Large Format 3D Printing: Moulds, Gantries and ABB Arms

Large format 3D printing builds plastic parts the size of a car body, a boat hull or the mould for one. The machines extrude molten thermoplastic, often fed as pellets, and build the part up layer by layer from a big gantry or from a robot arm. This post looks at how big plastic shapes were made before printing, the gantry machine that printed a car at a trade show in 2014 and the robot arms that joined in later. Then it turns to this autumn's news on boats, pellet printers and colours, and ends with where ABB robots fit and what still limits the method.

The first printed Strati on show at IMTS in Chicago, September 2014. Photo: AdelanteRiver / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How big plastic shapes were made by hand

Big plastic shapes used to start in a mould. Fiberglass grew out of a 1932 discovery by Games Slayter at Owens-Illinois, who found a way to mass-produce glass strands, and in 1936 DuPont developed a resin to bind the fibres into a composite. Ray Greene of Owens Corning is credited with the first composite boat in 1937. In hand lay-up, workers place sheets of chopped strand mat on a mould, brush them with resin and take the hardened part out once it cures. Boats and sports car bodies were the first big civilian uses, and fiberglass gained acceptance there in the 1950s.

A 1953 Chevrolet Corvette, whose body was glass fibre reinforced plastic, beside a 2013 model. Photo: artistmac / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Every one of those parts depends on its mould, since a fiberglass shell can only be as complex as the mould it is laid in, and the resin shrinks as it cures, by 5 to 6 percent for polyester, which can distort a part days or weeks later. Printing big shapes directly started with gantries. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cincinnati Incorporated developed a big area additive manufacturing machine, BAAM, essentially a very large FDM printer working in thermoplastic, and in 2014 Local Motors used it to print the body of its Strati car in 44 hours, live at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago.

The BAAM big area additive manufacturing machine at ORNL's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, built with Cincinnati Incorporated, 2015. Photo: Oak Ridge National Laboratory / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The process sped up quickly. ORNL cut the Strati's print time from 140 hours in July 2014 to under 45 hours by September, and the finished car, with about 50 parts against roughly 30,000 in a conventional vehicle, was first driven on 13 September 2014. Robot arms came next. CEAD, a company in Delft, builds the Flexbot, a large format printing system that uses robot arms and combines printing with milling, and sells pellet extruders for mounting on robots and CNC machines. In December 2019 ABB added a 3D Printing PowerPac to its RobotStudio software, with support for printing with granules.

An engineer works in ABB RobotStudio beside a robot cell with 3D printed parts. Photo: ABB

Boats, pellet printers and colour in 2026

In late August the University of Maine launched 3Dirigo X in Hampden, a 30-foot, 300-horsepower boat printed at its Advanced Structures and Composites Center. The Bangor Daily News described it as the only 3D-printed boat of its size that can reach 40 knots, and as a developed version of the university's earlier 3Dirigo after more than five years of research, development and testing. The centre's executive director, Habib Dagher, said you cannot simply print a vessel and assume it works. The university worked with industry partners and the Department of Defense, and the wider story of printed hulls is in our post on boat building.

The Alfond W2 Ocean Engineering Lab, a wave basin with a wind machine at the University of Maine's composites center, which printed the 3Dirigo X. Photo: Jplourde umaine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Smaller machines are taking the method to studios and workshops. On 22 October Peopoly opened general sales of its Giga 800, a pellet printer with an 800 mm cube build volume that starts at $15,000 and extrudes up to 3 kg of plastic an hour, aimed at tooling, fixtures, large prototypes and architectural models. In mid-October Polymaker unveiled CymphoniK, a system that mixes more than 100 validated colours of PETG on site from six base pellets. It is meant for large format printing studios that struggle to match a brand colour without ordering custom masterbatch in large minimum quantities.

Printed layers on the body of the Strati, the bead pattern that large format printers leave behind. Photo: z22 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB supplies the arm and the software. Its 3D Printing PowerPac translates the output of a standard slicer into RobotStudio simulation and robot code, which ABB says can take a part from CAD to a final model in about half an hour, and it is aimed at low-volume, high-mix printing. In 2024 ABB added Ultra Accuracy to its GoFa cobots, which it says gives more than ten times the path accuracy of other cobots, and it lists accurate positioning of additive layers for 3D printed prototypes among the uses. A larger cell would pair an ABB arm with a pellet extruder like CEAD's, which remains a possibility for each buyer to test.

Programming an ABB GoFa cobot with the FlexPendant; GoFa now offers an Ultra Accuracy option. Photo: ABB

Where large format 3D printing goes next

In factories the likely jobs are things made in ones and tens: moulds, tooling, fixtures and prototypes, the jobs Peopoly lists for its printer. A robot cell can switch tools, and CEAD's Flexbot already combines printing with milling, so a part can be printed and then machined in the same cell. Offline programming matters too. ABB says GoFa with Ultra Accuracy, programmed in RobotStudio, matches its simulation by 99 percent, which it says removes the need for touch-ups on the robot.

An ABB GoFa cobot with Ultra Accuracy working over a fixture plate. Photo: ABB

A $15,000 pellet printer is within reach of a design studio or a small workshop, and colour mixing on site removes one reason to order large batches of material. The products themselves are getting closer to everyday use, too: the University of Maine expects its boat to be used by the military and possibly for recreation. Recycling is part of the appeal as well, since the thermoplastic of the Strati is fully recyclable and can be chopped up and reprocessed to print another car.

The Local Motors Strati on display in 2017; its thermoplastic body can be chopped up and reprinted. Photo: TKOIII / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The open problems start with trust. A hull or a structural part needs years of testing before people rely on it, as the 3Dirigo X shows, and every new material and print path has to be proven again. Cost comes next, because for long runs a conventional mould is still hard to beat, so a big printer or robot cell has to earn its keep on short runs and one-offs. People need new skills as well, since a printing cell needs someone who can slice a model, set process parameters and program a robot, which is what tools like the PowerPac try to simplify.

An ABB GoFa cell with its FlexPendant, the kind of setup where printing jobs are programmed and tested. Photo: ABB

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