Dental care industry
The dental care is a fast growing industry which often is one of the first industries to try out innovations. 3D printing is one of them and we have a good example to show you how FDM 3D printing is used in the dental care industry.

Why the dental care industry is using FDM 3d printers.
One of our customers (in the dental care industry) is using a dozen Builder Premiums to print test dentures. Not so much for the teeth, but mainly for the gums. When the client needs a denture, the dentist makes a mall and scans this. After scanning the mall is ready to be printed and this is done to make sure the actual denture fits perfectly. Printing a test denture saves a lot of money and time.

Builder Premium printing a test denture.
The test denture you see in the video, is printed on the Builder Premium Small with PLA. The denture is printed with support and with a prime tower. The prime tower is used to make sure the teeth are perfectly white without any color of the filament which is used for the gums. A layer height of 0,2 mm, heated bed of 45 degrees and the closed housing results in a very smooth print.  Costs spend on the material for the test denture are €2.75.

Demand for bigger 3D printers
Builder 3D Printers received a lot of requests from customers who were satisfied with their Builder/Big Builder 3D printer, but they wanted and needed to print bigger prototypes or other objects. The objects wouldn’t fit on a Big Builder or they had to be divided into 4 or even 8 pieces, but that’s not necessary anymore, the Builder Extreme is here.

The Builder Extreme 1000/2000
The Builder Extreme is available in 2 sizes, the X and Y axis are the same size (700×700 mm) but the big, or should we say the Extreme difference, is in the Z axis. The Extreme 1000 is able to print 820 mm in height and the Extreme 2000 a dazzling 1820 mm. With a build size like that, you can print almost everything, from huge prototypes to a full size sculpture. The Builder Extreme has a fully closed chamber, an integrated heated bed, a camera and can be controlled with Wi-Fi. One of the best things about the Extreme is, it comes with the unique Dual-Feed Extruder from Builder 3D Printers. The Dual-Feed Extruder (with only 1 nozzle) is able to print 2 materials through 1 nozzle. Printing support can be done with a different material or color. The Extreme is able to print PLA, PET, PVA, Wood and Bronzefill and Flex and comes with 3 different diameter nozzles, 0,4 – 0,8 and 1,2 mm.

Fully assembled or DIY kit?
Did you know the Builder Extreme is fully assembled when shipping it to the customer? Do you prefer to receive the Extreme as a DIY kit? No problem, the Extreme comes with a manual how to assemble it. Why ordering it as a DIY kit? Simple! Not every building is made to fit a Builder Extreme 1000/2000 through the front door. Did you know the Extreme has been printing for over a week before it arrives to the customer just for testing? More info about the Builder Extreme is available here.

The RapidPro
It’s Tuesday again so it’s time for a brand new blog. This blog we would like to tell you all about our experience during the RapidPro 2016 which we attended last week. The RapidPro was held in Veldhoven, the Netherlands from 1 – 3 March and is the biggest event regarding 3D printing in the BeNeLux.

Enthousiastic reponse
Builder 3D Printers has chosen the RapidPro to present the Builder Premium line to the audience for the first time and the response was fantastic. The RapidPro is the event to visit when you would like to orientate the 3D printer market and purchase your 3D printer. The combination of the print quality combined with the camera, Wi-Fi and touch screen and build size was enough to convince a lot of 3D print enthusiastics to choose the Builder Premium over all the other 3D printers.  This also explains our current delivery time of 3 weeks for all our Builders. The RapidPro was also the perfect place to present the Builder Extreme 1000, one of the biggest FDM 3D printers available. During the RapidPro we spoke to a lot of Builders users who are very satisfied with their Builders and some of them even brought a printed object to show to the Builder team, like designer HC Carbo did. HC Carbo has designed BUILDER man and brought us a BUILDER man XXL in the highest quality possible. The BUILDER man was printed on the Big Builder Dual-Feed and can be seen on our Facebook page.

Next year, 2017
Next year, Builder 3D Printers, will definitely attend the RapidPro as the event was a huge success and we spoke a lot of Builder users which gave us good and useful feedback. See you next year?

Design and produce your own product
When you need a certain product which is not available, just simply design it yourself and print it on your Builder. That’s exactly what this blog is about. One of our customers has a boat and wanted to buy a steering wheel knob to make steering through the narrow canals easier. Unfortunately there was no steering wheel knob available for his kind of steering wheel. No problem, he designed it himself and printed it on the Builder Premium.

Printing the knob
The steering wheel knob has been designed in SolidWorks and is converted to a STL file. For slicing, the customer used the latest version of Cura. The steering wheel needed to be printed as smooth as possible as the customer has to use the knob several times with his bare hands during a boat trip and that is why is has been printed with a layer height of 0.1 mm. Due to the fact the Builder Premium is fully closed (stable temperature), the adhesion of the PLA between each layer is better which makes the knob even smoother. The orange you see on the picture is support. This will be removed later so the knob fits perfectly around the steering wheel. The total print time was 9 hours.

Share your Builder prints!
What are you printing on your Builder Original / Builder Premium? Share it with #builder3dprinters and/or #builderpremium.

Production
Did you know we use our own Builder Premium 3D printers for production? Every Builder Premium is leaving the Builder HQ with a filament holder and filament guide. The filament holder is used to hang the filament spool and the filament guide to guide the filament into the Builder Premium without getting strangled. These parts are designed by Builder and are printed 24/7 on 5 Premiums Small to keep up with the demand.

How we do it
The filament  guide, which you see on the right, is printed with black PLA with a layer height of 0.2 mm. The part is printed without support as the production of this part needs to go as fast as possible. The print time of a filament guide is about 58 minutes. To make sure we can print 24/7, without running out of filament too often, both extruders are filled with black PLA and both extrude 50%. Using both extruders on 50% enables us to use 2 kg filament instead of 1 kg and using the Dual-Feed extruder as a Mono extruder.

Do it yourself
What if one of these parts breaks? No problem. You can print them yourselve. Every Premium has a few standard G-codes in its memory and the filament holder and guide are 2 of them. Just simply press print and select the file you would like to print.