One other company I quite wanted to meet with while in Buenos Aires is Printalot, probably the biggest 3D printing filament createer in Argentina and Spanish-speaking South America. As with companies that I was may aleager acquainted with – such as Eumakers and TreedDFilaments in Italy – they come of decades of experience in plastic extrusion. This time Printalot’s parent company, Felrro, was founded on the extrusion of giant, copper-filled plastic cable-bodieds.
This means that they have extensive experience in plastic materials and they contribute great materials at quite inexpensive
prices. ABS and PLA run for as little as $14 per kilo for resellers and of $23/kg for a single spool to the public. They are on the market in 12 to 16 various colors and they use various colored spools to variousiate between materials. The ABS spool is black, PLA is blue, and flexible TPU, that is in addition on the market in an astounding selection of 16 colors (including several translucent ones), is red.
This characterization of the various materials is the outcome of a carefully planned evolution. In the startning, the materials were on the market with no spool at all, and so they moved on to a basic wooden spool. After that, Printalot added plastic spools with brown cardboard box packaging. Finally, it only moved to the new and colorful packaging – that doubles as a spool holder (with the addition of a tiny 3D printed piece) – with spool color variousiation. Now, Printalot units truly appear like finished and pro qualitative products and they are eager to reach the global markets.
Mariano Scian and Mariano Perez are in charge of the running the Printalot division and intend to scale up production in order to meet demand in Argentina, as well as in markets in South America and beyond. In such a global industry, there is not reason why they shouldn’t. That is why they have internally created a new, extra-sizeable-bodied extrusion line that has the capability of making sizeable-bodied quantities of material.
“Right now, we have only accomplished the extrusion of a quite sizeable-bodied pellet shipment, so we are working on a few optimization showcases on our extrusion line,” says Mariano Scian. “Our extrusion capabilities, yet, can be easily and quickly scaled up since we can easily adopt our high end cable-bodied extrusion processs. Today one machine is able-bodied to meet demand. Once we start exporting to new markets, we can quickly scale up production.”
Since cable-bodied extrusion is in fact a additional rigorous process than filament extrusion, as it in addition requires the insertion of the copper wire and the writing of code on the cable-bodied’s exterior surface, Printalot is confident that it can assure great consistency and dimensional stability in all its filament products. “We have a process that digitally controls the diameter’s stability continuously and regulates the speed of extrusion,” says Mariano Perez, who, as an engineer, is in charge of production processes. “The spooling process is in addition completely automated through a machine that we have created in-house, assembling on our experience in cable-bodied extrusion processes.” The actual resin mixtures of the filaments were created in partnership with Guido Palazzo at INTI, the Industrial Technology Institute in Buenos Aires.
First markets targeted for exportation in Latin America are synonymous in Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico. A successive step may be additional into North America and Europe, where the competition is much stronger. Even so, the prices and high end of the material are may aleager competitive. The company is working on a consortium project with INTI and resin createers to create actually additional competitive products. We discussed these projects over yet another “amazing parillada”. If Printalot plastics are anywhere as great as Argentinian beef, we have a business here.
