Markforged, a US-based manufacturer of polymer, carbon fiber, and metal 3D printers, has been one of the industry’s top brands for years, so it’s time we saw a few major updates from the company.

This week, All3DP spoke to Markforged about their three enhancements that effect nearly all Markforged printers and offer some new features. The focus is on enabling manufacturers to recover faster when parts break, operate with less on-hand inventory, and minimize equipment downtime.

Next Day Metal

Let’s start with the software update that speeds up your current Markforged printer, which is available now. Yes, new printer settings in the latest update to Next Day Metal, will actually increase the print speed of your current Markforged metal printers.

This over-the-air software update “unlocks” print speeds up to twice as fast as before to produce high-quality, strong metal parts, the company says. New software setting for wash and dry times are more accurate for smaller parts, shortening the required debind cycle time.

There’s also a 17-hour small parts “express run” on the Sinter-2 post-processing oven that can give you parts faster and — because of increased capacity on each printer — lets you scale-up your production capacity.

“Behind Next Day Metal’s increased print speeds are improvements to actual travel and extrusion speed, with no change to layer resolution,” Paulina Bucko, Markforged’s head of communications. “We began experimenting with print speeds, challenging our old assumptions about the correlation between speed and quality, and found that we could boost speeds without compromising surface finish. Metal X customers will simply see faster printing with this update, with no caveats. As we continue to innovate, we hope to bring similar improvements to other metals in Markforged’s materials lineup.”

To illustrate the new faster print ability, Markforged points to a case study where a manufacturer that was able to produce metal prototypes in three days, can now produce the same overnight.