How the NDAA Is Forcing Defense Contractors to Replace Chinese 3D Printers Earlier this year, a previous Pivot AM blog post discussed how the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) now places restrictions on additive manufacturing equipment used by defense contractors. Under new provisions published in January, U.S. military organizations and Department of Defense (DoD)…
DetailsPivot AM Service is proud to be a Gold sponsor of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) happening this year in Reno, Nevada March 15th to 19th. The AMUG motto is For Users by Users and that is what Pivot is all about. We work with owners of 3D Systems and Stratasys machines like Fortus,…
DetailsLooking for an Alternative to the Formlabs Wash L and Cure L? Recently, we’ve seen an increase in engineers and manufacturers searching for alternatives to the Formlabs Wash L and Cure L post-processing stations, especially when they have multiple Formlabs machines producing parts. As resin 3D printing scales from prototyping to production, many teams start…
DetailsPeople serious about running a top notch 3d printing or production operation should always dry their 3d printing filament, both Stratasys and Pivot brand materials: new and partial used spools. Many companies use vacuum drying ovens, the vacuum speeds up the process. Some companies use the Fortus build chamber set to run Ultem or they…
DetailsYour Fortus 360mc, 400mc, 380mc, or 450mc Can Benefit From a 24 Month PM Stratasys’s operator and service manual recommends a 24-month Preventative Maintenance (PM) overhaul for Fortus 360mc, 400mc, 380mc, and 450mc machines. The 24-month PM replaces several known wear components, helping improve reliability, increase uptime, maintain part quality, and extend equipment life. What’s…
DetailsDefense Procurement and Chinese Printers If you were thinking about procuring machines like Bambu, Qidi, Creality, or any number of the cheap machines out of China it might be time to think twice. The recently published National Defense Authorization Act in section 849 states that the department of defense and contractors to it are prohibited…
DetailsStratasys’s Q3 earnings report was released November 13, 2025 and there are some telling statistics. It seems that they’ve been able to stave off the erosion of their market share by focusing on top of market critical production chain environments. Even more illuminating however is despite the focus on leaders of industry they still saw…
DetailsThis week has been the week of sleeping giants. Talking with a few companies we’ve heard that their Fortus machines sit dormant. The reason? The quotes they received from Stratasys were simply too much to justify getting the machine up and running. However, since these Fortus users had already invested capital into a machine that…
DetailsStratasys mentions in their product lifecycle classification that service contracts are no longer available for Fortus 360mc/400mcs, but that they have parts ‘available’ for repairs. Then why are we hearing from customers that Stratasys is telling them that they’re out of stock on simple replacement items like build envelope lights? If you can’t see inside…
DetailsWelcome to the first edition of the Extend the Life Fortus 360 / 400mc Series where we’ll be sharing success stories from the week previous’ service calls. What machines the Pivot team was working on, what they did, and how they got a Pivot customer’s critical path 3D printing technology back up and running. The…
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