New capacity to support expanding business strategy
Rheinmuenster, Germany (18th March, 2010) – Crawley Creatures, a multi-award winning specialist in animatronics, robotics, prosthetics and model-making, has installed an Objet Alaris30™ 3D printer to expand its prototyping capacity and deliver exceptional 3D print quality.
“We’ve improved our in-house prototyping services with the Alaris30™ already,” states Managing Director Jez Gibson-Harris. “Quality is extremely important to us. A large proportion of our business is for film or television and more recently we’ve been working with the Ministry of Defence, so our work has to withstand heavy scrutiny.”
When it was founded in 1986, Crawley Creatures operated exclusively in the film, television and commercial industries. Since then it has provided a range of 3D scanning, surfacing and engineering services to a very impressive list of productions, including Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, 007 Tomorrow Never Dies, American Werewolf in Paris, Never Ending Story 1 and 2, Willow and the award-winning BBC1/Discovery series Walking with Dinosaurs. Success in this field led to enquiries from international government defence departments and in 2008 a subsidiary business, i-bodi, was launched to serve a broader range of markets.
Buckingham-based Crawley Creatures first invested in rapid prototyping in 2006, and the time and cost benefits of 3D printing technology quickly became apparent. Three years on, and the business required increased capacity and also wanted a step-change improvement in the detail and quality of the parts it was producing. For those reasons Objet technology was selected. “The prototyping stage is crucial to our customers, it can save a lot of time, money and effort if we can get things right early on in the process. The Alaris30™ suits our needs because the quality of printed parts is excellent – very fine and precise detail can be achieved, and it’s quick – parts can be printed overnight and post print clean-up is minimal,” comments Gibson-Harris.
The Alaris30™ uses VeroWhite FullCure830 as its modelling material, prints in fine 28-micron layers and produces models with walls as thin as 0.6 mm.
“We use the Alaris30™ principally for producing components to test size and function and print short run production moulds for soft polymer components. The opaque quality of the material allows details and edging to be seen very clearly, and although the material is rigid, it allows a certain amount of flexing and handles well. We can also achieve a very smooth finish and the precision provided by the Alaris30™ printer means that we can test moving parts with confidence,” says Gibson-Harris.
Founded in 1986, Crawley Creatures has been a limited company since 2006 and employs five staff. The company has won several awards for its work including two Baftas and four Bafta nominations, an Emmy and three Emmy nominations in Visual Effects, two Royal Television Society awards, a TRIC and a Millennium Products Award.
Jez Gibson Harris checks the details of a scaled-down model produced on the Alaris30™ 3D printer.
The opaque quality of Objet’s VeroWhite FullCure®830 material allows details and edging of models to be seen very clearly.
Crawley Creatures has won numerous awards for its specialist work in animatronics, robotics, prosthetics and model-making.
About Objet Geometries
Objet Geometries Ltd., (http://www.objet.com/), a pioneer in photopolymer jetting, develops, manufactures and globally markets ultra-thin-layer, high-resolution 3-Dimensional printing systems and materials that utilize PolyJet™ and PolyJet Matrix™ polymer jetting technologies to print ultra-thin layers.
The market-proven Eden™ line of 3D Printing Systems and the Alaris30 3D Printer are based on Objet’s patented office-friendly PolyJet Technology. The Connex family is based on Objet’s PolyJet Matrix™ technology, which jets multiple model materials simultaneously and creates composite Digital Materials™ on the fly. All Objet systems use Objet's FullCure® materials to create accurate, clean, smooth and highly detailed 3-dimensional models.
Objet’s solutions enable manufacturers and industrial designers to reduce cost of product development cycles and dramatically shorten time-to-market of new products. Objet systems are in use by world leaders in many industries, such as Education, Medical / Medical Devices & Dental, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, toys, consumer goods, and footwear industries in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Japan.
Founded in 1998, Objet serves its growing worldwide customer base through offices in USA, Mexico, Europe, Japan, China and Hong Kong, and a global network of distribution partners. Objet owns more than 50 patents and patent pending inventions.
Contacts:
John Jones, Objet Geometries GmbH +49 7229 777 2-200 john.jones@objet.com
David Chandler, The Bespoke Agency +44 1737 215 200 dave@bespoke.co.uk
