Snow Business is all about snow. Snow is all we do
For us, absolute perfection is the most important thing
The nozzle is the most important part, and this is where most of the focus of R&D goes
and the only way to do it is with 3D printing
My name is Paul Denney, and I'm Head of Research for Snow Business International
We're the world's biggest suppliers of winter special effects to the film and television industry
The chances are, if you've seen a movie like Star Wars or Bridget Jones's Diary or Game of Thrones
then the snow you've seen is made by us
The principal part of my job is to design the falling snow machines
It's not really snow, it's actually made from foam, and the most important part of the machine is the nozzle
As you can see it's a really complicated geometric shape
and it takes the air and the fluid and it combines them together to create the snow effect
There's no way we could make this any other way other than by 3D printing - it's far too complicated
So what I have to do is I design a nozzle and I try it
and I see how the effect works, and then I make small adjustments
and I try it again and I keep going and going and going
until eventually I come up with something like this, which I think was attempt number 15
When I started making these originally, I was outsourcing them to SLS printers
The problem with that, it was about £125 minimum order
and it would take anything up to 7 days with the turnaround
So what I really needed was a technology that I could use myself, on-site
that would be able to do what I needed it to do
That's when we bought our first Ultimaker printer, the Ultimaker 2
The idea was that I could use it to speed up our iterative R&D process
so that we could come down on the designs far more quickly
but I quickly realized that we didn't actually have to then have them made using SLS
The printer was good enough to make final finished parts themselves
With the Ultimaker, I can print that in 7 hours, I can test it, make a small adjustment and print another one
The cost difference between outsourcing this and doing it myself
That cost me a couple of euros worth of plastic
whereas before it was £125 every time I wanted to make a design change
The reduction in cost and the time savings that we achieved with the Ultimaker
meant that, effectively, the first printer we bought for the company paid for itself within 2 weeks
The first printer I bought was the Ultimaker 2, and the first nozzles I printed were in ABS
The problem with putting a support structure on ABS if you try to print the nozzle in one part
is that you get left with some rough edges around some bits of the part
In order to overcome that, I would print in two parts and stick them together
Now that we've got the Ultimaker 3 and we can print in Nylon and PVA
we can print the part in one piece straight off, so we've saved ourselves all that time in post-processing
Using the Nylon, we get quite a reliable and repeatable print
If it gets bashed it's going to survive. With ABS, we may well have to change it
The other beauty of using Nylon is the fact that the PVA dissolves away
so there are absolutely no marks on it at all from where the support structure was
I think in the future, 3D printing is going to be absolutely huge
and it's going to make massive inroads into automotive technology and space technology
and it's really good for us as a company to be in at the very start of this technology
with the best printers in the world, I think