3D Printing Museum

Many items to do with 3D Printing, in the news today, are about processes, materials and applications that are produced on new machines now, yet 3 decades ago some of the lucky few were quietly making history in many and varied application areas that some companies kept quiet to gain competitive advantage. We wish to pay tribute to those pioneers in the 3D Printing museum. Several corporations are helping to display their applications that were ground breaking at that time and even now all those years later can teach others what is possible.
Other applications that show recent developments of materials and machines are also included as well as developments in 3D CAD and Digital Manufacturing that includes Formative, Additive and Subtractive Technologies (FAST) these are all part of the global Time Compression Technology movement.

By 1999 other companies than those mentioned in above menu selection were known to own an SLA but did not publicly offer bureau services. They were:
BAe (Lostock & Warton) DRA Malvern, Ford Brentwood, Lever, Rolls Royce, Williams, Jordan, Kinnear Duffort, MCP, Cardiff Uni, Roush, Ogle, Portsmouth Uni.

RP&T Centre
(Rapid Prototyping & Tooling)
1991 Graham Tromans was the first to be trained on the SLA500 in the UK. His role was to educate the engineers in the Rover Group and help them understand the benefits of using Rapid Prototyping and Rapid tooling technologies to save time and money and further application developments within the business.

It was a year earlier that Graham was introduced to the SLA technology with the Rover front grill built by Lasercad on their SLA250 and this had to be split into 3 pieces and using the resin to glue them into one single piece. The early acrylic resin however was very brittle and Graham recalls how the grill pieces broke in his hand as he picked it up. This early prototype model cost Rover £10,000 as the project included stiching the CAD model into a surface volume as it was supplied only in wire frame and untrimmed surface information in CADDs 4X native format.

Graham realised very early on that the benefits of a large vat SLA was the way forward and using the SLA technology and incorporating them with Rapid Casting would allow engineers to have castings that could be used directly in prototype car development.

2002 Graham left Rover to become Rapid Manufacturing Consortium Manager at the Loughborough University, England. He presented International papers in the USA, Japan & Europe on the subject of RP, RT & RM (Rapid Prototyping, Tooling & Manufacture). The UK governments Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) invited and sent Graham to both USA and Japan as a member of OSTEM (Overseas Science & Technology Expert Mission) to study the state of the art of RP technology in those countries.

In 2003 Graham became Chairman of the Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Association, UK. As well as President of the European StereoLithography Users Association, In the same year he edited a book called 'Developments in Rapid Casting' that was published by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

(ISBN 1 86058 390 3)

For more up to date information about Graham P Tromans, please visit his independent Additive Manufacturing (AM), Rapid Prototyping (RP) and 3D Printing consultancy website.

Rover Group Rapid Prototyping Facility