We encourage our employees to create a 3D printed part on our printers every week. It provides a deeper understanding of the needs of our customers if we are a customer, too. Every Friday we take a break from work for Part of the Week where everyone showcases the parts they printed and we vote on which part we like the best.

We’ve seen a wide variety of printed parts over the years. From nearly headless Darth Vadars to strong ball joints for prosthetics. Last Friday Dan, one of our application engineers, printed Kevlar® reinforced pliers.

Dan’s goal for 3D printing the pliers was to print a very strong, functional, snap-fit hand tool. He downloaded the pliers from Thingiverse.

A close-up of the snap-fit

The pliers are reinforced with a Kevlar zebra pattern to provide optimal strength throughout the part while maintaining some flexibility when in use.

Parts of the pliers in Eiger. The yellow shows where the printer will lay down Kevlar

Within Eiger, an option exists to allow for automatic reinforcement of your part. For 80% of our customers this is exactly what they are looking for. For some, there is a desire to have more flexibility in where the fiber reinforces the part and how the Mark Two lays down the continuous fiber strands.

View of a single layer of concentric fiber strands

For the pliers, it made sense to have the continuous fiber stands laid down in a concentric pattern. For other parts, isotropic reinforcement might make more sense. Eiger gives you the flexibility to make that decision if you so choose. In addition, you can decide exactly how many rows of fiber you need per layer, and you can delete entire sections of reinforcement, as shown in the above image on the bar at the bottom of the page.

Want to print the pliers yourself?

Download the STL file:  Pliers.stl ()

Interested in learning more about Eiger and the Mark Two? Request a Demo today!