LEGO and Apple 3D print end-use parts | Arburg Exits 3D | Pro PCTG Pricing | 3D-Fueled Episode 3

Hey everyone, this is John Schneider with the 3D-Fueled podcast. 

This is the podcast where we talk about 3D printing industry related items, things that have to do with e-commerce, marketing, and also what 3D Fuel is up to - talking about some of the things that we're experiencing as a 3D printing small business. 

What we're going to be talking about today is first, we're gonna go through the news. 

We have a few items - Arburg is ending its 3D printing division, LEGO 3D prints end-use parts that are going into final sets. Apple now has 3D printed parts in its new iPhones, and the final version of Prusa slicer 2.9.3.

We're  also going to talk about some of the things going on in the 3D fuel world. We are going to ebe attending and exhibiting at 3D Printopia next weekend.  We have improved some of our production capacity and efficiency, and we have some things to share about that, and  also talking about some new lower pricing on the core 3D-Fuel Pro PCTG colors.

And then after that, we'll go ahead and jump into questions. So first, the news. Arburg is ending its first or ending its 3D printing division.

So, this is directly from Arburg. They put out a press release and talking about their withdrawal from additive manufacturing. So Arburg, if those of you out there that aren't aware of it, Arburg is primarily an injection molding company. So they do things like injection molding presses and auxiliary equipment.  

And about a little over a decade ago, they came out with a  3D printer that is kind of novel in how it works. It uses injection molding plastic pellets - so really low cost commodity materials, and it's able to print them by basically...  very similar to inkjet technology where it's using sound waves and melting the material in order to very precisely deposit droplets of that melted polymer layer by layer by layer.

So you are able to get really nice thermoplastic parts. This is different than like a resin 3D printer where it's maybe spraying like PolyJet by Stratasys where they are spraying the liquid resin and then using a UV light to harden that.

So this is different in that it is a thermoplastic rather than a photopolymer.  This can result in really strong parts. I mean, even I kind of wondered who is buying these 3D printers.

Whenever you would go to RAPID or any of the big industrial  print shows like Formnext.  You usually see Arburg with a pretty, pretty good-sized booth. And these are not inexpensive machines. My understanding is that these are in the six-figure range and you have to print a lot of parts in order to offset the  higher cost of those machines by using the lower cost injection molding materials. 

So, going through their press release, this is going to be from their chairman of the advisory board at Arburg, um Dr. Armin Schmiedeberg.  This business decision was taken after careful evaluation and consideration of the current market situation and the current economic parameters, which is a lot of fancy words to say, “Hey, the economy is not doing so great right now and it doesn't make sense to be making capital expenditures. And so the companies that normally would be buying our 3D printers, they're not buying our 3D printers.”

I've  worked for companies that have been kind of similar to this. was a period of time where I was working for Essentium or working with Essentium and also then Nexa3D.  And some of these same capital restrictions led to um challenging sales environments for those printers. If companies aren't able to obtain inexpensive money and if they don't have an urgent need then they're not going to be buying six-figure machines. It's just not something that they do.

However, existing AM customers and users of the Freeformer, which is the name of the printer,  can continue to rely on Arburg's brand promise, “Wir Sind Da”. So they're still going to be providing a reliable spare parts supply and comprehensive service for existing Freeformers on the market. However, Arburg will no longer participate in trade fairs, events, and symposia. 

That's just another large 3D printing company that has kind of, I mean, Arburg's not going away, but they are shuttering their 3D printing division. 

Next piece of news is that LEGO is 3D printing end use parts. So LEGO, everyone knows LEGO 3D printing. If you're listening to this, you're probably familiar with 3D printing. People have tried to 3D print LEGO pieces for a long time, but tolerances are usually one of the challenges with that. 

And to 3D print something at scale, to be blunt, injection molding is so much more repeatable. It is so much more inexpensive because LEGO, you're already going to have the mold cut and you're going to be cranking these things out. You're not just printing 10 bricks. You're going to be printing, you know, 10,000, 100,000, a million, a million plus 10 million pieces of the exact same part. So that's where those economies of scale of doing injection molding really make a lot of sense. 

Now the piece that LEGO is 3D printing it let's see. So, this is per 3DPrintingIndustry.com. It is going to be appearing in the LEGO Icons Holiday Express Train. The first set to include a mass-produced 3D printed part. And this is a unique design that they're able to get a really unique print that simply wouldn't be possible with injection molding, or at least not easily doable at scale. 

The 3D printed part is this little tiny blue train and has all of these really fine details in it. You can see the spokes in the wheel. I mean, this thing is not many studs long. So they say that it is, uh so it's not like the first official 3D printed piece,  but this is just the first one that's mass produced. The first piece was actually a LEGO duck that was given to guests at a LEGO House AFOL event. So AFOL, Adult Fans of LEGO event, but it was not mass-produced. 

This set is going to be available to LEGO Insiders on October 1st, 2025 with general release on October 4th, 2025 priced at 129.99 USD. It's just interesting to see how this, you know, how this is, they're not 3D printing it just because it can be 3D printed. They are 3D printing it because this part wouldn't really be doable via their normal injection molding process. So that's exciting. 

Speaking of other companies that are doing 3D printing in mass-produced parts, Apple is now additively manufacturing parts for the new iPhone Air and Apple Watch Series 11.  So this is per tctmagazine.com.  Again, this is not just because you can 3D print a part, but what they're doing is they are, let me see if I can find this section in here. 

So they're using 3D printing to produce the titanium USB-C port. The USB-C port is not only said to be stronger and thinner than predecessor iPhone charging ports, but the additive manufacturing process is also said to have used 33% less material than a conventional forging process. So with 3D printing, Apple is solving two problems here. 

The first one is, you know, providing better functionality of the part.  So it allows them to make their phones thinner or what I wish they would do, it would allow them to have more room for more battery capacity, but can't solve that problem today. 

And it's allowing them to save on material. So they're going to be achieving a cost savings. And now they're going to have a performance benefit or at least a perceived performance benefit by their customers, which should increase the implicit value of that iPhone. So that's exciting to see that they are bringing this into mass production. 

Other things, uh you know, other things that are in this article. Apple says additive manufacturing used half the raw material that was required for previous generations, so they're not needing to cast it in the same way, so casting is a completely different process than 3D  printing this part in titanium. Let's see, it's also part of its 2030 plan to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint. To meet this target, the company is looking to reduce product emissions from its three biggest sources: materials, electricity, and transportation. 

Conceivably, by 3D printing these parts, they shouldn't need to be transported as much. You bring the raw materials in and then you're able to print the parts on site. Now, I'm not sure exactly how Apple has integrated this into its supply chain, but you can bet that it is, oh, however they've done it, it is at scale. Apple, you know, might've heard of them, kind of a big company, kind of a big deal that they're doing this. Maybe they will be leading the way for other people to be doing similar things.  

And then the last piece of news for this week is that Prusa has released the final version  of Prusa Slicer 2.9.3. I talked about this in last week's episode and how the features of this for like the new consistent surface cooling, it's smarter logic for improved outer wall quality on fast layers. That's going to improve the overall surface finish of parts, especially printed  in glossy materials like PCTG or PETG, which really can demonstrate the different speed changes on those outer walls. This should provide more uniform strength because it will be more consistent throughout the part, rather than having potentially rapid changes. If you have one layer that prints much faster and another layer that prints much slower, this is also going to help reduce the those vertical fine artifacts. 

The second item in this big update is the short travel acceleration. This is going to reduce ringing by slowing only the shortest travels on external perimeters. So this, in conjunction with the belt tuning app that Prusa has released, I've been seeing some really good, really good videos out there talking about how much this has improved the overall print finish of parts that are printed on, for example, the Core One, the MK4S and the Prusa XL. 

There is also one more major change in 2.9.3 relative to 2.9.2. and that is custom G-code parameters, define your own variables and profiles for flexible G-code customization. This isn't something that I've really even come close to scratching the surface of yet. So I just can't really talk too extensively about it with any good level of knowledge. 

So going to 3D-Fuel happenings.  First and foremost, we are going to be exhibiting at 3D Printopia in Bel Air, Maryland, next weekend.  This is an event that is taking place on September 27th and 28th.  If you haven't been to 3D Printopia and you are in the area, especially if you're near Bel Air or in the DC-Baltimore area, this is a great 3D printing event to attend.  It's been one of my favorite events so far. 

3D-Fuel, this is going to be our, I believe it's our fourth or fifth time exhibiting at this event.  And it's one of the best-organized 3D printing events that I've been to, especially when we're talking at the hobbyist scale.  The team is really, as a vendor, the team is really on top of making sure that we have all of our ducks in a row and making sure that things are being shipped to the correct place.  

So we will be having a 10 foot by 20 foot booth at this event. We will have a bunch of Pro PCTG on hand for you to be looking at, for you to be touching, feeling,  really experiencing the differences between  something like PETG and our Pro PCTG. I mean, there's some pretty remarkable differences here. And we're going to have some of our most popular colors available for sale and we'll have some great on-site discounts for that too.  We really love seeing you guys.  

And if you, even if you haven't printed with it yet, if you printed with any of our other materials, we love to see what you're printing. We really love to see, you know, what our materials are enabling. You guys are the creative ones. We're just providing the fuel for that creativity. 

Speaking of providing the fuel for that creativity, our next production line is not quite up and running yet, but as we're expanding our production capacity, we're also finding other ways to improve our production efficiency. We are going to be moving to a new spool design, which I believe has about a 35 % reduction in the amount of plastic used that will help us save some on the costs. And it should also provide some better functionality for the, uh, for the spool of filament as well. 

And by that, I mean,  it's going to be even more compatible with your Bambu AMS because it won't. the inner core diameter is smaller. Our current spool, I think it's about 120 millimeters in diameter, or maybe it's 105. And then this new one, I think it's closer to 80 millimeters in diameter. So what that means is as the spool is filled, at its very outer edges, sometimes if it's not a perfect wind, that filament can interfere with where the filament gets loaded into the AMS. So this means with that smaller diameter, that outer diameter will also be smaller. 

That's going to reduce the amount of interference or potential interference issues.  There's also going to be some cutouts on the side. So it's much more visible to see how much material is left on the spool. And that's going to provide for better use of desiccant and more efficient filament drying when you have it in a filament dryer. So I should be ready to share information on that next week. We still have not entered that into full production. We've placed our first order for these spools. They should be arriving in about a week, week and a half. So I think all of our production from October moving forward is going to be on that new spool design. 

Because of these improved production capacities and efficiencies, we're no longer at the risk of selling out of so many of our materials. So we're very excited to say, and this has been a goal and something that we've been having as our probably biggest piece of feedback with Pro PCTG has been, “What can you do about the price?”

People love the material, they want to print more with it, but we understand that for a lot of people, Pro PCTG is a very functional material. It's not something that you're gonna be using to just knock out a quick prototype. This is what you use for your end-use, final use part. And so a lot of people are like, “Hey, John, love the material. I'm only using it for that final variation of the print that I'm doing. I'm not using it for  those prototyping prints.”

And when we have customers selling 3D-printed products, every little bit of margin counts. So every little bit that we can help them to reduce their cost means that they're going to be using PCTG even more and hopefully more effectively too. They're going to get more experience under their belts. We're going to get more experience from learning about their experience in printing with it. So just kind of builds on itself and it helps make everyone better. 

So right now we have, this is just kind of a short-term drop in price - the goal is to make this a longer-term drop in price. So we've dropped the price on our Natural, which is the perfectly clear PCTG material, Midnight Black, and Industrial Gray, all three of those. we've dropped from a price of $39.90 at the retail point for a 1 kilogram spool down to $34.90 for a 1 kilogram spool. 

So this is,  basically, it's a 13 % decrease in the cost of the filament to you. We still have the quantity discounts. So if you buy more, you end up saving more by having the quantity discount stacked on top of that. And we offer free shipping on orders over $75. So this means that some of the most popular colors, the Natural, Industrial Gray, Midnight Black. These are the colors that sell the best for us anyway, and we know that you're using them the most. And so we think this is gonna be the best way at least to start in bringing the cost down for Pro-PCTG. So with that, I think it's time for questions. 

Okay, so going through the comments, before I get to that, I do wanna say, hey, I know that the last video, the focus wasn't, it still wasn't where I wanted it to be.  I've played around with some of the camera settings. I've had some viewers that have provided some feedback. I see that it's doing a lot of fast focus adjusting. I believe my face is certainly more in focus, but now it's making those adjustments much more quickly.  So I'm going to see if there is a way that I can be tuning that even a little bit more.

But going through the questions and the comments on this video:  “Hell yeah, great episode. Looking forward to these.”

Thank you, DatMammot76. We have some ideas from, let's see, I don't know how to even pronounce this, I'm just gonna say it's Twiki. So T-W-I-K-I-Y.  They're talking about ideas for the toolbox colors. 

Oh, these are, I think, just new color ideas. So Bosch Blue, Bosch Green, Hitachi Green, Hioki Green, which is apparently new Hitachi under a different name, Dexter Blue slash Orange, Black and Decker Orange. So we'll take a look at some of these, some of them are already pretty close to uh colors that we already have out. We're probably going to be doing a survey in the next month or so just to see what colors people want the most. 

One of the things, and this is something that, you know, Gabe Bentz from Slant 3D, and I, in a lot of ways are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to, uh you know, when it comes to color selection and color variety availability.  Gabe is very much... Hey, going for maximum efficiency, absolute lowest cost per spool. So you can have PLA in any color as long as it's black. 

I know they have that low price target. And that's one of the ways they do it is by not having that manufacturing variety.  On the other end of the spectrum is us. 

We have, I think, 45 colors right now of Pro PCTG, 40 colors of Tough Pro PLA Plus, and 50 colors of standard PLA Plus. We may need to look at trimming some of those back because as we're introducing things like Toolbox Colors, for example, there are some of them that are already pretty, pretty close to existing colors that we have, but those existing colors don't sell terribly well. So we may be doing a little bit of pruning as we move forward on the color selection.  

Someone asked, "I want a hat."  The great news is we have these hats for sale on our 3dfuel.com website. In the site nav, if you go to, I think it's under either accessories or other, m Merchandise  is or like branded merch is one of the options. The hat is $20, or if you place an order for I believe it's  $500 or more, you get the hat for free. So just a little incentive to encourage you to, you know, place those orders hit that certain dollar threshold and get some free 3D-Fuel merch.

From Monty underscore FPV show, notes with timestamps for news events would be a game changer for your podcast. Consider it, I love your PCTG, I use it all the time. Good luck.

So Monty, that is something that we are going to try and implement. If you have any suggestions for tools that are good for helping accelerate the processing of something like that,  that'd be great because we're a very small marketing team. So, doing something like the show notes with timestamps, we'll be able to do it. It's just going to take a little bit of time because one of the other things I want to do is have a show transcript  and then have that posted to the website. 

That way, if someone's not able to listen to it, let's say they are just watching this on the train or on a bus, and I hope that you're not listening to it with the speakers on, like no one else wants to hear this, I guarantee it, this is just something between you and I that we're gonna be talking 3D printing and startup life. 

This way you can be watching, but also having the text that you can be following along with too. Because sometimes things like YouTube,  their auto-generated subtitles don't always do well for technical content or very niche content like 3D printing can be.  

Let's see, love having another spot to get more 3D printing news. That's from Specialized with Spooner. Oh, hey, thanks, Eric.  So Eric, he's the one that tipped me off to, hey, John, do you know that in your camera there's better autofocus functionality? And  not only that, but he sent me the link to how to do it. So thank you, Eric, I appreciate that. 

From coffee gear lab: good coverage of the Prusa changes I wonder if the updated short travel movements are akin to jerk values for travel. Also, are you going to be making a matte white PCTG using glass fiber? 

Great question regarding the jerk values for travel. I have a feeling that it's - without having done enough research on this. I think that they are kind of two different ways of solving similar problems. One is very much in the firmware itself. That's gonna be your jerk values.  You can define that in the firmware. So some of that can be hard-coded. Some of it is dynamically set at the beginning of each print. So I don't know, like I think this is going to be, it's just gonna be addressing different things.  And then on that point about matte white PCTG using glass fiber, this is something that we're looking into. 

We already have a really good compounder for carbon fiber materials, but they're not set up to be doing glass fiber materials. They basically specialize in carbon fiber, carbon fiber, carbon fiber.  And so they don't even have glass fiber in-house to be able to help us source that. So we're working with another compounder on that. But the goal is to be able to offer that.  

And then,  let's see, the thumbnail looks like, I'm Joseph, put money here. If you saw the thumbnail from last week's video, I... Yeah, that's kind of accurate. I got to figure out what to do for,  I need to figure out what to do for,  for thumbnails for,  for videos moving forward. So if you guys have ideas, please let me know down in the comments. 

Just sometimes doing a screen grab will work, but since a lot of these videos are going to be me being a talking head, it means that they might not be as interesting as, uh you know, as they could be. 

Let's see then.  Oh, this is, this is, guess, more of a fun comment: John Schneider, the big stud in demand. Are you single? Asking for friend. I'm jealous, my friend.  

I guarantee you, I can almost guarantee you that if someone is commenting that in the video comments, it's probably not... ah We may have different dating types or dating styles. Not  to say that that's the case, but um yeah.  And I'm taken anyway, so that's...  Sorry to disappoint anyone out there. 

I want to thank you all for checking in for this episode three of the 3D Fueled podcast.  Next week, I'm going to try and get this filmed a little bit earlier. I'm going to be heading out for 3D Printopia on Thursday. I'm also trying to get a better idea of a good release date and release cadence for these. I want to be doing one per week. If you guys have an idea on which day works best, that would be fantastic because I also don't want to be competing with some of the other really great 3D printing YouTubers out there.  But I want to  have something a little more structured so you can plan around it. 

Like, oh,  hey, it's Friday. Oh, Filament Friday,  3D-Fueld, Filament Friday,  the podcast is going to be up.  Or Wednesday, oh, this is a good midweek thing, kind of help get you through the week. Or if you want to be getting news on Monday, I don't know what is going to be the best option. I will say that most press releases by companies tend to get released on Tuesday, or at least they are cleared for publication on Tuesday. So I probably won't do any filming before a Tuesday, maybe doing it Tuesday evening, maybe filming Wednesday.  And I don't really like posting on Fridays.  I could certainly be convinced otherwise on that. And once we try out some different posting dates, maybe we'll get some data to back up one way or another.  But Friday, I feel like people are, hey, it's the weekend. I'm going to be heading out of town. I'm going be going and doing something. I've got family things planned. I have friends things planned. 

And I worry that it may get buried under people just not being available to watch. So open to ideas, and I hope to have more information to share with you next week  and  I will talk to you then. Have a good week. Bye.