Friday, November 18, 2011

Business as Unusual

Back in Canada! Its good to be home. Let me give you the run down of Europe and my return.

I visited Enrico Dini in Pisa, Italy and developed a deal to bring the D-Shape to Canada. I saw his machine, I saw the prints and I saw the future. We both hit it off very well, talking about what we could make with this machine, his own successes and failures and my own aspirations. Right now I have the rights to sell his printing services and patent license in Canada. So the clock is ticking to find clients and investors.


That was October 5th. Now its November 18th and I have a lot of things on the go. I have my friend Marcelo in Bolivia coding my website, I have brochures to edit and business cards to buy. I have to find seed capital and clients. Enrico has been selling his services to landscape architects, printing beautiful pieces like this below:


This is a print by Rinus Roelofs - a Dutch Mathematician and designer...and developed the 3D modeling program Rhino! I dont see why anyone WOULDNT want one in their garden.

Since I got back to Ottawa on Monday I've met up with a few interesting people...Ian Graham of the Code Factory, a smattering of business types at the Chamber of Commerce and architects at a party. Their response was partly open-mouths and partly excited chatter - which means nothing if they don't sign a check and get things REALLY moving. What I am lacking are a few small stl models and a piece of printed rock to show. I emailed Enrico and they are (apparently) in the mail right now.

On the side, I've been dreaming up some ideas of other applications - mostly combining Ti02 and the DShape. These will be coming down the tube in the next few years if everything goes to plan.

Website will be up soon peeps! For now, I will give you an excerpt from one of our brochures.

The D-Shape™ can use a vast number of materials as an aggregate, ranging from 0.2 to 60 mm in granular size. Sand, gravel, cement, rubber, cork, sawdust, grinded rejects, ceramic shards, crushed glass, pumice, polystyrene, polyurethane, expanded clays, wax spheroids, cellulose grains, etc.

Virtually any fibre, microfibers or nanofibres can be added into the granular material. Polymeric fibres, glass fibres, basalt fibres, vegetable fibres, synthetic fibres, etc.
Any of the above can be mixed together with the D-Sand to produce your design.

A liquid is needed to dissolve and hold the D-Salt, our inorganic binder that is deposited by the DShape onto your mix of D-Sand and the aggregate. The dissolved D-Salt reacts with the D-Sand and binds the aggregate together. This liquid must have a viscosity between water and that of honey, such as water, water based solutions, alcoholic solutions, Pre-polymers, etc.

Assuming that the liquid is able to cement together the grains of the mixture, is easy to see that the materials that can be printed with D-Shape are endless. Colour and texture of a print can be completely different from one material to the next. However we must carefully examine your design and the demanded material to see if it is printable to our standard.