Hi ! Yesterday I was at the AddFab in Paris, France (not Texas :)).
It is an exhibition of French 3D Printing Professionals: manufacturers, software, services around 3D Printing, prototyping and so.
It is not big, which is nice because exhibitors can really take the time to discuss with people.
It was pretty nice with a dominance of industrial printers.
I forgot to take a few photos, but I will give you several links down bellow on what I found the most interesting.
The next year I will re-do it: http://www.addfab.fr
It is free as visitor, you need to register.
From a 3D Printers perspective, there was mostly polymer/plastic based ones, resin based too, and few samples for metal using either MIM or laser fused powder. I like a lot the MIM process because plastic pellets are available, and probably soon you can access it as filament you can print with your desktop 3D printer. Still the de-binding and the oven are not something yet really available even for SOHO businesses, but probably in the near future too.
There was a few resellers of known printer brands:
There was 3 French Manufacturers of 3D Printers:
They brought 3 machines: the smallest one, the big one (400mm on all axis) and a big prototype using servos.
All machines have an E3D HotEnd, 220V heatbed and fan less power supplies (120 to 200W). It does make sense, it is slightly faster to heat and when you have a 300mm heatbed it is more cost effective. Less fan noise too is nice.
The big one has the heatbed driven by two synchronized pulleys reducing any potential wobble on the bed.
Those machines are made of aluminium 2020 for the small, 3030 for the big one, simple and easy to hack.
The big prototype was very nice too, it is using IGUS linear rails all around and screws with a very long pitch that allow to move and to accelerate fast on X and Y Axis, and 80W water cooled hotends.
You can put also an addon on the extruder head to harvest small particles with a Charcoal Filter
http://3dmodularsystems.com/en/3dtox/423-3dtox-le-purificateur-d-air-pour-imprimante-3d.html
Nice guys to talk to about several different topics: printer design, high throughput extruders and so on.
There was the Polymer version of the machine, with 4 extruders.
It is a Delta machine where the massive multihead is static, the bed moves.
This machine print with pellets of any kind, the nozzle size can go down to 0.25mm which means they really mastered the extrusion via pellets.
They also had some samples produced by the MIM version of the machine. It is quiet something when you have such a part (made in Stainless Steel in this case), where you can still see a few part of the layers printed by the machine.
The part that I had in my hand was the following:
Nice team available for talking, to discuss different topics since they are in contact with industrial using different kind of plastics not available as filament.
More details here: https://www.pollen.am/
They have different range of machines, they brought a desktop machine and a relatively large one.
The large one is 600mm * 600mm * 600mm :
They are also building custom machines even larger than that, you can have a look to the photos here:
http://www.tobeca.fr/speciales/
They have a nice team, very available and supportive people to talk to.
