Additive Manufacturing

AUG 2013

Modern Machine Shop and MoldMaking Technology present ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING, a quarterly supplement reporting on the use of additive processes to manufacture functional parts. More at additivemanufacturinginsight.com.

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does and why one way is better than the other," McCue says. "Matt" is Matt Havekost, Advanced Technology's director of sales. Also, he says, in the design area, Premier has a young crew of employees—mostly in their 20s and 30s. This has made the leap to designing for AM (as opposed to designing for more conventional processes) much easier. Meanwhile, the mold makers have come to appreciate AM's application in fxturing because it often saves them from having to come up with a convoluted fxture device and therefore allows them to focus more on the part. McCue says the group that still has to be engaged or persuaded now is the customers who have not yet seen AM at all, or those who don't yet appreciate how to think differently to design tools for AM. Engineers become accustomed to every part beginning as a big block, McCue says. "Now, we need to explain that 'No, that is wasted material, time and cost; use AM and only put material where you need it.' It's a real re-education." Adding On "Our next machine will be a metal laser sintering machine. This could help us tremendously on the moldmaking side of things, reducing leadtimes," he says. It would do this by eliminating steps, McCue says. He would just design the mold component and print it. There would be no need to create electrodes and write the CAM program to go on the mill. Machining could make the plates and the pockets, while the detail could go into the sintered parts. The diffcult part of this plan will be justifying the machine. The price of a metal AM machine—well over a half million dollars—equals a lot of mold inserts, he says. But the same challenge in justifcation is there for plastics AM machines as well. "I don't see every manufacturer having a machine in-house," McCue says. "If they are only going to buy $10,000 worth of parts a year, why buy a $100,000 printer? Just farm it out. We want to be the place that can do this work for them and, at the same time, use AM for ourselves." Now you can 3D print industrial-strength sand cores, mold packages and functional metal parts directly from CAD fles. No matter how many parts you need, build them on demand, faster and at lower cost with ExOne's industrial-grade 3D printing systems. ExOne technology can create complex production parts and molds, in metal or sand, directly from CAD fles without tooling, patterns, or inventory. ExOne. The future, on demand. +1 877 773 9663 • ExOne.com AdditiveManufacturingInsight.com August 2013 — 13

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