Rapid Prototyping and Small-Batch Manufacturing
When you’re testing a product design, you don’t need 10,000 parts. You need 50. Or 100. You need to print them, test them in the real world, learn what breaks, iterate the design, and try again. Just as we’re currently learning with our Golf training Innovation Arc Master.
3D printing collapses the feedback loop. Instead of waiting months for a tool to be built, you can have parts in your hands in hours or days. You can test different materials, different geometries, different approaches – in parallel, not sequentially.
For low-volume manufacturing – anything in the ones, twos, even hundreds – you get:
- Speed – Move from design to production parts in days, not months
- Flexibility – Iterate and test without tooling investment
- Cost efficiency – You’re not paying for a tool you’ll use once
- Scale on demand – Make what you need, when you need it
That’s the sweet spot. And we’re finidng more and more this is something our client’s really value from us.
Why We Chose Bambu Lab
When we decided to scale 3D printing, we didn’t just buy the most expensive system on the market. We ran the numbers.
The math was simple: cost per part and return on investment. Bambu Lab printers delivered faster ROI than anything else we looked at. A system that produces this quality of part used to cost £150,000 twenty years ago. These are just over £400.
But it’s not just about the upfront cost. There are three operational advantages:
First, the hardware itself. These are enclosed cabinet systems, which means we can maintain higher temperatures inside the printer. That lets us work with materials like ABS that need precise thermal conditions. Our older generation printers couldn’t do that consistently.
Second, cloud connectivity. With our old setup, someone had to physically walk to each printer, load a USB stick, find the file, and wait. With 25 machines running, that’s a bottleneck. Now we sit at our desks and send files via the cloud to every printer simultaneously. It’s faster. It’s cheaper. It scales.
Third, remote monitoring. Because the printers are linked to our systems, we get real-time alerts when something goes wrong – a Z-axis issue, a material shortage, anything. We don’t discover problems when a print fails halfway through. We catch them before they happen.
What This Actually Means
For our customers, it means:
- Complex geometry? No problem.
- Tight timelines? We can deliver.
- Low quantities that don’t justify traditional tooling? We’ve got you covered.
- Need to iterate and test different materials? We can run variants in parallel.
For us, it means we’ve built infrastructure that scales. We’re not hiring someone to babysit machines. We’re automating the process of turning designs into physical parts quickly and cost-effectively.
Wtih all that said, we absolutely believe there’s a vital and important role for injection moulding – for the right products, at the right scale, with the right timelines. It’s not either/or. It’s about matching the manufacturing method to the actual problem you’re trying to solve.
This is the kind of decision-making we think about every day at npd. If you’re working on something complex that needs speed, iteration, and someone who understands both the design and the manufacturing reality, let’s talk.
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