Materials

Get bowled over by these 3D-printed bowling balls

Start-up Freshmade 3D from Ohio have recently announced that they have created a material strong enough to create 3D-printed bowling balls from. The material, called AMClad, is an “isotropic Engineered Sand Composite (ESC)”, that they say is “ideal for 3D&hellip

3D-printed bowling ball
3Dnatives

Start-up Freshmade 3D from Ohio have recently announced that they have created a material strong enough to create 3D-printed bowling balls from. The material, called AMClad, is an “isotropic Engineered Sand Composite (ESC)”, that they say is “ideal for 3D printing large, functional, and strong objects.”

But how?

Bowling balls have always struck me as a highly-furnished, shiny item, which explains why to recreational players they can become prized possessions. Therefore, I originally doubted how 3D printers would be able to achieve this level of finish on a completely spherical object of this weight. In addition, the bowling balls need to be able to deal with the force that bowling involves. People like me can through some terrible bowls, and they need to be able to handle our mediocrity.

3D-printed bowling balls

Bowling ball made from AMClad material

However, Freshmade 3D say they’ve achieved this level of strength. They used bowling balls as an example of just how strong their AMClad material is. Rich Wetzel of Freshmade 3D stated that “compared to nylon, which is a commonly used 3D printing material which is common in the tooling industry, it’s right up there with that. It can withstand high tensile strengths and it has a good compression strength.”