The Upload

At Protolabs, we love giving back to our communities and have several corporate and employee programs that help further this mission. As a technology-enabled manufacturer, supporting STEM related programs and initiatives is important to us, and we’re proud to be able to do this through the Protolabs Foundation. In addition to the Foundation, we have a number of employee giving groups that coordinate monetary and donation drives throughout the year to give back to our local communities and the causes that matter most to our employees.

There’s one fundamental thing you need to know about threading and assembling inserts into 3D-printed parts: What you can and can’t manufacture depends on the material properties of both the part and the insert. A second thing to keep in mind: It pays to design for standard taps and inserts whenever possible.

A newly machined metal part can end up with edges that are sharper than desired for the end user unless the design smooths or breaks those sharp edges. To create an edge break, the design should incorporate sloped or beveled edges and corners known as chamfers—or rounded ones called fillets.

When you hear the term “over-engineering,” you probably think about all of those overly complicated products we’ve all encountered that seem too complex relative to their intended use. The confusing shower faucet controls. The washer or dryer with a dizzying array of counter-intuitive buttons and settings. Your new car’s baffling audio setup. Well, you get the idea.

A quick look at the current state of global supply chains with Protolabs' Director of Strategic Sourcing, Bernie Henderson.

Thermoplastic elastomers come in a variety of formulations, and each is unique in its own way. That makes picking the right one an important task among many when you are designing your parts.

GD&T is an industry standard symbolic language used to communicate allowable geometric represents the evolution of the CTQ quality inspection process.

Finishing options for sheet metal vary depending on your needs. For instance, are you looking for an aesthetically pleasing part, a part that needs to withstand environmental challenges and wear, or are you testing overall functionality?

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) recently awarded us with a 2022 Leadership Award in the Collaborative Ecosystems category. This is the eighth straight year in which we’ve won a Leadership Award, including last year’s award for our sustainability efforts.

The innovation race is on to create next-generation battery technology as the industry seeks to develop batteries that are cheaper, faster to charge, and less vulnerable to raw material shortages.