Then and now
The first Julia, and today's Twin Dragon
Thirteen years apart: the first printer we built in Manipal, and the industrial dual-extruder we make now.
Thirteen years of making 3D printers in India.
Since 2013 Fracktal Works has designed, built, sold and serviced 3D printers from India, and made more than 100,000 parts on them.
Fracktal Works
I co-founded it in 2013 and have run it since.
Rohit Asil and I started it in June 2013, while we were both students at the Manipal Institute of Technology. Our robotics team, RoboManipal, was always waiting for parts, so we built our own printer.
The range runs from desktop machines to industrial powder bed: Snowflake, Julia, Dragon, Twin Dragon, Volterra and the Apollo 350, each in several variants. All are designed, assembled and serviced in India, and they run more than 20 materials. Customers use them in medicine, automotive, aerospace, architecture and education. We have sold to more than 2,000 industrial customers, among them Ashok Leyland, TVS Motor, Godrej, Decathlon and several IITs, and have made more than 100,000 parts.
Two projects show what the machines can do. In 2019 more than twenty of our Julia machines printed the parts for Jhada, a sculpture over eight feet tall designed by the studios Nudes and Folds, assembled from 61 printed pieces onto a steel column and installed at Mumbai International Airport. 3D Printing Industry called it India's largest 3D printed sculpture.
In January 2025 the Apollo 350 SLS was unveiled at IMTEX by the Union Minister for Heavy Industries. It is an industrial polymer sintering machine, about two years of work, built under the Ministry of Heavy Industries capital goods scheme. Sintering powder is a very different process from melting filament, and the project brought Fracktal into a national manufacturing programme.
The team
The people who make them
The Fracktal Works team at a trade show.
The range.
From a desktop machine to a powder bed, all designed and built in India.
Connected desktopJulia
Built for classrooms and labs: 60µm resolution, an integrated camera and IoT control.
Single extruderDragon
Built for the large and demanding parts that run in engineering-grade material.
IDEX industrialTwin Dragon
Two independent extruders over a 600×600×400mm bed, for two-colour, dual-material, mirror and duplication work.
High temperatureVolterra
A 450°C hotend and a 90°C chamber, for the engineering polymers nothing else will hold.
Powder bedApollo 350 SLS
Production-grade selective laser sintering. Nylon parts with no supports and no limit on geometry.
The materials.
Materials are the other half of the business. We test the ones that run on our machines and publish what we find.
PrototypingPLA
The easiest to print, with the best overhangs and dimensional accuracy. The first to soften when things get warm.
General purposePET-G
A chemical-resistant copolyester that prints easily and stays tough. The everyday workhorse.
High impactPolycarbonate
The highest impact resistance in the range. The choice when nothing cheaper survives.
Engineering blendPC-ABS
Polycarbonate's heat and impact resistance, printed like ABS. Device housings are made from it.
Moving partsNylon PA12
Tough and low-friction, for snap-fits, gears and parts that wear against each other.
Carbon compositeCF-PETG
Short carbon fibre in PET-G, for stiff, dimensionally stable structural parts.
Chemical resistantPP
Light and chemically inert, and it prints living hinges that flex thousands of times.
Soluble supportPVA
Support that dissolves in warm water, freeing channels and overhangs nothing could reach.
The company in the press.
Over 20 of the company's industrial 3D printers were used to construct parts for the Jhada installation.
What started just as a college project is now a registered 3D printing company which has clients from Ludhiana to Coimbatore, and even some multinationals.
Tell me what you need made.
