Silicone has always been the awkward material in additive manufacturing. You can't melt it, extrude it and let it cool like a thermoplastic. It cures, and once curing starts the clock keeps running, including while the material is still sitting in the print head. French manufacturer Lynxter now says it has a way around that limit. According to TCT Magazine's report published October 27, 2026, the company has launched OVERTIME, a patented add-on for its S300X LIQ21 and LIQ11 systems. Lynxter says it delivers about 36 times more printing autonomy without affecting material performance. The company also lists the feature on its own OVERTIME option page as an option for the S300X LIQ21 | LIQ11.
CEO Thomas Batigne doesn't undersell it: "We have finally succeeded in breaking through the glass ceiling of silicone 3D printing." That's a big claim, so it's worth looking at what the company has actually said, what it hasn't, and why the problem it targets matters to anyone who has wanted to print a silicone part bigger than a few gaskets.
The problem: a timer inside the nozzle
For an FDM printer, total print time is mostly a scheduling question. A 40-hour print is annoying, but the filament doesn't care how long it sat on the spool. Silicone liquid deposition works differently. TCT reports that silicone additive manufacturing is typically limited by "the material's curing time inside the print head." Put plainly, the material's working window has set a ceiling on how long a single print could run. Past that ceiling, material curing in the head becomes the bottleneck.
That ceiling has real effects on the parts you can make. If a print can only run so long, you can't use all of the machine's build volume in one job, no matter how large the build envelope is. Large parts get split or scaled down. TCT also says OVERTIME opens the way to thin-walled geometries at higher resolution. Those are slow, many-layer designs, which is plausibly where a time-limited process is under the most pressure.
Lynxter's pitch, as TCT relays it, is that OVERTIME lets the full build volume go into a single print. That means larger parts and thin-walled designs that used to run into the clock.
What Lynxter has disclosed
The published details are mostly about compatibility rather than mechanism. Here is what's on the record:
- Machines: OVERTIME is an option for the S300X LIQ21 and LIQ11 configurations. TCT notes that some earlier S300X units need a print-head modification before they can use it, so current owners should check with Lynxter before assuming it's a drop-in upgrade.
- Materials: Compatible silicones include SIL-001, SIL-002 and SIL-004, plus the COPSIL-0550, -1050, -2550 and -4050 ranges.
- Nozzles: Nozzle diameters from 0.40 to 1.00 mm are supported.
- Headline claim: About 36x more printing autonomy, with no effect on material performance, according to Lynxter.
- IP status: The option is described as patented.
What's missing is any explanation of how it works. Neither TCT's report nor the readable parts of Lynxter's site explain the engineering behind OVERTIME. Most of the manufacturer's page body is rendered client-side, and only fragments could be retrieved. Readers should treat the 36x figure as a vendor claim until independent users or test data show how it holds up across geometries, materials and nozzle sizes. "Autonomy" is also a slightly slippery word. The reasonable reading is the length of uninterrupted printing, but how Lynxter measured the baseline and the improvement hasn't been published in the material available to us.
From prototypes to production runs
The more telling signal may be how Lynxter is framing the launch on its own site. A blog entry dated 27/10/2026, titled "170,000 gaskets in three months: how silicone 3D printing saved a delivery?", says the OVERTIME feature supports the transition to serial production on the S300X LIQ21 | LIQ11. The full post isn't readable through the client-rendered page, so we can't report the details of that case. The headline alone shows where the company is aiming: away from one-off prototyping and toward production volumes.
That fits a broader logic. Short print windows are an inconvenience for a design studio. For a production cell they're a structural limit, because they cap batch size per build and force more operator touchpoints. If a printer can use its whole build volume per job, it can pack more parts per run, and that matters more to unit economics than any single-part improvement.
Lynxter's site also says the company has equipped customers in 43 countries and that more than 100,000 silicone parts have been printed with its systems. Those numbers are self-reported, but they suggest an installed base large enough for an add-on like this to matter commercially.
What It Means for Makers
Let's be clear about who this is for. The S300X is a professional liquid-deposition platform, not a hobbyist desktop machine, and OVERTIME is an option for that platform. Most readers won't be bolting it onto anything in the garage. Still, it's worth paying attention to for a few reasons:
- Service bureaus and small shops that offer printed silicone may be able to quote bigger parts or bigger batches in one build, if the autonomy claim holds up in practice.
- Designers of soft parts such as seals, gaskets, grips and flexible enclosures should note the thin-wall angle. Geometries that used to be impractical in printed silicone may become printable, though we'd want to see real-world parts before redesigning around it.
- Existing S300X owners need to confirm whether their unit needs the print-head modification TCT mentions, and whether their material and nozzle choices fall inside the compatibility list above.
- Everyone else can treat this as a sign of where elastomer printing may be heading. TCT frames curing time in the print head as the typical limit on silicone additive manufacturing, so a vendor tackling that directly suggests throughput could become a bigger point of competition.
The caveats are just as plain. The mechanism isn't public, the headline multiplier comes from the vendor, and pricing and availability weren't included in the facts available at launch. Until there are third-party results, OVERTIME is a promising claim, not a proven capability.
Where to see it
Lynxter plans to preview OVERTIME at Formnext, booth 12.1-B71, according to TCT. For anyone weighing silicone printing for production work, that's the place to ask the questions the announcement leaves open: how the curing-time limit is actually overcome, how the 36x figure was measured, and what a retrofit involves for older S300X machines.
