3D Maquette – SA-NV Lithobeton

Our company bought the Zortrax M200 in order to be able to print prototypes of new products and adjust the product before investing in expensive concrete moulds.
Another reason was to give a 3D portfolio of our products to our sales staff, which connect smoothly to the 2D documentation, brochures and data sheets.

The first idea for this maquette came arround as a breezy figment during the preparations for an national exhibition, where we will be exhibiting our concrete products as Lithobeton is one of the leading precast concrete companies in Belgium.
Some of the chosen pieces were too big to put in real size on a exhibition stand, so the main idea was to create separate scale-models and to merge them into a representative maquette.
Which means there is no better way than a 3D-printer to make this happen!!!

So very soon it became clear that there was an intense project born.
At the end of May 2015 the first part was printed, the final piece will be ready in late August 2015.

The printer model that we used for this job is the Zortrax M200. Given the nature of the project, there was a need for a high degree of finishing, therefore we chose the smallest thickness in Z-ABS materials, 5 finish colors were used: white-black-gray-green-red.
Pieces are printed which occupied the entire surface, this required a lot of printing time.

In order to gain time and money, an electrical timer system was implemented, therefore we where able to print during the day and the nightly hours, without having to be constantly present, because managing the M200 is one of the ancillary tasks within my job.

For the overall model about six kilograms of ABS material is used, some 100 pieces were printed which in total contains 3100 individual pieces of our concrete products.
The making of such compilation is not achievable these days without a decent 3D-printer.

By extensive and constant maintenance of the printer, using original materials and solid preparation, we have finished this project in approximately 450 printing hours. If you count all the hours together, including the hours of operation for the design of the pieces in the 3D software, you understand why this job has been treated on projectlevel.

We are of course proud of the final result and thanks to the M200, we are able to offer a unique 3D-printing experience to our customers and visitors.

PS : because the total maquette containes more than 100 Zortrax-printed pieces, only one example has been joined to this contest. The photo material gives a better impression.