Can you guess what this is?
It actually is two things: first it is an inner reflector for a desk lamp, but it also dates back to 1990 and is Materialise’s very first prototype. Fried Vancraen, Materialise’s Founder and CEO, hired Philippe Schiettecatte as his first employee to work with this new technology that looked more like science fiction than anything in this world. Materialise started as a spinoff of the University of Louvain (KU Leuven), which provided them with a tiny 12-squaremeter space, and Materialise’s first machine, a SLA 250, was installed on Philippe’s second day of work and the two of them got busy testing a few prints.
The first real prototype that the company made was this part for Massive, a light equipment manufacturer, and it was revolutionary in 1990 that Massive could get a part printed in one week. At that time, they didn’t have Magics or other software programs that make it easier to print, and the hardware (both computers and printers themselves) were not very powerful.
So what they had to do exactly was the following:
- Design object from 2D to 3D: Philippe received 2D drawings from Massive and designed it in 3D with software provided by the KU Leuven.
- Designing support: After he had a design, Philippe designed support structures (and I mean design - there wasn’t a software like e-Stage that would automatically generate support) so that the object could actually hold its shape once it was printed; without support, most objects need support to be printed so that the object holds the intended form, and this support is removed in the finishing process.
- Slicing the data: Next came the time-consuming process of slicing the data – both the support and the part itself – which took a long time on the Pentium 386 computer they used. Computers were not very powerful which made slicing either time consuming or not possible at all. Because of this step was so complicated, Fried brought in Johan Pawels, a master’s student at KU Leuven (and who would later acquire his current title of Executive Vice President). He developed software to simplify this process and it was initially only used in-house, and this software is the grandfather of Materialise’s 3D printing software available today. Using the software he developed, it became possible to manipulate SLI files. Therefore, instead of slicing the entire file by scratch, he sliced a portion of the file, and this information could be mirrored, rotated, and translated to make the workflow faster.
- Printing the object: Usually only one part was printed at a time because of the time-consuming process to get to that point. It simply took too much time to design and slice more than one object and print both at once.
- Support Removal: Then came the laborious task of removing the support from the brittle structure. In these early days, the supports used a lot of material, meaning that there was a lot of contact between the support and the part itself. Of course today it is different: there is minimal contact and the materials themselves are better-suited for the part and support, so this task is much easier in comparison. But Philippe had to stay on his toes when they removed the support because one slip of the hand could put their previous hours of work to waste.
- Finished prototype! After lots of sandpaper, they had their finished prototype – the first of many to come.
In between these steps, they played lots of ping pong, but that’s another story. So if this was a prototype for a company to use in their product development, why does Materialise have it? Well, in 2000 for Materialise’s 10th anniversary, Massive gave the prototype to Materialise as a symbolic present to see how far the company had come.