If you look at a traditional bottle of chain lube, it’s like an environmental hand grenade. We’re really hoping to drive this movement in the industry of removing PFAS from lubricants – we’ve published our lubricant recipes because it’s important.
![what is the smallest all in one printer what is the smallest all in one printer](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8b/d2/76/8bd2763e8bace5731b5188838ea43e61.jpg)
We’re also able to do it with very environmentally friendly ingredients and non-fluorinated ingredients such as PFAS. Some of these modern drivetrains can be $500 or $600 for a cassette and for me, it’s a fun area because it hits those marginal gains or efficiency things, but it has all of these other pay-offs. One of the companies now has a 600-day lead time for a chain – what are you going to be doing 600 days from now? That’s a long time and in light of a shortage, that starts to make a lot of sense to people, and when you really get them thinking about the true cost of the chain wearing out, it takes the cassette with it and then the chainring. Ī better-quality chain lubricant reduces wear. I think all of that groundwork laid over a 10-year period or so really came to help us during the pandemic when all of a sudden, you couldn’t get a chain or cassette and this concept of ‘we can make your chain last five to 10 times longer’. As you can imagine, if you pack a chain with grease, you can really cut the wear, but the friction goes up. It was really Zero Friction Cycling from Australia who brought in this element of wear in extending life and this concept of using the wear reduction as a proxy for friction, which ultimately we have multiple machines in house that can do a combination of things. I initially came into this way back in my Zipp days when we were looking at hot-melt waxing chains and we were trying to find a watt, or a half-watt of efficiency. It’s a space conventional wisdom was believed to be settled… When you really dig into the technology, what you realise is we don’t fully understand it and there’s a lot of opportunity here to do better. We’ve been right at the forefront of changing people’s thinking and I think the opportunity in these areas is fun. Josh: Efficiency/friction is exciting in that it’s a lot like tyre pressures. Can you talk about why that makes such a big difference? Silca has massively expanded in the field of chain lubricant, with wax-based and synergetic lubricants.
![what is the smallest all in one printer what is the smallest all in one printer](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71jHKbyiIBL.jpg)
Simon: One of the aspects Silca has been at the forefront of in recent years is drivetrain efficiency. Silca’s Synergetic chain lube attracts virtually no grime or grit. You do get a much higher use percentage of it but the investment to get into this space is pretty high. Josh: Well, the machines are very expensive… Titanium bar stock or plate is somewhere in the order of $50 a pound and titanium powder for 3D printing is somewhere in the order of $500 a pound. Simon: What’s preventing us from getting on the moon?
WHAT IS THE SMALLEST ALL IN ONE PRINTER HOW TO
So while the tech is pretty new, it’s super-expensive, I want to make sure we’re at the cutting edge of how to do it because when it starts to become mainstream, I want to make sure we have a 10-year head start on everyone else. Whereas with powder for 3D printing, we end up with about a 98 to 99 per cent use rate because the powder that isn’t solidified in one print just gets recycled through the machine and can be printed in the next print. If you’re machining titanium or aluminium, you have what we call in aerospace the ‘buy to fly’ ratio and typically, you’re buying 10 times more material than ends up in your finished part, and so you have a roughly 90 per cent scrap or waste rate and that material needs to be cleaned or recycled, and in some cases the material can’t be recycled. It’s clearly the future and is the environmental impact of these machines.
![what is the smallest all in one printer what is the smallest all in one printer](https://images.zentail.com/254/b044c47b0a1fc0e5a702e6edaf7d65458b0c3db1485602a7cd09c80a7cb23c37.jpg)
If you have a 3D printer and powder, in our case titanium powder, and a printer, you can print anything with that. Silca’s Mensola computer mount was its first 3D-printed product. Each machine requires its own type of material and can only do limited actions. You have to have bar stock, tube or plate stock. If you think we’re going to build a colony on the moon or on Mars, you’re not going to send lathes and mills and multi-access machining centres because with all those machines, you have to use specific inputs.
![what is the smallest all in one printer what is the smallest all in one printer](https://images.scannerguide.biz/l-m/wireless-all-in-one-small-printer-scanner-9e7NfbIsRk1n-A-v-3904531298.jpg)
The last is, with really one or two raw materials, a 3D printer can make anything. You can print unlimited geometries on the inside of things, which has never been possible before. The real advantages are that you can essentially print anything in any geometry, almost without limit. Josh: I look at this technology and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the future of all manufacturing, maybe not the two-, five- or 10-year future, but certainly the 50-year future. Simon: What are the advantages of 3D printing from a manufacturer and consumer point of view? We hear a lot about it, but it hasn’t gone mainstream yet. Silca’s titanium cleats are one example of its 3D-printed products.