CHICAGO, Illinois—There’s never been a question that additive manufacturing is cool. The ability to 3D print complex parts from plastic or metal powders offers massive improvements in the geometries that manufacturers can produce and in some cases eliminates expensive tooling.
However, cost and speed have always been the challenges. At the IMTS – The International Manufacturing Technology Show, several additive companies say they still can’t compete on speed or cost in a lot of situations, but where the technology makes sense, it makes a lot of sense.
Patrick Dunne, vice president of advanced applications for 3D Systems, says it’s all about finding niches within niches.
“Additive is a niche,” Dunne says, pointing to his booth where the company is highlighting technology that supports investment casting molds – test molds for the foundry industry. “Investment casting is a niche within a niche. That’s where we play. That’s where the magic is: low-volume, high complexity. That’s where you see us.”
A big selling point for additive is the lack of tooling. Products tend to go straight from a digital file into a physical product. Higher production volumes tend to demand custom tooling for plastic injection molding or stamping dies.
Hard tooling like that supports fast, cheap production, but it’s fixed. Any change to the product will require new dies, and that can take months to produce. As Dunne puts it, when he tells someone that his new additive technology takes about two hours to produce a unique part, the response is generally, “I can do that in injection molding in 30 seconds.”
“I say, ‘Really? I’ll start a stopwatch, and call me in 30 seconds,’” Dunne says. With dies made, it takes 30 seconds, but it takes months to get those. The difference between those two is where additive makes the most sense, he says.
A few booths down at Desktop Metal, Justin Nardone, founder and CEO of subsidiary Figur shows off his system that effectively uses giant ball-point pens to created stamped metal parts. Well, that’s a simplification. A stylus presses rolling balls onto a flat metal surface, bending metal into complex shapes by applying force to that rolling ball.
The big selling point: lack of hard tooling for stamping dies. Transfer presses can stamp complex shapes into metal sheets several hundred times per minute, but again, you need the dies in place for that. Want a handful of parts tomorrow? An additive system like Figur might make sense.
Please enjoy the above video to hear Nardone explain the benefits of the system.
IMTS began Monday and runs through the weekend. Stay tuned for more coverage from the show floor.
