Grow your business and increase profitability opening the door to new designs and efficiencies with our turnkey 3D printing solutions
100%
integration into conventional casting processes
50-90%
cost reduction over conventional patterns
2-8x
faster component delivery

Supporting Your Business Growth, Profitability and Responsiveness with Additive Manufacturing Expertise for Metal Casting

  • Analog foundry practices

    Benefits of Adopting the Digital Foundry - 3D printed casting patterns offer an affordable way to create complex cast parts in production volumes.

  • Foundries are adopting additive manufacturing solutions to address growing industry pressures that range from digitalization and the need for faster, more complex geometry patterns and molds to foundry labor shortages. In the age of the digital foundry, these solutions offer streamlined manufacturing workflows with higher degrees of automation, improved operational efficiency, as well as significant time and cost savings.

    3D Systems has decades of expertise in metal casting solutions development. While investment casting foundries have been using 3D printing to produce casting patterns for decades, sand casting shops have been taking advantage of additive manufacturing in the recent years. In both cases, we have developed specific and integrated additive manufacturing (AM) solutions that maximize your productivity, reliability, flexibility, and yield – delivering your customers high quality parts while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).
     

The Role of 3D Printing within Metal Casting Workflows

  • Patterns for Investment Casting

    Overcome the geometry and time constraints common with conventional machined molds for wax pattern injection, replacing it with a fast, tool-less process that opens the door to greater design freedom while improving product performance. Digital processes and additive manufacturing technologies are poised to deliver massive time and cost savings.

    Investment Casting Applications
  • 3D printed investment Casting parts

  • Patterns and Cores for Sand Casting

    Accelerate production delivery, optimize parts, and reduce manufacturing costs by creating reusable patterns and core boxes for traditional sand-casting production process. Our advanced software and 3D printing solutions, and large selection of affordable materials will help you to quickly and easily optimize designs and produce patterns and cores with excellent wear resistance and superior surface finish for the final part.

    Sand Casting Applications
  • Sand Casting part

Customer Stories

3D Printing Solutions that Defy Limitations

Our cutting-edge additive manufacturing solutions deliver our customers unprecedented quality, design flexibility, economics, and product reliability, to address the most demanding customer specifications.

  • a man standing inside of a 3D printed stator, showing that the scale is larger than him

    Additive Manufacturing, From Micro to Macro

    3D Systems offers the largest suite of additive manufacturing solutions for metal casting, with hardware, software and materials specifically developed for foundry applications. From direct 3D printing of small to medium size 100% wax patterns to extra-large, lightweight castable plastic patterns for precision investment casting, and single-piece large patterns for sand casting and core molds, we can help you bring greater production efficiency within your existing workflows.

    Learn More About Our 3D Printers
  • A variety of wax patterns

    Materials Developed for Your Applications Needs

    Our 3D printing materials for metal casting have been developed to fit into conventional processes. With a choice of 100% wax material for high resolution patterns for standard lost-wax casting processes or castable plastics for ash-free clean castings, you can produce high quality sacrificial patterns for investment casting without tooling. For reusable sand casting patterns, we offer materials that not only have better durability than wood but have equivalent benching properties for post-processing.

    Discover Materials for Metal Casting
  • 3DXpert Software and 3D printed part

    Software that Deliver Results

    Software is the key to transforming your digital end-to-end manufacturing workflow. From design optimization and 3D scanning for part quality inspection up to managing your production process, it enables increased efficiency across traditional and 3D-based manufacturing processes.

    Explore Our Software Portfolio
  • maintenance on ProJet 6000

    3D Systems’ World-Class Services

    From installation to hands-on training and consulting support, 3D Systems’ experts enable you to quickly and effectively ramp from prototyping to volume production. To maximize your uptime and keep your fleet running efficiently, we have a world-class service organization to meet the needs of your business, with on-call experts, field engineering services, preventive maintenance programs, and optimized equipment for high serviceability. 

    Learn More About Our Service Plans
  • 2 people collaborating on a tablet in an industrial setting

    Application Development

    Are you specializing in a specific industry, such as transportation or aerospace? Our Application Innovation Group (AIG) has decades of additive manufacturing expertise in your target markets, including highly regulated industries, developing optimized solutions for the most complicated applications. Let us partner with you to design and produce parts that consistently meet your customers’ expectations.

Choose 3D Systems’ Expertise and Technologies to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Responsiveness

With 3D Systems’ solutions capable of 3D printing patterns and core boxes in hours, foundries can optimize their casting workflow and easily adjust to design changes, enabling rapid order fulfillment and faster metal parts delivery. Increase the flexibility and control of your operation by printing patterns and molds on demand. 

ProJet 2500 IC Time Breakeven Graph

Performance and Reliability

Accuracy, precision, surface finish and mechanical properties are critical factors for casting patterns and molds. Achieve the performance your process requires with advanced 3D printing solutions and materials that deliver the expected specifications, whether it is stability, temperature resistance, durability, clean burnout and much more.

a clock graphic indicating that time is speeding up

Design Flexibility

Complex metal parts that were previously challenging to produce can easily be made a reality by leveraging 3D printed patterns. More efficient designs enabled by 3D printing also allow to optimize consumption of expensive and/or difficult to source metal alloys. 

a row of 3D printed parts that show different design engineering and custom prints

Productivity & Operational Efficiency

Our additive manufacturing solutions include software, printer, materials, and post-processing designed to deliver industry-leading quality, reliability, and productivity to keep your operation running efficiently. Reduced labor enabled by downstream compatibility with automation, minimized waste with high material efficiency, and reduced finishing with smooth pattern surfaces contribute to reduced cost per part.

3D Systems ProJet 2500 IC Total Pattern Cost Graph

Supply Chain Continuity

In-house patterns and molds production guarantees part delivery with reduced lead time and costs, for a streamlined supply chain without risk of damage during shipping. 3D printing on demand also increases the flexibility and control through your processes while reducing storage.

Supply Chain Icons showing low volume production progressing to factory production

Resources

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  • Application Innovation Group

    Our team can help you solve your most difficult design and production challenges with additive manufacturing solutions. Together we’ll identify your needs, working with you to optimize your designs, prototype, validate and define a manufacturing flow.