Materials
Soft and light are the specialty,
not the exception
Every material below runs in production on our floor today. If a job needs something H2D-compatible that is not listed, ask; if we cannot run it reliably, we will say so rather than learn on your order.
| Material | Shore / density | Character | Typical drone use |
|---|---|---|---|
| TPU 95A | 95A · solid or foamed | The workhorse. Stiff for an elastomer, abrasion-resistant, survives hard landings. | Antenna mounts, landing gear, skid plates, prop guards |
| TPU 85A | 85A · solid or foamed | Noticeably compliant, high rebound. The middle of our range. | Camera cages, bumpers, grommets, cable strain relief |
| Very soft TPU | 60A–70A | Gel-adjacent feel. Genuinely difficult to feed; the reason this farm exists. | Vibration dampers, FC soft-mounts, gimbal isolators, sensor pads |
| Foaming TPU | density tunable to ~50% of solid | Expands at the nozzle. Weight of foam, printability of TPU. Effective durometer drops with expansion, tunable per part. | Anything airborne where grams count: cages, pads, dampers, cushioning |
| PEBAX | material-grade dependent | High energy return, keeps its flexibility in the cold. The elastomer for low-temperature service. | High-cycle flexures, cold-weather dampers and mounts |
| Foamed PLA | density tunable | Lightweight rigid structure at a fraction of solid weight. Printed fixed-wing airframes fly on this material family today. | Wing sections and skins, fuselage components, formers, nose cones |
| Other foaming polymers | per datasheet | The foaming family keeps growing. If it is H2D-compatible and it expands, we can characterize it for your part. | Application-specific lightweight structure |
Exact filament SKUs, datasheets, and lot numbers accompany every quote. Material lot traceability on every order.
The honest tradeoffs
What soft FDM is not
Printed TPU is anisotropic: layer direction matters, and we orient parts accordingly or tell you when a geometry fights it. Foamed parts trade some tear strength for their weight savings; where a part sees sustained abrasion we will recommend solid skin with foamed core, or plain solid. And below 60A, FDM stops being the right process; we will point you to casting before we sell you a bad part.