Large Format 3D Printing: Industrial Manufacturing at Scale

Take advantage of our large format industrial additive machines to print huge parts or high volume production orders in a wide selection of engineering grade materials. These systems represent the pinnacle of additive manufacturing technology, combining massive build volumes with industrial precision and reliability.

The Challenge with Splitting Parts

Typically, parts that exceed the build volume of standard printers are split up into smaller sections that then must be assembled. While this is a viable solution to a common problem, it introduces complications that can significantly affect cost, quality, timeline, and dimensional accuracy across multiple industries including aerospace and automotive manufacturing.

Parts too large for a standard printer must be segmented and printed in pieces, then reassembled.

Assembly Design Considerations

When splitting a part, consideration needs to be given to how it will be reassembled. This usually involves designing additional features that ensure the sections attach properly. Common methods include:

• Tongue and groove joints: Provide mechanical interlocking but require precise tolerances
• Lap joints: Offer good surface area for bonding but increase material usage
• Bosses for fasteners: Enable removable assembly but add complexity and weight
• Alignment jigs: Necessary for holding parts during gluing, increasing tooling costs
• Keying features: Prevent misalignment but require additional machining considerations

Post-Processing Complexity

Most split assemblies result in additional material usage, and the resulting part may be weaker along the seams than a one-piece print. If seams need to be hidden for aesthetic or functional reasons, the entire part must undergo a comprehensive finishing process:

1. Surface preparation: Cleaning and roughening mating surfaces
2. Adhesive application: Using structural adhesives or epoxies
3. Clamping and curing: Maintaining alignment during cure cycles
4. Seam filling: Applying body filler or putty to gaps
5. Surface priming: Preparing for paint adhesion
6. Sanding progression: Multiple grits from coarse to fine
7. Final finishing: Painting, texturing, or coating application

Tolerance and Quality Challenges

Assembling split parts has a significant impact on tolerances. Offsets need to be included for any keys or mating surfaces, and there remains a risk that dimensions across a split will be inaccurate. In precision applications common in aerospace and medical device manufacturing, these tolerance stack-ups can be problematic.

Print Huge Parts as Single Bodies

Our large format machines give you the ability to print very large parts as a single body, rather than segmenting, keying, and joining. This can save on up-front design time, post-processing costs, and significantly reduces lead times while maintaining superior structural integrity.

Our 3D Systems ProX950 can print an entire vehicle dashboard as one piece, enabling rapid iteration for automotive designers.

Maximum Build Volume Capabilities

If you provide a part that exceeds the build volume of our largest machines, we can still split it for assembly. However, it ends up being far more efficient than splitting it for smaller machines, because the preparation, labor, and potential error accumulate with every additional split. Our approach minimizes the number of segments required, reducing overall project complexity.

Production Volume Manufacturing

Even if you are not printing large parts, our large build volumes enable high throughput of production parts with excellent reliability, repeatability, and tolerances across the build area. This is an excellent choice for companies that want to produce end-use consumer parts while maintaining complete design flexibility and avoiding the expensive tooling costs that come with traditional high-volume manufacturing methods like injection molding.

Large printers have very high throughput, enabling greater production volumes than standard industrial machines.

Large Format Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM)

Large format FDM with good accuracy is technically challenging because it requires high gantry rigidity across the long spans of each axis, parallelism between the gantry and the large build platform, and consistent temperature control throughout the build volume. It is also critical to use high-quality filament clear of contaminants, with low moisture content and consistent extrusion diameter to reduce the incidence of quality issues, since larger builds always come with a higher probability of failure.

Stratasys Engineering Excellence

Stratasys has mastered these challenges. Our industrial fused deposition modeling machines are remarkably reliable across even the largest builds when it comes to part stability, tolerances across long spans, and repeatability between prints. The carefully controlled temperature inside the build chamber, coupled with platen flatness, consistent calibration, material quality, regular maintenance, and technical know-how combines to form the perfect recipe for superior quality parts across the entire build area.

Stratasys F900

Build Volume:

36 × 24 × 36 in

914 × 609 × 914 mm

Stratasys F770

Build Volume:

39 × 24 × 24 in

1,000 × 610 × 610 mm

Large Format Stereolithography (SLA)

Our large format stereolithography technology is indispensable when it comes to producing watertight parts or parts with an ultra-smooth surface finish on tight timelines. With industrial SLA, the build volume is directly dependent on the amount of resin stored in the vat below the build platform. Larger machines have more than $100,000 worth of photopolymer resin sitting inside them at any given time. Once printing is completed, parts need to be post-cured, which is made possible with our large format UV curing oven.

Advanced Laser Technology

Our ProX950 printers have the largest build volume in our SLA facility, which means we can print huge monolithic parts with high complexity and fine details and move them into post-processing and finishing without any assembly required. With dual laser spot sizes, print times can be reduced by using small laser spots on fine details and outer walls while a larger spot size is used to quickly cure interior features.

Industry-Specific Applications

This design freedom and speed makes this technology popular with film industry prop-masters and industrial design studios. Film props are almost always highly time-critical, and minor differences in production time can make or break a project. Automotive designers are able to print entire car dash pieces, allowing them to rapidly iterate through design variations without the need to remove or ignore artifacts from split parts.

3D Systems ProX800

Build Volume:

26 × 30 × 22 in

650 × 750 × 550 mm

3D Systems ProX950

Build Volume:

59 × 30 × 22 in

1500 × 750 × 550 mm

Go Big: Maximizing Manufacturing Potential

While it is impressive to see some of the ingenious workarounds used by designers trying to print outside their printer's build volume, large format printers completely sidestep this problem. Rather than factoring in additional time and money for complex pre- and post-processing, you can simply upload your large parts to our quote tool and we will print them as a single piece while you focus on more important aspects of your project.