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