Looking for Engineer Feedback for 3d Printing

Hello,

     I have kind of an odd question. I work for a company that specializes in procurement for hydraulic and pneumatic parts. I am trying to convince our boss to purchase a 3d printer for side projects such as printing models and hard to find parts. My question for all you engineers out there is, "would there be any specific parts or models that you think that you as an engineer may need printed?" For example, prototyping and such. We were thinking of offering a print service specific to engineers for different types of projects versus open to hobbyist. Let me know what you guys think. Thank you in advance  

Kindest Regards,

Michael

Hm... I'm work for a company that designs and manufactures stuff. We have several 3D printers. They are primarily used for prototyping concepts... anything from new products to ideas for tools and fixtures. We'll use them for fit checks, basic functional tests, or just to see a concept in real life (or show it to others) before investing in real manufacturing. I don't think we've yet to make any production parts from 3D printing, but we're not opposed to it.

That being said, I'm not sure what you mean when you say your company "specializes in procurement for hydraulic and pneumatic parts". I'm guessing you purchase and resell? ... the proverbial "middle-man"?  Or do you spec out systems for other people who don't have the expertise? I'm not sure what uses you might get from a 3D printer. Maybe sending models to customers? 

The middle-man is a good way to sum it up  But we may want to step out of the field of fluid power and offer assistance with other applications and industries. Models would definitely be something I could see working for quite a few of our clients. 

Thanks for the wonderful response, it is greatly appreciated. If I may ask a follow up question. Do you or your team have any specific frustrations with 3d printing that you could share. The more feedback the better

Thanks again

Frustrations? I don't know maybe early on (before I started here), but not at this point. Frustration comes when something doesn't meet your expectations, but if your expectations are realistic then nothing to get frustrated over.

If possible, I'd recommend figuring out what you want from your 3D printer first, then select a machine based on that. There's lots of options out there, so someone who's really interested will have to spend time doing a lot of research. For example, how strong do you want your prints to be? ...how dimensionally accurate? What size parts will you be printing? How fast do you want to get them done? Price? Complexity? Etc, etc. If you don't know these answers, there's nothing wrong with getting a decent general purpose printer to try it out and see what happens. But realize that it once you figure out what you want, it may not be the ideal machine. So you may end up buying something else.

My department (new product design) has two 3D printers.

We have a "traditional/common" filament extrusion one. It's on the slower side, can print medium sized parts, with a pretty rough surface (probably +/- a couple millimeters), but the parts are decently strong for our purposes.

We have a second 3D printer that's a binder jetting one. It can print much faster, prints larger parts that are SUPER dimensionally accurate (down to fractions of a millimeter). And the parts look beautiful. But they are super weak (strength and wear). I could easily break them by hand or scrape away material with a fingernail.

So we'll use a different printer depending on what we need out of the part. Everything is a compromise. You won't be able to get the best of every quality in a single machine unless you drop some serious cash. And even then, different processes have different advantages.