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OGDEN — A new company in Ogden will soon change the way that things are designed and built with their 3-D printer.
Whiteclouds will offer 3-D printing services for manufacturing and design businesses in Utah to help streamline their process.
A 3-D printer takes liquid plastic, sandstone or paper and lays the substances down in layers that are about the thickness of a human hair. After thousands of layers, a full-color, scale model of the object is created. The 3-D printers print and manufacture at the same time.
"Basically it's being able to create objects layer by layer," Whiteclouds CEO Jerry Ropelato said.
3-D printing technology has been around since the mid-1980s, and they were primarily used for industrial purposes. But as the technology has improved, 3-D printing is becoming more mainstream.
"So that's one of our goals, to bring 3-D printing to the masses," Ropelato said.
Ropelato said that once a design is in the computer-aided drafting program, a very good model can be printed out in a matter of days. With the Whiteclouds 3-D printers, design team can bring things to life, virtually testing out the structure before building it to scale.
Whiteclouds has about 25 employees, and will officially open for business early next month. Right now the designers are creating and printing anything they can think of to make sure the systems work smoothly.
"I can make whatever I want. There are no guidelines, really. I can let my imagination go free and have fun with it," said Kyle Clifford, designer for Whiteclouds.
A dinosaur creature that Clifford has already created is in Whiteclouds lobby in 3-D form. Items will soon be available on the company website, but customers can also design their own products and have them created. Whether you want to design a building or create a 3-D version of your child's crayon drawing of a dot, Whiteclouds will do it.
"Anything that can be imagined and put into a computer, you can print that out," Ropeolato said.
Whiteclouds recently received international attention after Space X Founder Elon Musk said he wanted to build a supersonic speed transportation system called the Hyperloop. Within 24 hours, the company created and printed a 3-D model of the system and put it on the company website. The images went viral after they were put online.
