Tour of Touchstone3d design- Cary NC

Allen Moore of Touchstone 3-D just gave me a tour of their facility in Cary, NC. Touchstone offers product design and prototyping services at a very high end quality. I can offer some degree of reasonableness as to market prospects, engineering-criticism, and even some degree of CAD, but I am a world away from these guys. He showed many of their capabilities and it is astonishing.

Have you ever seen:

– a 3d printed lens? I have, now.

– metal-plated plastic at a level of quality that might have been what an automotive designer had in mind for tactile-valuable interior trim, before it was penny-pinched to death

– multicolor prints of hugely-complicated molecules?

– better-than injection-mold-quality keychain-sized versions of things that resulted from scanning multiple square-foot models sculpted in clay, by hand, by an artist-inventor?

– ONE-off, translucent, UV-resistant, deep-displacement plastic parts that could pass or exceed the quality of original equipment on a taillight?

I have seen all of those things today. It was humbling.

I would love to show you some of the things I saw, in a similar manner to yesterday’s post about solid art labs, but they would prefer if we do it another time, so that they could have ready a more condensed set of examples. So the only pic I’ve posted follows the contact info. In the meantime, visit their website, give them a call, and maybe even set up a time for a consultation. Then you’ll get to see more of what I couldn’t show here.

I have also posted some images from their website.

Touchstone3d.com