Tucked away in the red-brick Dickensian backstreets of Stoke-on-Trent, in the area of the industrial Midlands known as the Potteries, there’s an old bottle kiln called Sutherland Works that’s being restored. This is where you’ll find Meta Additive, one of the UK’s leading lights in additive manufacturing, or as Kate Black puts it: “in layman’s terms, a 3D printing company that focuses on new materials.”
For the past few decades, says Meta Additive’s chief technology officer, this Next Big Thing has been “limited by the materials it uses”.
We’ve come a long way from the days when the process of stereolithography, or ‘rapid prototyping’ as it was once called, produced “plastic trinkets that helped you to see how something worked”. Black is referring to decades-old, antiquated processes that created components layer-by-layer in acrylic, in a morbidly slow procedure that would leave visitors at trade shows less than spellbound. The results “looked good, but...