Apple Tree begins Japan sales of Markforged Onyx GF high-strength colored composite

Apple Tree Co., Ltd. has begun Japanese sales of Markforged Onyx GF, a glass-fiber-reinforced nylon composite offered in six colors: red, yellow, blue, green, gray, and white. The material retains the tensile strength, stiffness, and dimensional stability of the Onyx line while enabling as-printed color for shop-floor visual management. Apple Tree is pitching it for in-house jigs, fixtures, and hand tools that previously needed paint or labels when plants required both mechanical performance and high visibility, cutting peel and maintenance failures common on painted tooling.

The product fills a practical gap in industrial material extrusion: black-only high-strength composites on one side, color-capable but under-specified resins such as PLA and ABS on the other. Glass fiber keeps parts non-conductive for electrically sensitive cells where carbon-filled Onyx is a poor fit, while Markforged continuous fiber reinforcement still allows selective continuous carbon fiber where aluminum-comparable stiffness is required. Aerospace and automotive programs can use high-visibility tools to reduce foreign-object debris and assembly mistakes; food and pharma lines can zone work areas by color without coatings that flake into product.

For Apple Tree, a Tokyo digital-manufacturing distributor, the launch deepens its Markforged materials catalog rather than expanding machine SKUs. Value lands where Japanese tooling teams treat color as process control and where skipping paint and labels shortens the fixture iteration loop enough to justify platform lock-in.