TE Connectivity Turns to 3D Printing for Medical Catheter Manufacturing

TE Connectivity, the Swiss-American connector manufacturer, has started using 3D printing to produce catheter shafts. The company says additive manufacturing lowers the cost of these medical device components while enabling geometries that are difficult or impossible to achieve with conventional machining.

Catheter shafts are often coated in polymer materials that interact poorly with traditional cutting tools. 3D printing bypasses that problem entirely by building the part layer by layer, eliminating tool wear and reducing material waste.

Why Catheters Are a Hard Manufacturing Problem

Catheter shafts demand tight dimensional tolerances, smooth internal passages, and consistent wall thickness. Traditional methods like CNC machining or draw-down processes require multiple setup steps and produce significant scrap, especially when working with soft or abrasive polymers.

3D printing lets TE Connectivity produce near-net-shape parts. Post-processing still happens, but the baseline geometry arrives closer to final form. That translates into shorter lead times and lower per-part cost at production volumes.

What It Means for Medical Device Manufacturing

If a company of TE Connectivity's scale is willing to put 3D printing into catheter production, the technology has crossed a credibility threshold in medical manufacturing. This is not a prototype operation or a low-volume customization service. It is a high-reliability, repeatable production process.

Other medical device makers will watch closely. Success here could accelerate adoption of additive manufacturing across minimally invasive surgical tools, guidewires, and other catheter-adjacent components that share the same material and tolerancing challenges.