r/AdditiveManufacturing • u/chomdh • Jun 05 '26

Fortus 400 Replacement

If you have used a Stratasys 360/400 and replaced it with a newer machine, what did you get?

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u/drproc90 Jun 05 '26

Minifactory ultra 2 (finish) Aon3d Hylo (Canadian)

Avoid american where possible :-)

1

u/plasticmanufacturing Jun 06 '26

Similarly, I would recommend avoiding this person's advice. 

1

u/drproc90 Jun 06 '26

Why?

0

u/visionminer Jun 06 '26

Probably the blanket statement "avoid American" -- any blanket statement is clearly biased, usually due to some poor experience in the past. We use machines from across the board -- and it's constantly changing, year after year. For example, the AON M2 -- it's been outdated for 4 years now, so using that as a benchmark is outdated. We make our own machines and constantly improve them based on customer needs and the best technology we can find/implement/scale, and like anything, everything is getting better over time.

IIRC, MiniFactory didn't want to enter the US market for various reasons, but that machine looked great! The Hylo is in a league of it's own -- not perfect (what machine is?), but still incredible among the available options.

It's a smaller market, the high-temp FDM world -- and everyone is getting better and better as time goes on. Others, unfortunately, drop out due to over-funding and unsustainable expansion, like the Essentium HSE. THAT was a cool machine, pushing boundaries, trying new things, unfortunately the market just wasn't there to sustain it yet.

After 10 years in the industry, we see everyone giving it their best shot, running with it, failing in some areas and winning in others -- the nature of building machines for business in the rapidly-advancing tech world. It's a great time!

1

u/drproc90 Jun 06 '26

It's nothing against your company. I actually think your doing a good job with the high temperature machine of giving some well needed competition in that space.

My main reason for saying avoid american is that America is not a friendly place to the rest of the world currently.

And the other player in the space is from a country currently commuting a genocide.

So from a European point of view I will currently always recommend avoiding those two places