3D Printed Rubber: New Possibilities for Flexible Manufacturing

Aerosport has more than two decades of manufacturing experience, serving thousands of customers in the automotive, aerospace, medical, electronic, and consumer industries with the highest quality prototypes, appearance models, and working models. 

With this rich production experience, the company offers a variety of manufacturing methods to meet customer needs including CNC machining, RTV molding, urethane casting, vacuum forming, and 3D printing. Additive manufacturing has allowed Aerosport to offer tooling-free solutions that eliminate the long lead times associated with traditional processes and the ability to quickly print functional prototypes enables more opportunities for design iteration.

Rubber materials, however, were not readily available on most 3D printers. While many materials like TPU and TPA can be used to produce flexible parts, matching the strength and durability of real rubber was only possible after investing in the Xtreme 8K digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer from ETEC with Elastic Tough Rubber resin from Adaptive 3D.