Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace puts machine shops within reach of your fingertips.
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How often we wish that a part carefully designed, utterly specified and completely detailed would simply appear, leaping from our screen to our doorstep? Have we not told our CAD program everything a manufacturer would need to know? The shape, material, the tolerance we can tolerate… what more is there to say? Where is that button we can push so I can have the part delivered to us?
In one manner, push button manufacturing arrives in the form of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace—and it arrived just in time. I had discovered my recently purchased electric range and oven could be accidently turned on by anyone brushing the control knobs as they walked by or leaned on it. This was a safety issue and demanded immediate attention.
The control knobs had to be depressed before they would turn. If they couldn’t be depressed, they couldn’t accidentally turn on the range. Something that would prevent the knobs from being depressed, such as a panel of a thickness just slightly less than the gap between the control knobs and the range display panel, would prevent accidental activation. Of course, nothing like this existed, so one had to be custom made.
I leapt into design mode and fired up SOLIDWORKS. I modeled a flat panel with slots to accommodate the shafts on which the control knobs were perched.
The thickness of the panel was critical – and thinner than stock material I had in my amateur woodshop. Also, the tolerance (plus or minus 0.01 inch) was beyond what I can hold in wood parts. As it was for personal use, I could not make use of a model shop or machine shop, or call in a favor from a trusted machinist. In addition, we are still in the grip of COVID. Few of the independent machine shops still in business want me to darken their doorstep, an unknown engineer with a one-off design. They would know that a custom-made part and a one-off set up, would be more than I cared to spend.
Engineers working on their own, designers in the middle of a pandemic and companies facing the loss of local fabrication facilities from closures, their businesses gone dark or their business gone overseas, now face a computer model without a way to give it physical form. The guys with their Bridgeports and shop aprons are nowhere to be found.
3D printing service bureaus have stepped into the vacuum, claiming the ability to make any part or any shape, but not every part can or should be produced with a 3D printer. A fabrication facility that can fabricate a part in sheet metal, from a casting or cut it out of a block of metal using a Bridgeport, a CNC machine or a lathe, is still desperately needed.
Luckily for me, several manufacturers who could create my part appeared to me—not by magic or in a dream, but on the right of my SOLIDWORKS screen. Here was a reminder of the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace. It was a promise of a virtual marketplace of service providers of every manner of manufacturing, whether it be 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal forming, laser cutting or injection molding.
From the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace link in SOLIDWORKS, a browser window opens to the virtual market, making many manufacturing services suddenly available—even though it is Sunday. I am overjoyed to find so many services willing to cut the piece for me and deliver it to my house.
The 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace requires a 3DEXPERIENCE ID, which is easy enough to create. You do not need to have a license of SOLIDWORKS or any Dassault Systèmes software. Dassault Systèmes has generously made their virtual market freely available to all.
You upload your file (or files) into the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace in any of three ways, including selecting the file from your computer or selecting the file from a cloud drive. 3DEXPERIENCE drive is supported, of course, but so are popular cloud storage drives such as Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive and Dropbox. You can also drag a file from Windows file explorer into a drop region.
Compatible file formats listed are STL, OBJ, STP, STEP, 3DXML, CATPART, SLDPRT, IGS, IGES, DXF and DWG. You are limited to a maximum size of 50 Mb per file, but several files can be imported at once.
A few seconds after my SLDPRT file was selected, a small isometric interactive view of the part appears so that you can visually verify the right part was selected. Enlarging the view exposes viewing controls for the view, a slider for transparency, sectioning and allows measurement. You can also change the material and select the manufacturing process.
The part was designed using inch units, but for some reason the Marketplace only shows dimensions in millimeters. Quotes were to come back in mm units. There appears no way to choose the units of measurement.
The material had been modeled in wood (maple) but changed to Delrin in 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace because material choice in SOLIDWORKS is not picked up, nor is material choice offered in applicable vendors as it varies.
Even after selecting a CNC manufacturing process for my part, I noticed other manufacturing options continued to be shown. 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace is smart enough to provide some design for manufacture guidance peculiar to each manufacturing process. For example, I was informed that the wall thickness of the part would not be possible with 3D printing using the binder jet process.
Before limiting the process to CNC, five services were able to automatically provide a price quote. Xometry, a prime partner, was listed first and quoted me a price of $63.96 and a 1-day delivery. A 3D printing service in the U.K. quoted a price a little higher ($69.84) which included estimated shipping to the U.S. in only two days. I couldn’t imagine flying my part over the Arctic from the U.K. to San Francisco could be so cheap and quick, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.
Two other manufacturers were quite a bit higher priced (186.33 euros and $221.10) so were immediately out of the running. The highest bid was from a French service provider of 575 euros. Although the price variation was shocking, the transparency that instant quoting provides was welcome. Manufacturers, like hospitals, can take advantage of proximity and familiarity, often charging what the local market will bear rather than attempting competitive pricing.
But unfortunately, all instant quotes went away when I reaffirmed the manufacturing process as CNC. There was no explanation as to why Xometry, or any of the five other services, were no longer able to provide instant quotes on a machined part. I would very much have liked to know the price right away instead of every vendor now a no-show. There was no one to complain to, no chat like every other consumer marketplace. (Oh, I forgot. It was still Sunday.) However, the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace does not appear to provide a help line or an online chat session even during business hours.
No longer did I know how much the part was to cost—unless I went back to 3D printing, the only process choice with instant quoting.
Not willing to compromise my choice of manufacturing process, I chose to stick with CNC machining, even though I’d have to wait for the quote—but not having an instant quote did make me a bit uneasy. How much would the part cost now. $100? $200? $500?
Upon selecting “CNC Machining,” my choices of vendors dwindled from 47 to 30 services. None of them were offering any hint of what how much this part would cost.
I had to select a material before I could submit the part for quotes to the 30 services. 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace offers a helpful summary of available materials, providing a paragraph description of their properties and common use in products. I had wanted Delrin, but it was not available. I looked for polycarbonate, thinking a material used for fighter jet canopies and shatter proof eyeglass lenses could certainly withstand a hip check on the range control knobs.
Although polycarbonate was listed in the list of materials and their descriptions, it was not available as material choice in the Marketplace. I wished only the materials available would have descriptions provided. That would have saved me a bit of useless reading. I took my third choice, ABS.
Choosing ABS from the available materials left 13 providers from whom I could request a quote. There is a form to fill out which includes fields for address and phone number but none for email address. You can check off that you will pick up the order, but not knowing the location of any of the 13 services at this stage, made pick-up an unlikely choice. I narrowed the choice of vendors to those in North America and was down to 8.
I was able to send the request only after I checked off that I was going to pick up the order—strange, as I was expecting a delivery and not a pickup. I was told the order would be confirmed after an interaction with the manufacturer, so I was hoping the delivery/pickup confusion would be settled then.
I press “Send request” with fingers crossed.
I was rewarded a few days later when the first of two “acceptances” arrived. One was from Xometry. You will recall Xometry, a prime partner, had chosen not to provide an instant quote, but here they were with a quote a few days later. Unlike their lowest price on the instant quote for a 3D print, Xometry’s not-instant quote was $215 plus $24 for shipping, for a total of $239. As this was about half of the cost of my range/oven, it did not seem wise to proceed with Xometry.
The 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace dashboard is a convenient way to see who has bid on the project. Call me ethnocentric, but I found myself wishing the interface had been localized for the U.S. Seeing commas instead of decimal points makes high prices seem even higher. Also, dollar sign following the amount is a very European look to the Marketplace.
A more reasonable quote ($89.57, not including tax and delivery) was provided by another vendor, Cessner, a design and build company in Oxford, Michigan, that according to their website specializes in making ideas like mine into reality. Cessner is listed as a Xometry supplier, but here they are with a much lower price than Xometry.
All bids are conveniently shown on the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace dashboard, as are messages. One of the messages was from Cessner asking for an address so they could determine shipping, information that had already been supplied when I submitted the part.
As the time of writing, two vendors have responded with bids. The eight North American vendors were given six days to respond. I will be waiting for the others and will update this article should more bids come in, so do check back.
To learn more, visit the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace.
