers are Transforming Design and Engineering

RECENTLY I HAD A CHANCE TO talk with John Kawola, President of Ultimaker North America, about his Dutch-based 3D printer company and its presence in the larger 3D market. Our hour-long conversation touched on multiple fascinating points, including the decision for Ultimaker to base their US-based office in Boston, how the 3D printer company got its start, and how Ultimaker sees the overall 3D printing market and their position in it.

A Bit of History—Three Phases of the 3D Printing Industry

While 3D printing may seem relatively new to some within the CAD software industry—and to be honest most companies owning CAD software do not own 3D printers—the industry itself has been around for 30 years, and Kawola been involved in it for decades.

“I was a part of Z Corporation,” says Kawola, “and we sold the company to 3D Systems about six years ago.”

In looking back John Kawola sees the industry in three major phases, which he labels 3D printing 1.0, 3D printing 2.0 and now in the current 3.0 phase. In the 1.0 phase, there were just a couple of major companies back in the ’90s who invented the technologies, protected them with patents and sold their novel printers for more than 200 thousand dollars. As technologies advanced these large and expensive machines fell to prices like 50 thousand dollars, thereby enabling some very larger firms to acquire them as well as big reprographics houses serving thousands of smaller companies.

 

 

 

 

“3D printing 2.0 happened around 2000, around nearly 20 years ago,” says Kawola. “I was actually part of 2.0.” What characterized this phase was that big price drop. But somewhere around 2011 or 2012 3D printing entered its 3.0 phase and this is where things began to get really exciting.” So what changed?

He says that the initial 3D printing patents ran out, opening up many smaller rivals to enter the market. The other advance had been made in the metals printing and, of course, the third wave has brought about the sub-three thousand dollar printer. But that’s not where the 3D printing 3.0 era ends. We now have the legendary computer and printer company HP enter the market. And then GE wants in on the game—all signaling just how important the 3D printing industry is turning out to be.

A Dutch Company in Boston

While Kawola has been involved in the 3D printing industry for decades, he landed his new role as President of Ultimaker in North America just a few years ago. The Dutch-based upstart in 3D printing was looking to expand to North America and contacted Kawola about leading their initiatives in the Americas. But the company was thinking New York City.

Kawola convinced Ultimaker’s leadership to settle in Boston instead. “Boston is a pretty good place for this,” adds Kawola, “because, one, there are other 3D printing companies here, but probably more importantly, the CAD companies are here. They are all here; they are all five or ten minutes from where we are.”

Indeed, Ultimaker’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are not far from the offices of Onshape. I asked him what it meant to be in the center of it all. Isn’t Boston to the CAD industry what Florence was to the Renaissance? This is where all the leading characters are—this is where the talent and innovation is. “In some ways, we are a little bit of an outsider,” Kawola adds, “because we are a Dutch company who has an office here, whereas the other companies like FormLabs, for example, are native here.”

“SolidWorks was born here, PTC was born here, so we are in the thick of it. So being here means there are meetings, forums, and things to participate in,” he adds. “There is a pro and con for talent. The talent is here but we are all fighting for it.”

next page: The Plummeting Price Drops of 3D Printing

The Plummeting Price Drops of 3D Printing

When 3D printing got its start only defense industry companies and the Boeings of the world could afford them. They went from a quarter of a million dollar machines, then to 50k machines, then they broke through the 10k barrier. But it was companies like MakerBot that caused the big shift to happen.

 

 

 

 

“When MakerBot showed up with a two or three thousand dollar printer that marked a big shift,” says Kawola. But Stratasys acquired MakerBot when the latter company was going through their major “Hype-cycle” moment. “Stratasys was the company with the core patent about extruding plastic through a nozzle,” says Kawola. “Now MakerBot, Ultimaker and a whole bunch of other guys are using technology that Stratasys invented.”

With the 3.0 era, companies like Ultimaker are offering the market easy-to-use 3D printers for under three thousand dollars. This dramatically opens up the market, including the AEC industry which Kawola says is about 5 percent of their total business.

“Education is the strongest market after manufacturing for 3D printers,” adds Kawola. But the AEC industry includes manufacturers of building products—a touch point where the “design-to-fabrication” intersection becomes a highly interesting possible point of disruption within AEC as a whole.

Ultimaker’s Positioning

The Dutch company got started with three guys trying to do a low-cost 3D printer for the maker crowd. In 2011, they started selling 3D printer kits that you could buy over the Internet with a credit card. “Makers were attracted to Ultimaker because they could tinker with it—due to its open-source nature,” said Kawola.

The manufacturing crowd, however, was focused on the larger existing players. “There was a bias in the enterprise market against companies like Ultimaker,” he adds. Now things are slowly changing and Ultimaker’s potential market audience is evolving. “Because they are only $5K, they are now at a disruptive price point,” Kawola says, “and now they are looking at this and thinking we should maybe get one—or five.”

This dynamic change means that Ultimaker is no longer just a fan favorite for the makers, much bigger companies are looking at their 3D printers for their engineering and design workgroups. “Our market is where the engineers are,” says Kawola. China’s a big market, Japan’s a big market, South Korea’s a big market. When we think about distribution in the world—and we track where all the engineers are—generally the market breakdown is about 40 percent Europe, 40 percent North America and 20 percent Asia-Pacific.”

 

 

 

 

“We were underrepresented here in the US, but Ultimaker is growing fastest here in North America,” he adds. Kawola is modest about this growth in the US, noting that the rivals make good technology also. “We like to say our products are more robust and we deliver a very good product and we have materials and parts all over the world,” he adds, “increasingly we are global.”

Ultimaker has two factories at the moment. One factory is in the Netherlands and the other is in the US in Memphis. He explained that there is a lot of contract manufacturing in Memphis as well as fulfillment centers.

Talking About the AEC Market Challenges

Part of the reason why this interview came about had to do with Ultimaker’s appearance at the 2018 AIA National Convention. Are architects interested in 3D printers? Absolutely, many are, as evidenced by the high traffic at the Ultimaker booth. (see image 03 below) But there are still interesting challenges in front of wide-spread adoption to 3D printers in architecture offices.

Kawola notes that selling to architecture firms is just 5 percent of their mix. I asked him what are the challenges getting in the way of larger adoption in architecture firms. “I’ve been selling 3D printers to architects for 20 years,” he says, “but part of the challenge is the difference between buildings and parts in manufacturing. In manufacturing, the part is a solid model, it is the real thing, in scale. When you are using 3D software in architecture it is still a “rendering” and it may not be solid, and the walls might not touch, or the features are so small that when you scale it down there are obstacles there.”

Kawola noted that in the architectural industry there has always been a challenge with the data. “There is more of a skill-level in architecture to go from design to printed part today.” In the manufacturing world, the 3D printers can print those parts at 1:1 scale, but such machines must print buildings or segments of them at vastly different scales. Still, he says that they continue to see widespread adoption of their Ultimaker 3D printers by architecture firms.

More and more architecture firms are delving into “digital design to fabrication” workflows, whether in research labs or as tried and true one-off production runs. The way in which 3D printers work says a lot about what is possible for various industries as well.

Why Buy a 3D Printer—Benefits and Opportunities in Industries

One of the major trends in manufacturing is weight reduction, which also applies to the world of buildings—products and parts that are transported often great distances for erection in a building on site. I asked Kawola where he saw 3D printing playing a role in this weight-reduction movement.

“I think that is a huge opportunity that is only now just being realized a little bit.” He noted that in the history of 3D printing nearly all the value has been in simply making parts at scale for iterative design workflows and validation. But he says that today one of the side advantages of 3D printing is that your geometry constraints sort of go away. “Molding parts, casting parts, machine parts, you always have constraints,” he adds, “but with 3D printing, those constraints largely go away.”

 

 

 

 

Kawola says that generative design software has changed the way people design with CAD. “If you use that organic generative design software to create something,” he adds, “now the challenge is ‘can you actually make it.?’ So 3D printing is practically the only way you can make it; so I think those ideas are coming together, and I think the industry that is probably the most forward on that is aerospace.”

He says that in aerospace if you tell someone you can make something five percent lighter there is no incentive not to pursue it, they know that five percent less weight comes with a huge benefit down the line. “The aerospace industry is the most out there in pushing this weight reduction and in some ways is pushing the industry in the development of metal 3D printing,” he adds.

Weight reduction and 3D printing have different economics for every industry. The car industry might find a way to make a part several grams lighter, but if the cost of that part rises 30 percent in doing so, it doesn’t matter if the car may become more fuel efficient, the car company isn’t likely going to do it. But the aerospace industry and other industries where weight optimization is critical to costs are likely going to pursue such endeavors no matter what the cost.

next page: Ultimaker’s 3D Printers and How They Work

Ultimaker’s 3D Printers and How They Work

When it comes to 3D printers the cost levers behind such machines may surprise you. Basically the bigger the machine the bigger the cost. The speed of 3D printing is not a cost lever, unlike printing on paper. “They all have the same speed,” says Kawola. “In the more expensive 3D printers folks are paying for items like more automation, and cameras to watch the print develop.”

Ultimaker makes three models—the Ultimaker 2+, the Ultimaker 3, and the Ultimaker S5. The 2+ is single-extrusion, while the 3 and S5 are double-extrusion. Bigger 3D printers allow you to make slightly larger parts but they involve larger motors which increase cost. Sensors increase in the more expensive model which give you the automation features customers want. Double extrusion printers allow you to print in two colors of plastic, and there are advantages there.

 

 

 

 

As for speed, Kawola says that “speed is based on thermodynamics based on the materials and the choreography of how the head moves around the part.” In other words, plastic must form solid before another strip can be laid on top or next to it. “It’s not just how fast the head can move around on the motors, it’s about how fast can the material cool down,” adds Kawola.

The temperature difference of the plastic used in 3D printing between the liquid state and solid state is about 10 degrees. “We want to be just on the edge of that line,” says Kawola, “there is zero reason to be more fluid or more liquid, it is just like a glue gun—same principle.” To get the accuracy of crisp corners it all depends on the bead size. The bead sizes vary. Kawola says the standard is 0.4mm but users have nozzle size options with Ultimaker printers and there is also 0.25mm, 0.6mm, and 0.8mm options. Nozzle size is inverse to speed. “The smaller the nozzle size the slower the speed of the printer,” he adds.

You can get more accuracy with the smaller nozzles but it comes at the price of speed. Models can take 10 hours to print. But this is where the 3D printing industry takes an interesting turn. “The speed hasn’t been a deterrent to 3D printing,” he says, “because at a $3,000 price point companies just get another printer.” Still, there is research going on to develop different materials with better thermodynamics. One such company is Markforged, another Metro Boston company. Markforged has developed 3D printing materials like HSHT Fiberglass and Kevlar, for example. The range of use and opportunity in 3D printer materials is vast.

The Dows and Owens Corning’s are now in the market on the material side. Kawola says these guys can maybe drive down the costs which will impact the use of 3D printing for actual production runs. Today the costs of materials are still too prohibitive. Plastic resin is $4 a pound, an order of magnitude too expensive for actual production runs of mass manufactured plastic items. But things will only get better with innovation and competition in the market and Ultimaker is innovating and serving a growing 3D printer market.

For its part, Ultimaker has three fantastic 3D printers. The Ultimaker 2+ starts at just $2,499 and is the entry-level model. It doesn’t feature a camera but it has swappable nozzle support for 0.25, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8mm print beads for greater accuracy or faster print speed. The Ultimaker 2 Extended+ is the same machine but in a taller volume for bigger parts.

The Ultimaker 3 features dual extrusion. It can, therefore, print in two colors, one color each nozzle. It also features a camera and WiFi, Ethernet and USB connectivity so users can print directly to the printer. The mid-level machine costs $3,495 and also comes in an extended taller volume model.

The flagship model is the Ultimaker S5, which costs $5,995. It is the largest of the three models and helps companies print bigger parts. It uniquely features a color touch control panel for operation. Otherwise, the S5 and 3 are similar dual-extrusion machines with similar connectivity and other features. And speaking of extrusions, all three models have the capacity for multiple material support. Materials vary from Nylon, PLA, ABS, CPE, PVA, PC, TPU 95A and others.

3D Printers and Architects—Ultimaker’s Six Reasons

Ultimaker may only sell 5 percent of their 3D printers to architecture firms but that doesn’t mean anything in the true take-up of 3D printers. Manufacturing and education are the two biggest markets for 3D printing in general, in that order, but there is continuing traction in AEC fields. For architects many times they are making physical models at far lower costs and with faster outcomes.

The Dutch company has an excellent customer profile story on Make Ltd, an architecture firm founded by Ken Shuttleworth in 2004. The London-based firm has offices in Hong Kong and Sydney and over 150 employees. The firm, which prior to their selection of Ultimaker 3D printers, used traditional hand-cut models from foam and cardboard. While this page details their use of 3D printers there is a very good video that provides a good view of how they are using these printers for modeling making and for iterative design work in their firm.

Architects can also use 3D printers for making custom-designed parts for buildings at scale. Custom door hardware, stair parts like handrails and balusters and some of the things that architects are using 3D printers for, as well as specialized parts with complex textures. As seen here, it is possible to design sophisticated lattice-like patterns and structures and sometimes only 3D printers can create these. What you can do is really quite endless and open to one’s imagination.

 

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Image Credits

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: FJMT / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

Title image credit:  ( Ultimaker / Architosh. All rights reserved.) Not credited images are copyrighted to Architosh. All other images are copyrighted, as noted in the image credits. 

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