3D Hubs are a big name in the 3D printing industry, linking thousands of local 3D printing services together to provide a huge variety of 3D technologies and materials. Expanding beyond just being a 3D printing service, 3D Hubs have spent months putting together the ultimate 3D printing book – The 3D Printing Handbook. We were lucky enough to sit down with 3D Hubs to ask them some questions about the book, and they’ve provided us 8 copies to giveaway!
To join in the giveaway and be in with a chance of winning one of these 8 books, simply put your email address in below. We can then get in contact if you’re picked as a winner! You can enter until midnight on March 4th – we’ll then email the winners to send you your copy!
3DN: Now that 3D Hubs are a major name in the 3D printing industry, what are the main areas you are currently focusing on?
The main areas for us that we are focussing on are growing our B2B customer base and expanding our manufacturing portfolio to further technologies that our users are regularly utilizing.
3DN: Why did you decide to undertake such a big project in putting together this comprehensive 3D printing guide?
There was a lot of information from around the internet, in textbooks and in peoples heads about 3D printing that needed centralising into one place for people to be able to go to get the information they need. With this in mind, we decided a book would be the best way to do that but one that took this disjointed information from various sources and put it into a definitive handbook that you can grab for when a question arises.
3DN: How long did the book take to put together, and how many different people/companies did you collaborate with to put it together?
We worked with over 50 different companies, academics and experts in their respective fields. All in all the book took just under a year to write, research and print.
3DN: Who did you make the book for?
To steal the book’s tagline “If you’re a professional looking to master the key aspects of 3D printing, this book is for you”. This extends to students, academics, engineers, designers, architects or anyone who is looking to understand how they can leverage 3D printing for their own professional work.
3DN: What are 3D Hubs’ plans for the future in relation to 3D printing?
Our plans for the future in relation to 3D printing are to take what’s worked with 3D printing business model on 3D Hubs and apply it to other manufacturing technologies. We recently launched 3D Hubs CNC, and will shortly be adding Injection Molding to leveraging the same benefits of localised manufacturing of fast turnaround times and affordable pricing. For 3D printing, in particular, we will continue to work on our advanced geometry analysis of parts, we recently released more features in the checkout that help a customer pick a technology, understand errors with their file and allow them to check the model before submission.
We also released the Material Index, the one place online you can go to compare over 500+ materials and then instantly print with them. This is extremely important to the adoption of 3D printing, managing those expectations when a customer arrives, informing them on the capabilities of a material and letting them know the of challenges before an object is printed means that its done right the first time and they then see that 3D printing is a viable manufacturing option for their needs.
If you’re interested in purchasing the book, you can visit 3D Hubs’ purchasing page here.