3D printing case studies – see what we have already printed
Below are 13 jobs that give a good sense of the range of our work – from a single, unique spare part for a classic car, through promotional models and competition trophies, to runs counted in thousands against a hard deadline. Every photo is a real job, not a rendering.
Trophies for the KUL Academic Sports Club
The starting point was nothing more than an old, blurred photograph of the club’s patron, Professor Czesław Martyniak – no scan, no reference model. With the help of AI we reconstructed his features as a 3D model, and designed the figure itself to look right from every angle. The plinth was printed separately and bonded on, and the trophy was positioned at an angle to the build plate – which cut down the time needed for supports. The first batch ran to more than 70 pieces against a fixed club event date; a year later the club came back for another round.
EGR throttle gear – Dodge
This one looks unremarkable, but it solved a real problem: without this gear the EGR throttle in the Dodge would not work at all, and the part was not sold separately. The customer had looked into importing the complete throttle body from the USA – over PLN 1,600 (~€370) plus weeks of waiting for shipping and customs clearance. We printed a replacement in ASA; when the customer reported that the component was working under a heavier load than we had assumed at the outset, we produced a second version in PA6-GF – glass-fibre reinforced nylon – for greater durability.
Speedometer gear – 1970s Pontiac
A classic 1970s Pontiac very nearly ended up in the garage for good over a single broken speedometer component – exactly the sort of failure where the original part simply cannot be bought anywhere any more. Working from the worn component, we produced a replacement in ASA, a material that stands up to the mechanical loads inside a speedometer. The car went back on the road without having to hunt for an assembly discontinued decades ago.
Webasto window adapter – KIA Sportage
A job where time was the main consideration: the customer sent a few dimensions of the pipe and the window opening, and the next day had a finished adapter for routing a parking heater line through the glass of a KIA Sportage. Printed in PETG, with no unnecessary revisions – a simple design, delivered quickly and without dragging it out.
Valentine’s decorations
Not every project in our portfolio is an answer to someone’s breakdown – sometimes it is our own idea, made from scratch in our own workshop. We designed and printed a series of Valentine’s decorations: hearts, a three-dimensional “love” lettering piece and a version with balloons, all in PLA. A good illustration that our fleet copes equally well with commercial orders and with purely creative projects.
Case for a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny mini PC
The customer already had a print-ready file – our job was to produce, precisely, a case that improves cooling on a small Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny. Despite its compact dimensions the machine has a genuinely powerful specification: an i7-8700T processor, 64 GB of RAM, a 1 TB NVMe drive and an RX 6400 graphics card – so the PETG case had to shed heat well, not merely look good.
Housings for an employee time and attendance system
RCM Control needed not a prototype but a fully functional, deployment-ready housing – with heat-set threaded inserts allowing repeated assembly and disassembly without stripping the thread. The argument for 3D printing was the arithmetic of the project: an injection mould to start series production would cost around PLN 150,000 (~€34,600), whereas a single printed housing costs PLN 250-300 (~€58-69). We chose the material – PETG Matte – deliberately, so that the finished product would have a muted texture and not betray that it came off a 3D printer.
Vacuum cleaner gearbox
The worn gearbox had one specific problem: the lower hole for the rectangular drive pin was so worn that the part no longer held the drive, and a replacement could not be bought separately. We solved it in two stages – the upper geometry was digitised with a Creality Raptor 3D scanner, the lower section was designed from scratch in CAD, with tolerances matched for a press fit. The customer put the finished component side by side with the original using callipers and confirmed it matched to the millimetre.
Scanning the third brake light – Fiat Ducato
Not every job ends in a print – sometimes it is purely about a precise scan. The customer was planning to fit an additional reversing camera into the rear light of a Fiat Ducato and needed the exact geometry of the third brake light in order to plan the cut-out without risking damage to the original housing. The 3D scan produced a full reference point cloud – a safer starting point than cutting into the light by eye.
Trophies for a figure skating competition
The organisers of the Biellmann Cup in Krynica-Zdrój came to us with a deadline that all but ruled out a complex design – five days until the competition began. We went for simplicity: a flat, instantly recognisable skater silhouette that could be printed quickly and in large numbers simultaneously across several machines in our fleet. In the end 75 trophies made it to the podium – and the competition went ahead as planned.
Gate drive gear
A small component, but critical to the whole drive working – a gear with a 20 mm lower diameter and 10 mm upper toothing, inside an entrance gate drive. With details this fine we used a 0.2 mm nozzle so that the teeth would be reproduced accurately enough. The result: the owner replaced one gear instead of the entire drive unit.
Shuttle lever bushing – New Holland TD5 tractor
The original shuttle lever bushing was fitted by thermal press fit – without the right workshop equipment that simply cannot be repeated in an ordinary garage. So we designed a two-piece, split bushing which, despite the different fitting method, holds just as firmly as the original. The repair cost a fraction of the price of a new lever – the customer saved over PLN 1,000 (~€230).
Windmills for a board game
This job reached us as an emergency – another supplier could not keep up with production, and the advertising agency had a hard, immovable delivery date for the board game. More than 2,000 small windmills still had to be printed; we took on 1,000 of them, putting our entire available printer fleet to work immediately, while the second supplier finished the rest. The time pressure left no room for lengthy planning – what counted was how fast we could react.