At the beginning of October 2022, Jens Harmeling and Jordan Kopping set up their business by founding the company Blueprint Advanced Manufacturing (Memmingerberg, Germany; www.blueprint-am.com). At present, the start-up has five employees, with the workforce intended to rise to 10 in the medium term.

Talking to Plasteurope.com, the founders explain which segments and target markets they are aiming to reach with their 3D printing products, and why it is absolutely the right strategy to have founded the company in times of crisis.

PIE: Your company Blueprint produces components by 3D printing. You promise “individual components in industrial quality”. That’s quite a claim, isn’t it?

Jens Harmeling: Especially for start-ups, beating the drum is part of the trade. Nevertheless, I don’t consider our promises to be exaggerated. The additive manufacturing of components, whatever the industry, is still a niche area, but it is part of the future.

Why?
Harmeling: Because 3D printing allows “on demand” manufacturing. If the customer needs the product, we simply manufacture it – without the need to produce an expensive mould, which, of course, takes up a lot of time and involves high costs. Apart from that, the technique of building the product up layer by layer is ideal for manufacturing complex geometries with numerous cavities and undercuts. Traditional injection moulding thrives on moulds that are as simple as possible and production runs that are as large as possible. We, on the other hand, want as high a level of complexity as possible.

What are the target markets and what sort of numbers are we talking about?
Harmeling: Our technology is industry-agnostic. 3D printing is just as suitable for medical technology as for the automotive sector and also for consumer goods. The typical batch size is between 500 and 1,000, but we can also economically scale it up to batches of 10,000.

A major shortcoming with 3D printing has so far been the awful quality of the surface.

Jordan Kopping: Correct. This is also a fundamental problem with polyamide 12, the material we use most of all. For this reason, we have taken a great deal of effort to develop a surface finish equivalent to that of injection moulding. In the meantime, together with our network partners, we are able to offer all possible surface coatings and finishes, such as metallisation.

Founding a company in the crisis is quite a risk, or not?
Kopping: On the contrary. We regard the present crisis as an opportunity because the companies must now, more than ever, pay attention to efficiency in the use of resources and capital. That is where additive manufacturing in particular can play out its strengths.

Jens Harmeling is a medical technology engineer and was most recently managing director in the Direct Manufacturing Centre of plastics processor Röchling. Jordan Kopping holds a doctorate in polymer chemistry and has worked for 10 years in material development at BASF.