FROM THE
LAB.
Technical guides, material comparisons, case studies and industry news from 3Dmatic’s engineering team. No fluff — just useful content for engineers, designers and product teams.
A complete guide to rapid prototyping in Australia — covering 3D printing technologies, materials, turnaround times and how to get from concept to physical part in days, not weeks.
What This 3D Printing Blog Covers
The 3D printing blog behind these cards exists to answer the questions our Brisbane workshop hears daily: which technology suits a given part — FDM, SLA, SLS, MJF or metal; how materials actually behave in service rather than on a datasheet; what 3D scanning and reverse engineering can recover from a legacy part; and how to prepare CAD files that print right the first time. Guides are written by the people running the machines, so the advice reflects what survives contact with a build plate — wall thicknesses that actually hold, orientations that avoid support scarring, and the tolerance expectations each process can honestly meet.
Where to Start
New to additive manufacturing? Start with the technology comparison guides, which map part requirements to process without the vendor gloss. Engineers evaluating suppliers should read the material and tolerance articles — they set the vocabulary for a productive quoting conversation. And anyone with a broken, obsolete or undocumented part will get the most from the scan-to-CAD case studies, which show what reverse engineering can reconstruct and what it costs in time. If a question is not covered, send it through the contact page; reader questions drive a good share of what gets written next.
Guides, Case Studies and Material Notes
Content lands in three shapes. Technical guides walk one decision end to end — choosing a nylon, orienting a part, specifying a scan. Case studies document real jobs from this workshop with the compromises left in, because the compromises are the education: the bracket that needed a redesign before it would print, the obsolete impeller reconstructed from a worn sample, the prototype run that changed material halfway through and why. Material notes are short and current — new filaments, resins and powders get bench-tested here before they get recommended anywhere, and the notes say plainly when a heavily marketed material is not worth your money. The archive below runs newest first; everything stays up because old posts get corrected rather than quietly deleted. Publication runs on usefulness rather than a calendar — a post appears when a pattern of client questions or a genuinely new material justifies it. That cadence keeps the archive small and dense: fewer posts than a content-farm competitor, but each one written because someone standing at a machine in this workshop needed the answer first. Suggestions for topics are read and frequently acted on; several of the most-visited guides on this 3d printing blog started life as a client email asking why a part failed.