Dr. Charles Mire and Dr. Andrew Finkle

After realizing that there wasn’t a standardized toolhead that would allow 3D printers to handle liquid rubber materials, Dr. Charles Mire, CEO, and Dr. Andrew Finkle, CTO, cofounded Structur3d.io, a Canadian company that offers the Discov3ry extruder. It is integrated with the Ultimaker 2+ for R&D purposes. Using the Discov3ry Complete printer system vastly expands the capabilities of a desktop 3D printer, allowing everything from 3D printed concrete, to foods, to hydrogels for biotech applications to be printed.

“As our company grew, our customers helped us understand more about the technology gaps for manufacturing, particularly for producing small quantities of production quality parts or products, and this led us to develop the Inj3ctor,” Dr. Mire, says.

The Inj3ctor is capable of using thousands of factory-grade 2K liquid rubber materials, and can easily be used with the Ultimaker ecosystem. Simply load the STL file into Cura, select the mold-generation feature to create a mold design, and print the mold using dissolvable PVA on the latest Ultimaker 3D printers. The Inj3ctor can be programmed for the mixing ratio and injection volume for turnkey, small volume manufacturing.

With 3D printing, inspiration is a feedback loop, because the community as a whole opens the frontiers even further, making what is impossible today possible tomorrow.