Manufacturing Services and Guidelines
- jonathan.procter
We provide a variety of manufacturing services to both students and staff. These pages contain details about our services, requirements for accessing these services, associated costs, and some tips and tricks for helping you design for manufacture. For all our manufacturing services and facilities the technical staff are here to consult and offer advice on all stages from design to manufacturing.
Our manufacturing services are available to anyone in the School of PET. For student projects this will be paid from your project budget, please check with your module supervisor. For requests from staff we require a workorder number to charge the costs to. If you require a quote before work is carried your please let us know. For larger jobs we may need advance notice so we can order additional material, and plan a suitable time to fulfil the request.
For all manufacturing enquiries please contact the TSS at:
tss-manufacturing-group@york.ac.uk
Laser Cutting
Our laser cutter is capable of cutting or engraving flat sheets of material up to 900mm x 600mm in size. We keep a variety of suitable material in stock, but typically recommend 3mm or 5mm thick acrylic for most applications. Engraving can be done for decorative purposes (e.g. text or vector artwork), or can be used to engrave pockets.
We accept DXF files only for laser cutting requests. Engraving should be specified using a different colour line in your DXF file, and you should include your depth specifications in your email. We cannot guarantee exact depths due to material and laser power tolerances. Optionally you can also include your Inventor part file so we can double check. If we have any questions about your job then we will email back, so please check your emails.
Check out the other pages in the Design for Manufacture folder for guidance on designing with laser cutting in mind
Laser Material Information
Materials to be cut or etched with the laser cutter need to known to be safe to use before we can work with them.
For materials not sourced by ourselves we require proof that it is safe to laser cut or etch. This means if you are bringing in unknown (to us) materials then you must provide a datasheet with the material detailing its composition so we can determine if it is safe to cut. If at any point during cutting or engraving we feel the material is unsafe, we will stop, even if that means stopping your job part way through. This is to prevent harm to the operator and damage to the machine.
Typically we keep in stock the following materials for laser cutting:
3mm and 5mm acrylic (Perspex, PMMA) in clear and a variety of both transparent and opaque colours
2mm and 4mm acrylic in clear only
6mm Laser plywood
Card
3mm and 5mm acetal (Delrin, POM)
Laser rubber
There are many other materials that can be laser cut or etched that we do not keep in stock:
Thin film PTFE
Polypropylene (PP)
Finally there are some materials that are known to be unsafe and will will not be able to cut or etch. These materials either produce toxic gases that are harmful to both machine and operator, or pose a significant fire risk:
ABS - Melts easily, leading to poor cutting and engraving. Releases Hydrogen Cyanide gas, which is highly toxic.
PVC - Produces a highly toxic gas (chlorine gas, i.e. mustard gas) that will also damage the laser cutter via corrosion.
The following sites provide more information on what can and cannot be laser cut:
https://laseruser.com/what-can-a-laser-cutter-cut/
3D Printing
We have access to a variety of 3D printers across the technical teams. In the 4th floor labs we have two Stratasys F170 printers and a Raise3D E2 printer. The F170 has a max print area of 254mm x 254mm x 254mm and uses a soluble support system so complex geometries can be printed easily, but printed parts must got through an alkali bath to remove the supports, which can take a couple of days. The Stratasys machine are also all locked to Stratasys branded material only, which limits the choice of material on these machines to ASA, ABS, TPU-92A and carbon fibre ABS.
The E2 has a print area of 295mm x 240mm x 240mm. It is an open platform printer, meaning it can print any material that is within it’s capabilities, which means 1.75mm diameter filament with a maximum print temperature of 300C. It is also capable of printing two materials in one print. This makes it a much more versatile printer, but also more experimental as we must manually determine optimal print settings. We regularly print PLA and PETG, which are fairly standard materials, and have also had success printing TPU and igus Iglidur material.
For general print requests just email your parts through and we will determine the best machine and material to use - this is usually ASA material on the Stratasys machines. Unfortunately we are not able to honour colour requests unless there is an engineering reason why you require a specific colour. This is to reduce material waste. For more unusual requests involving non-standard materials or specific requirements we will need to discuss your needs on a case-by-case basis, but this process starts the same way be emailing your part files and requirements to tss-manufacturing-group@york.ac.uk. We may direct you to other parts of our team they can better meet your needs.
Check out the other pages in the Design for Manufacture folder for guidance on designing 3D printed parts
Printed Circuit Boards (PCB)
We don’t currently offer PCB manufacture in-house, but we are able to arrange for your boards to be manufactured externally by Eurocircuits. We can accept either KiCAD .kicad_pcb files or standard gerber files. For prototype runs of boards (1-5 qty) there is typically less than a week turnaround, assuming there are no problems flagged with the design. For larger quantities lead times will be longer.
Please email your board files to tss-manufacturing-group@york.ac.uk and we will organise a quote for you.
Check out the other pages in the Design for Manufacture folder for guidance on designing PCBs