AdditiveManufacturingInsight.com September 2014 — 7
design, and in fact he expects them to see little
distinction between these two realms. To that end,
he encourages them to play with the 3D printer.
Indeed, another perk of being employed by
Baklund R&D; is this: Employees are free to use
the shop's 3D printing capabilities for their own
purposes, freely making and taking any object
they want to produce. If the 3D printer happens to
be open, and if the employee has available time
because his jobs are running on other machines
and no one else needs help, then he is free to
make personal use of the 3D printer even dur-
ing working hours. This kind of learning through
playing is diffcult to allow on a machining center,
Jon Baklund to Speak at IMTS
Additive Manufacturing Workshop
Baklund R&D; President Jon Baklund will
be one of the speakers at the Additive
Manufacturing Workshop, a new half-day
event to be held on September 9 at the
International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago.
Other speakers will include additive manufacturing
experts from Boeing, GE, Linear Mold & Engineering
and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Learn more at short.
mmsonline.com/amw.
Many of Baklund R&D;'s production parts are hybrid jobs
using additive manufacturing and CNC machining in tan-
dem. Here are examples. The sensor mount (top) consists
of a 3D-printed form built around a metal core. Plastic
was useful for most of the part, but the metal provided
for a precise locating surface and durable threaded holes.
The rife magazine (bottom) will be 3D printed except
for a component seen to the left that will be subject to
stresses and wear as shells are repeatedly loaded into
it. This one component will be machined from aluminum
and anodized.
in which programming is complex and tooling
is expensive. But on a 3D printer making plastic
parts, even a higher-end 3D printer, the use of
the machine is straightforward enough and the
material is inexpensive enough that encouraging
employees to grow by exploring it is a natural
secondary use of the machine's capacity.
The Customers
Andy Bleck, the company's VP of business de-
velopment, manages three other representatives
focused on fnding business for the shop. Their
activity is tracked as closely as any shopfoor
operation, and it is even displayed with other
business metrics on the shop foor. However, the
metric by which this work is evaluated is not what
you might think.
Mr. Baklund does not grade the business
development reps' efforts according to sales in