 Caleb's gonna love this editing. I just know it Hey everybody, I'm here at coax in Appleton, Wisconsin They're a filament maker and it is awesome. My name is Jim and this is the edge of tech All right, like I said we're here at coax in Appleton, Wisconsin And I'm with Bob and he's gonna go through a little bit about what coax is because I really love coax filament And then we're gonna go into shop and show you how it's made. So Bob, I mean coax What is it? Where'd you guys start all the good stuff? Jim? We're really glad that you're here tonight and and happy to know that you love our filament Wow, like everybody does and and a lot of that is because of the quality that we build right into that filament Jim That's awesome, and we'll talk a little bit later about quality because they have some really good resins in the back It's very good quality. No fillers and all that good stuff. Why don't we go out into the shop and let's check out the machines excellent All right So yeah, let me grab Wes. So this is Wesley. He's gonna be describing how this process works So I basically just fill the hopper with whatever color I made And then it goes down through a magnet that if there's any metal there shouldn't be and then it goes through there And then it touches the screw. It's basically like an auger sort of that Okay, and then it goes through different heat zones. He didn't melt it and then push it out That goes through water bath Nice, so if I understood that correctly You you the mastermind right puts the right color in because you get to mix it, right? That's awesome. So you you mix the color it comes down through an auger and then inside of this there's multiple heat zones and it goes through each heat zone and then it shoots through a Proprietary process Okay, so it goes through different heat zones and then it goes through a dye and then through a water bath of some sort Which is proprietary and we're not going to show that here Every manufacturer has their own way to do this and we don't want to give that away how these guys do it They get their quality from this process, right? That's cool so you could potentially you can make any color you wanted Just by dumping stuff in here Yeah, we are a very small amount of color and actually oh it does yeah, so we can make custom colors if we wanted to get the base color But those are all our colorants there Gotcha so and what you're saying is most of the resin is like a clear or a base And it just takes a little bit of color to to make the color. Oh, that's cool So Sure Gotcha So so not only are you working with different colors, but yet obviously you have to have the color in that material as well Okay, and then as I look behind us. There's a ton of different color resins here. That's really cool And then I saw you using the Air here is that just to blow out the rest of what was left? Okay, so what he said was he's pretty close to shutting down We came towards the end of the night here today, so that's awesome So he gets in there and he blows it all out and that's pretty cool So on our line, we've got a two-axis laser system That's actually measuring the x and the y of the filament as well as the the standard deviation between the two and You can see by looking at the X and y our tolerance is very tight Yeah, we advertise plus or minus point zero three on one point seven five But I've got data to support point zero one to point zero two millimeters. So Very accurate material when it comes to 3d filament. That's awesome. So so it comes out of here And it comes to a laser correct, and then what's this do here just pulling the line That's just pulling the line okay out of the extruder this pulls the line here correct, and it measures it In the laser here right the laser is measuring the x and the y it's a two-axis laser And then it shoots it down that way where we saw it spooling where we'll see it spooling next, right? So if so if we look at this screen here, this tells us what your tolerance is and In real in real time, right? It's measuring Five points a second. Oh, well So so that's awesome That explains why it prints so good right exactly. I don't have to change it in my dang slicer every five seconds right right right nice Again the market tolerance is plus or minus point zero five And like we like I said before we've advertised point zero three It's a little bit better than than whatever anyone else is doing out there And like you say that that shows in the in the printouts, right? Cool, so Basically you're you're looking at the winding process there where we're making one spool at a time And one of the empty schools is staged and we We focus on just one Filament line out of time for quality purposes, so so what we're looking at now is the Spooler it's going down and rolling it in the spool, right? Correct. He's gonna package it vacuum seals everyone with a desiccant inside All right during this fool change Wesley is actually going to change it over into a big five pound spool So we just got done with the little spool underneath and he did the change over and Now it's shooting up and he's just making sure it's all dialed in So is there anything specific that he does while he's looking at it? You know not really he's got an alarm set on it on his diameter tolerances, so If something's going wrong with the diameter it's an alarm will sound and he'll pull that spool off and and fix Any the run parameters other than that basically he had to reset the traverse To a bigger spool now because the one kilo of spools are narrower gotcha That's awesome We're watching the spool actually or the filament load on to the spool here And as you can see it's really straight and uniform So as I watch I imagine that that is part of the quality, right? You know not so much. It's not It's not required, you know the market doesn't really require a perfect wine on it Because it they don't always turn out like that, right and the 2.85 is a little bit Stiffer, which doesn't wine quite as perfect as the 175 every time And as you can see our traverse is kind of bouncing along on the backside of the spool So I mean it's it's not an exact science by any means So but it it's never gonna tangle it's never gonna cross because of the manufacturing process doesn't allow it to yeah Because I've definitely seen tangles in the middle of a print and then you're Sunk in that print and sometimes it's because it's how people loaded their Or they let go of it when they open it and it went all over the place, right? And then they crossed it underneath itself and then I right so So now he just weighed it on the scale And then it looks like it gets a sticker Serial number the lot number. Oh Part number and so on correct. So the sticker has it's a lot number a label a serial number Okay, and then he puts it in a Shrink wrap bag with the desiccant And then I'm told we have to watch this one because this is pretty awesome. So this is the shrink wrap And there he goes boom and it's done and that's what you end up with in the end All right, so after it gets vacuum sealed they grab a box and it gets boxed and then the What is that the seal so you know, it's not broken. So it's fresh So when he's done running them, they all look like that so he stacks them up here So it looks like you ran about five different colors and what are these? Changeover school So we call them mystery. So I basically go back to natural and to the next color So those are the those schools So you never know what you're gonna get here because they're change over right they start yeah in one color They go back to natural. Yeah, and then to another color. That's awesome. So I'm gonna be very pretty some are Doll but but that's the best part about mystery, right? All right. Yeah That's awesome So right now we're looking at a whole wall. I believe of the color resin, right? That's correct So what exactly I mean, how does it work? How do you go about the process of picking it and the quality and all that right so so that The colors basically are by resin type. So if I want to a blue PLA and a blue ABS Blue PTG. I've got to have a box of this colorant for each one of those resin types So you can see a guy can spend a lot of money in a hurry You know offer several different colors because you have to have you have to have a color a Box of this for each color or variants of color you want to do for each material that you print, right? That's correct, right? So so the resins we use are basically always Prime virgin resins to start with on our standard materials And then we use the prime colorants as well we don't add any other fillers or recycled materials or Process aids or adding additives while we're doing the manufacturing process that helps in our quality so Are there when you say you don't add anything? It's kind of like food. There's no other additives right in a way to say that so what you get out of this box Is what you get you don't add stuff to make it like more material or a different right? We don't you know to make we don't we don't add anything to process it faster or to make it cheaper Again, I'll always using the prime virgin resin always from the same supplier the same grade the same Not obviously not the same lots up number But we're always buying it from the same people right at the same grade and and what you guys really care about here Is the quality it it doesn't matter you don't search around for the cheapest quality You guys found something you really liked and you just keep going back for it We just stay with that and that's why our stuff so consistent as well It's really easy to do if you don't have any variables in the process, right? Well, and I love I love printing with it because it doesn't matter what color I've used so far I can use the same temperature in the same settings on my slicer And it's always gonna print the same and I like that a lot I don't have to change every time I because some you know some colors you get on different manufacturers a red will print different than a black and stuff like that and and I think when I've used yours. I haven't had to do that yet. So that's awesome That is that is good and and I've heard that same thing One of the tougher colors to print is white Everybody talks about white all the time on all the all the postings and stuff out there We went to work and and we reformulated some of our white And and got it a lot better now a lot closer to printing like all the rest of the colors. So so With white being said how hard is orange to make like a true one like your shirt orange Piece of cake piece of cake. Yes, and I think I saw one on the shelf over there Yeah, we've got inferno orange on the shelf So I always hear that's a really hard one to nail because it changes while you're printing Like for a really tight orange like your shirt. I heard that was hard, but piece of cake, right? That's correct This is a PVC line. So they make a PVC coils to right right for bookbinding industry And the same process over here is what you saw on the 3d line basically and it's an extruder running two lines Through a water bath and then winding on the opposite end So so it's very similar almost almost identical except for using PVC the whole time at the colors probably don't change and right And this you were saying this is kind of how the business started with book binding For those of you that don't know he was actually explaining that that we started with book binding here 25 years ago, right? Something like that. Yeah, and Stratasys first got out with their first printer. I think you know They were they were just making PVC wire nice So they've been around for a long time and and then you know they started making their own PVC coils here And that's how this all kind of started, right? That's awesome. And this is really cool here. This is all automated It's got a a whole tub of a PVC resin and it gets pulled up to the top You can't really see it right here But gets pulled up to the top and it's automatically just feeds itself through because then that's the only thing you run here That's what you said. That's correct. Yes, I dedicated the line just for PVC. That's cool So what we're looking at is the actual resin that gets Put in when we do the inferno orange right here So they only mix about four percent of this to the hopper when they're gonna make the inferno orange Which means this bag is gonna go a really long way. All right So now what we're looking at is a whole stock of the film in here So we're kind of just walk through it. So what do you got here? It looks like you have we've got everything from the standard PLA To PTG to ABS and then the prime and the prograde in every one of those resins as well, okay So, what are we looking at here? This is ABS. This is our section of 2.85 millimeter I don't stock a whole lot of that. The tricky part is trying to figure out what Joe public is gonna buy next year, right? So basically That's why I don't stock a whole lot of 2.85 But a whole lot more 1.75 because that's that's what the is more pop So we're looking at all the different variants pretty much in 2.85 here Correct, and then if we come down this way a little bit This is a 1.75 PTG said and then if we keep coming to here, we're looking at PLA prime Okay, is this small section with the PLA pro right at the top and that's a nucleated PLA Basically, you can heat treat it after you're done printing which makes it a whole lot stronger And there's a very subtle difference in between our standard PLA and our PLA prime and obviously I only stock Red white blue and black in the PLA prime, right? And we were talking about that it's because the quality of the standard PLA is so good You don't have to stock a lot of that correct So we're kind of looking at all of the PLA the stuff that we would print on our printers most of them, right all in this area and That looks like your Inferno orange, right? Can I take this down? So I showed the resin on this earlier, and it came I think they said 4% mixture Is that correct? So 4% mixture gave you this whole Inferno orange color, which is awesome because at only 4% That's a pretty bright color. I love that orange Which I don't know if you looked you're not on our website, but all the sparkle colors are basically Again no additives no no glitter or anything like that is added to this sparkle means it's translucent Okay, so so all of our stuff on the website if it's named sparkle it just means it's translucent Okay, basically I use the same colorant, but only a fraction of a percent To to get the to get the translucent look so it's not glitter. It's it's not glitter It's it's translucent so any of the sparkle that explains why I think I got the silver sparkle at home and And I printed with it and I was like I really thought this was gonna be glitter the first time because it said sparkle But it actually came out really cool. We did Some puzzles with it actually it's a like the puzzle boxes, you know, I'd like like my camera Steve over here He's like, yeah, I remember those we did the bottoms of those in that spark That's really cool and and the thinner you print like base mode the more it will sparkle from the light trend That explains why the vases I print are actually more sparkly and I'm actually gonna throw one of those in this I'll take a picture or film it when I get home I made a like a hundred and fifty percent skull and it's printed in base mode It's like a candy dish for Halloween and you know, we put the candy in there and you could see through it But it was really sparkly So when we're looking you said that the sparkle is like a translucent and then you got your your construction yellow you have your The Green Bay green Green Bay green that's a that's a popular one up here And the Green Bay yellow there you go Good that's the olive drab green and and let's see there's the cobalt blue I love the cobalt blue by the way. I did a whole one of my ender threes is all printed in the in the blue All the modifications. There's our new. Oh, there it is. That's the new one. So this is Hard to show you because I don't want to break the seal on this But this is one of the brand new colors that came out this month. I believe right and it's called Plum purple. So if you are a dodge fan It's a Chrysler fan. We'll call it right. I think they had plum crazy on their Chryslers This is actually called plum purple and I'm gonna actually put a picture of that in there now and We'll show you what that looks like, but I don't think I can get this close enough That is that is a sweet color there. That's that's my wife's newest color She's she asked me on the way up here or right before I left like did you get the purple? I was like So we might we might have to do that So then as we come down Have you noticed to the different school sizes? 5 pound 15 pound 1 kg schools are normal size if you want something else Definitely do it. I can fit 10 pounds of material on a 5-pound spool and I can fit up to 23 pounds of material Oh, wow, so you could do up to 23 pounds on a big spool there, correct But your normal size your normal sizes are 1 1 kilogram 5 pounds and 15 pounds and if we say you didn't have it on your website and then we got a hold of you and said hey Next time you run this color. Could you do it in 15 pounds? You could do it. Oh, that's awesome So that's what happens when you get a hometown 3d filament manufacturer You call them up you say hey, I need 15 pounds of your brightest green and he gets it for you So that's awesome, so the rest down here this looks like ABS is that correct? Yep, the whole rack on the end is ABS nice so we kind of walk through all the filaments they have here and Well, at least what they have in stock right now and we kind of walked through how they manufacture it a little bit And not only that but all the different resins that they use to manufacture it. Is there anything else? We got to see while we're here You think that's it This place was awesome. I tell you what all right, so we just walked through we saw the manufacturing process We saw all the sweet filaments you had on the wall And we saw the big spools the little spools the resins that you mixed with that sweet inferno orange That was awesome You know, thank you so much for having us. I appreciate it anything else you want to shoot out to the crowd No, I just thanks for being here Jim. I really appreciate your time tonight. We hope everyone Gets to use co-ex filament. Thank you so much. I appreciate it Hey everybody, if you liked the video, please click the like button if you want to see more click the subscribe button below And as always click that little bell if you want to be notified when the next great video comes out You guys have a good one