Tescoma

Ladislav Skoda
Chief Designer
Tescoma

Tescoma shapes new trends with help of Connex 3D printing system

Tescoma, a leading Czech company with a global customer base, focuses on creating truly original designs for its high-quality kitchen utensils. The best young Czech designers work with cutting-edge technologies to design Tescoma's products and all employees play an integral part in ensuring the products meet stringent quality and functional requirements.

Tescoma's range of brand products includes more than 2,000 utensils for domestic and professional catering. These items are made of top quality traditional materials, including high-grade stainless steel, thick-wall porcelain, resistant plastics, high-quality hardwoods, and contemporary materials such as heat-resistant silicone, transparent plastics and crystal. Many Tescoma products combine multiple materials to provide the ideal functional and ergonomic performance.

The design and creation of such a wide range of products using multiple materials requires highly accurate concept modeling and functional testing. To facilitate the creation of detailed 3D prototypes for this purpose, Tescoma depends on the Connex500™ 3D printer system from Objet Geometries. Based on Objet's innovative, market-proven PolyJetMatrix™ Technology, this advanced printing system offers the unique ability to print parts and assemblies made of multiple materials, with different mechanical or physical properties, all in a single build. This cannot be done with any other RP technology and is difficult and expensive to do with tooling.

"The ability to create multi-material models in a single build process allows our designers to fully explore creative ideas by simultaneously modeling and testing multiple variations of their designs," explains Pavel Skrivanek, design engineer at Tescoma."Moreover, with the Connex 3D printer, we can create our product models to combine parts with varied physical properties, such as rigid surfaces, soft surfaces and non-slip handles, so that our engineers can accurately test all ergonomic aspects of our products. And, all of this can now be done in-house, which means major time savings and only minor preproduction changes."

Stepping up to multi-material jetting and high resolution parts

The concept of 3D printing is not new to Tescoma as the company has been using a number of in-house 3D printers for several years. Recently, when Tescoma was looking for more advanced technology that could be used to create prototypes for concept modeling, packaging testing and final testing of multi-material products, it decided to purchase the Connex500 3D printer.

"Our goal at Tescoma is to create original designs with top-quality materials. Tescoma brand products are designed for the widest possible range of applications, offer multifunctional use and are supplied in multiple sizes and colors," says Skrivanek,. "All of these characteristics are taken into account whenever we purchase new equipment and they led us to the Connex500 3D printer. We selected this machine because of the multi-material capabilities, fine details, smooth surfaces, and high resolution of its printing.

The Connex500 3D printing system offers unprecedented return on investment (ROI) by producing highquality, 3D models quickly, conveniently and cost-effectively throughout the design-to-manufacturing cycle.

Printing with ultra-thin 16-micron, high-resolution layers with high accuracy, the Connex500 produces parts with extremely smooth and durable surfaces, exceptionally fine details and an outstanding surface finish. It supports a wide range of materials, including the FullCure® photopolymer model and support materials, and on-the-fly composite materials known as Digital Materials™. The high quality output and unique multimaterial printing capabilities of the Connex500 are of particular importance to Tescoma as its products answer to high aesthetic and ergonomic standards. The ability to closely emulate the look, feel and function of a combination of varied product parts such as non-slip handles and rigid surfaces is essential.

Commitment to quality and excellence

The success of Tescoma is based on its ongoing pursuit of excellence and quality, which led to Tescoma's achievement of the Certificate of Excellence in the field of Development, Design and Sale of Name Brand Kitchen Utensils. All Tescoma products are subjected to stringent testing, which requires the use of prototype materials that closely mimic the materials used in the final design. This ensures that functional
testing returns accurate results.

Printing multi-material parts and mixed trays with the Connex500 3D printer enables Tescoma to costeffectively model products at the earliest of stages, and create accurate end product models to be used as patterns for manufacturing. This reduces time and cost by facilitating in-house testing and product modeling, and dramatically reduces the risk of error.