Thermwood to demo LSAM AP510 printing daily drone molds with varied materials

Thermwood will perform live demonstrations at JEC World in Paris, printing matched drone molds each day to show how its LSAM AP510 Additive Printer handles a range of thermoplastic materials. The company announced on January 15, 2026 that it will rotate material suppliers across the three-day event, using examples such as carbon-fiber reinforced polycarbonate to highlight differences in stiffness, weight and surface finish for large molds and fixtures.

The demonstrations pair on-floor printing with interactive presentations and finished hardware. Thermwood plans to show completed drone bodies produced in partnership with Aria Group, giving attendees a direct line of sight from raw feedstock to finished part and the tooling used to make it. The focus is on practical industrial applications: large thermoplastic parts and tooling where speed, repeatability and material choice affect cycle time, part quality and downstream processes like composite layup.

For builders and small manufacturers who work with molds, jigs and large structural thermoplastics, the value is concrete. Seeing matched molds printed live demonstrates how LSAM can shorten lead times for tooling and let teams trial multiple material systems without committing to long tooling campaigns. The rotating supplier format also makes it easier to compare properties such as fill consistency, dimensional stability and post-processing needs side-by-side, information that matters when qualifying materials for production runs or hybrid workflows that combine printed tooling with traditional machining.

Thermwood’s choice of the AP510 platform highlights an ongoing trend in the community toward large-format extrusion-based systems that bridge prototyping and production. By showing drone molds and finished bodies, the company illustrates use cases across the product lifecycle: rapid tooling for composite layup, production fixtures, and one-off or short-run large parts where cost and turnaround time dominate decision making. The collaboration with Aria Group underscores the workflow from print to application rather than treating large-format printing as an isolated capability.

JEC World runs March 10 to March 12, 2026, giving designers, fabricators and small manufacturers a chance to watch prints, attend the presentations, and examine completed parts in person. Observing live builds and supplier comparisons can inform material selection, tooling strategies and investment choices for shops scaling to larger thermoplastic components.

For anyone evaluating large-format additive for tooling or big-part production, the demos offer a practical checklist: watch material handling and extrusion behavior, inspect dimensional fidelity of matched molds, and assess post-processing steps required to go from printed mold to finished drone body. The event should clarify where LSAM fits into your workflow and help prioritize tests you can run back at the shop.