Swarm // Product Design, Engineering, Branding // Salt Lake City, Utah

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3D printing is amazing (except for when it's not)

3D printing is an amazing technology. No doubt about that. And in the past 5 years so many very smart people have worked tirelessly to make it easy to do and incredibly affordable. It is so empowering to be able to prototype whatever you want, whenever you want. 

But 3D printing often comes with many headaches. Prototypes can have trouble sticking to the build platform, the printer can lose its registration, or a host of other problems. Most of them result in what we (un)affectionally call "spaghetti". Here at Swarm, we were building a large AT-AT head (strictly business purposes of course) a few days ago on our printer and managed to catch one of these frustrating spaghetti manufacturing instances on our time-lapse camera. (video below)

Next week's blog post, we're going to show you some of the 3D printing tips and tricks that we use to fix some of these prints without re-printing the WHOLE build. We'll also show you the strictly business reason that we're printing a large AT-AT head.