Size of a bumper car at an amusement park
From the leather aprons worn by the partners, brick walls and molded Victorian ceilings at the FORGE Manufacturing LLC offices, you’d never guess it was a 3D printing shop. Then there’s the scanning devices, a few samples of their work and, finally, down a dark hall away from the storefront in a side room, is the big, box-like device that’s about the size of a bumper car at an amusement park.
That device is an $80,000, full-color plastic 3D printer that FORGE just got operational in September. The 3D Systems ProJet 4500 printer allows FORGE to manufacture or “print” objects up to 10 inches long, 8 inches wide and 8 inches in depth.
It has been used to make statues, custom trophies, minatures of the Main Street Bridge and even forensic replicas that simulate such things as a bullet hole in a window.
For FORGE, such custom assignments are novelites. In just two years, Pfanenstiel said, the mainstay of FORGE’s business has become the 200 customers whose contracted “projects” range from developing miniature space craft used for enhancing video-game development by a company in Prague, Czech Republic, to models of buildings for an architectural firm in Israel.
“What we’re seeing now is, the cost is dropping. It’s more accessible and the software that you use to make this stuff is more accessible,” Dukes said.
And the business is changing from the service that helps a walk-in customer fulfill a unique order to applications that can transform a company’s manufacturing efficiency.