Sponsored post from Stratasys
As a Stratasys application engineer, I was part of the FDM booth at the recent IMTS show in Chicago. While we were setting up, we came across a broken part that would have held the lights on our pop-up display. Although this is not a deal breaker, the display looked lopsided with just one off-centered light. We joked that if we only had the file, we could build a replacement on the 3D production system we had just set up in the booth.
One of the guys in the booth told me this had happened before and he knew who had the file. On a Sunday afternoon, with just one email, an attachment arrived with the STL file. We loaded it on the Fortus, built the part and had the light mounted within an hour or two.
You can't say we don't practice what we preach! We used direct digital manufacturing for a very quick turn part.