Check it Out: RedEye Video

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Remember the end of “Casablanca” when Bogart says to Claude Rains “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”? A good service bureau can have that kind of relationship with you. And RedEye On Demand, the digital manufacturing arm of Stratasys, is just the kind of outfit that  you should consider as your service bureau partner.

What RedEye does is make rapid prototyping and direct digital manufacturing both quick and affordable for you. Just don’t think of RedEye as one of the usual suspects. What these guys do is work with you to ensure that you get what you need. It’s better to think of them as your digital factory.

RedEye has more than 100 FDM and PolyJet 3D printing systems at its global facilities. This means that they can create your intricate,  complex, and even functional plastic parts quickly. RedEye can make your jigs and fixtures, and your parts can be in any one of 16 different thermoplastics and resins. They can deliver parts ready for painting, plating or other finishing techniques, and they can even deliver large parts and subassemblies with real production-grade thermoplastic.

And because RedEye is direct digital manufacturing, you can now produce minute quantities of parts made with engineering-grade thermoplastics cost effectively. Since tooling and capital investment costs are eliminated, you can maximize servicing your clients and your bottom line even if your client needs just 8 parts. In short, RedEye can support the full life-cycle of your projects from those first prototypes to low-volume production to manufacturing full-scale parts.

Dwell on that full-scale parts thing a second. What that means is that, with FDM technology, you really do not have any limits on the size of part you can make. Yeah, yeah, the build table is limited in size. You’re right. However, the use of thermoplastics enables you to bond parts while maintaining their strength and accuracy. That means you can produce mega-sized prototypes. Today’s very quick Check It Out video show you exactly what I mean by mega-sized prototypes.

After the video, I recommend that you wander around the RedEye site. There are plenty of videos to watch, white papers to download, and so on.

Still, your take away is not that RedEye can produce a huge part for you. That’s just an example of something cool that they can do. Your takeaway is that RedEye has the skills and resources to serve as your digital factory. RedEye offers you the opportunity to open  up new services for your clients. Getting to know RedEye better now could be the beginning of a beneficial relationship in the days ahead.

Thanks, pal—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering