Printing Payback

Spending a few thousand bucks for a desktop 3D printer has long since become a no-brainer. So equipped, the person sitting at the desk can manufacture prototypes, experiment with different design geometries, produce show-and-tell models for customers or for quoting purposes, brainstorm with others on the manufacturability of quoted parts, make fixtures and jigs for the factory floor, and in her spare time, print Baby Yoda figurines. 

It’s a long list of potential use cases, many of which were probably never anticipated when she fired off the purchase order for that machine. And so it is with desktop printers’ more productive and accurate counterparts: production 3D printers. Here, end-use parts in polymer and metal alike are possible. So are speeds that greatly outpace so-called “prototype-only” printers, not to mention larger build volumes, more advanced software and machine controls, and materials that would otherwise be unavailable. Each opens the door to additional business opportunities that few can predict.

Delivering on the Vision

Company moniker to the contrary, even the smallest printer from Desktop Metal Inc., Burlington, Mass., is unlikely to fit on a typical office desk—its Studio System 2 measures a bit less than one meter in width and weighs in at 97 kg., never mind the 1400°C stand-alone furnace needed to sinter the “green” parts once they emerge from the build chamber. It also costs a fair bit more than the “few grand” mentioned earlier.

Still, it’s a machine quite suitable for engineering department and industrial office use, and often serves as a segue to Desktop Metal’s larger, even more productive 3D-printing platforms. All provide the cited advantages and a few more besides, higher price tag notwithstanding.

“There’s much more to ROI with a 3D printer than overall efficiency gains and cost reductions,” notes Jonah Myerberg, Desktop Metal co-founder and chief technical officer. “For instance, greater design flexibility means you no longer have to make one-size-fits-all compromises. A digital manufacturing environment like that provided with 3D printing makes mass customization a reality, in that it becomes quite easy to tweak part designs based on the customer’s requirements.”

This goes well beyond bespoke hearing aids and smartphone cases. Additive manufacturing (AM) provides countless opportunities for continuous improvement. Designers have the freedom to make multiple iterations on the front end of the design process and can better address customer feedback once the product hits the market. They’re also able to cut assembly costs and complexity through part consolidation, making products that are smaller, lighter and stronger than is possible with traditional manufacturing technologies.

As Myerberg points out, there’s no hard tooling with AM, making it easy to modify and improve product designs on the fly. “You want to add a little radius here? Increase a hole diameter there? Because you’re not locked in like you are with machining or plastic injection molding, changes anywhere in the product lifecycle become both practical and affordable.” 

Defying Limitations

Each of these expedites ROI, albeit in ways that conventional cost calculators—which typically do not consider these intangibles—might not recognize. It can also have a profound effect on a company’s balance sheet. That’s according to Jeph Ruppert, vice president of technical business development at 3D Systems Corp., Rock Hill, S.C., who suggests that decreased lead time alone is often the differentiator between 3D printing and the alternative.

“Let’s say I have a customer who needs a cast component but the supplier can’t deliver them for a year or more,” Ruppert illustrates. “Because I can provide that same part in a week or two for roughly the same price, it can mean getting the order or not. And if I do earn the business, it also means lower inventory levels and fewer carrying costs, less risk of obsolescence, and so on.”

And while Ruppert doesn’t want to imply that 3D Systems and other AM solution providers are “hammers looking for nails,” the fact remains that 3D printing is perfectly capable of making “boring” parts like castings that are easily machined. “End-use parts like these might not be sexy, but they are still necessary, and we can produce many of them quickly with very high quality and good repeatability.”

Add to that AM’s ability to deliver optimized part geometries, which in turn means greater performance, less material usage and shorter manufacturing times, and it quickly becomes apparent that ROI arguments in its favor are easily made, even though the figures needed to support those arguments might seem elusive.

“We see this in a lot of industries,” Ruppert says. “Obviously, the aerospace and defense world has embraced additive due to the nature of the complex parts and difficult materials they deal in. But so has semiconductor, where metal AM began ramping up around 15 years ago and has only gotten stronger since announcement of the CHIPS Act and related reshoring initiatives. Nor does the medical field have any problems justifying AM investment, since it’s become a game-changer for everything from bespoke implants and dental prostheses to surgical guides and models of patient organs for procedure planning. Greater supply chain efficiency, fewer operations, less waste—despite the fact that it might be difficult to quantify some of the advantages, all weigh in 3D printing’s favor.”

Walking a Fine Line

One company well-acquainted with ROI exercises is Minneapolis-based Protolabs Inc. Since acquiring the service bureau Fineline Prototyping of Raleigh, N.C., in 2014, the quick-turn digital manufacturer has continued to expand its 3D-printing capabilities and now boasts more than 120 metal and polymer printers.

Eric Utley, Protolabs’ 3D printing applications engineering manager, was part of the acquisition. For him, deciding whether to invest in additional capacity or a new AM technology is relatively straightforward. “Our primary goal is to service customer demand. Maybe that means buying a printer that generates smoother surface finishes or one that produces smaller parts and finer detail, or maybe it’s picking up new materials and postprocessing equipment. Whatever the market is asking for, it’s our job to evaluate and quite possibly meet that need, otherwise someone else will.”

That’s also true for throughput. As production volumes rise and end-use parts become more common, Utley and his team have found it necessary to look for faster printing technology, as well as ones that support three-dimensional nesting. For Protolabs, multi-jet fusion (MJF) checked both of these boxes. “I have a simple desktop printer sitting behind me,” Utley says. “It might take a full day to print something that MJF could print several hundred of in the same amount of time.”

This goes to the heart of a discussion common among AM aficionados—invest in one or two super machines, or several dozen lower-cost, consumer-grade printers? It’s clear which path Protolabs has taken, although as a service bureau, the needs are admittedly different than those of an OEM or product development firm. However, this doesn’t take into account the end-user’s part mix, material requirements, postprocessing and machining abilities, and a host of other considerations that only intensive study and no small amount of tire-kicking will resolve.

As for the figurine-printing design engineer described at the outset, Utley has some advice. “If a customer were to ask me what printer to buy, my answer is pretty simple: get a general-purpose machine that prints general-purpose materials and will hopefully cover 80% of your needs. For the rest, send it to a service bureau.”

Pouring Proudly

One such end-user is Waupaca Foundry Inc. of Waupaca, Wis., where Jarrod Osborn, vice president of engineering, together with engineering manager Michael Barden, are using AM to redefine a decades-old business model. “We’re now able to turn around a prototype tool in days instead of the weeks it takes for hard tooling,” Osborn says. “In addition, customers are more willing to accept the cost of 3D-printed cores, which are easier to justify at lower production volumes.”

You may not have heard of Waupaca, but this doesn’t change the fact that its cast-iron products touch practically every aspect of daily life, from the flywheel and disc brake rotors in your car to the skillet you used to make bacon and eggs this morning.

The cores Osborn’s referring to are tools the foundry industry uses to make these and countless other products. Traditionally produced using an Isocure or warm box machine using resins or heat, a growing number of companies like Waupaca are now binder jetting their sand cores. Not only does this eliminate the need for more time-consuming and costly production tooling, it can be performed in a lights-out manner, drastically increasing throughput. It also presents the possibility of more complex geometries while improving “first-pour” success rates.

This isn’t Waupaca’s first 3D-printing rodeo. Barden says the company purchased a polymer 3D printer several years earlier for prototyping and general shop use. It wasn’t until the company began buying 3D-printed sand cores from a nearby supplier, however, that it recognized the greater speed and flexibility parts could bring to foundry work.

The decision to invest in its own machine—an ExOne S-MAX Pro from Desktop Metal—coincided with the re-introduction of horizontal molding capabilities to its legacy vertical molding lines. “Up to this point, everything was vertical pour,” Barden says. “The move to horizontal allowed us to enter a market that has greater part variability and lower annual volumes. However, we couldn’t do that with hard tools, which is what led us to the ExOne.”

As other companies have found, investment in 3D printing brings unexpected but welcome growth in areas other than initially intended. Waupaca has since moved the ExOne into “its own separate entity” that focuses on lower volumes and prototyping, and has begun supplying cores to its other Wisconsin plants and facilities in Michigan and Indiana.

Despite its success, the company had to make investments well beyond the 3D printer, costs that AM newbies should plan for before signing on the dotted line. These obviously include learning how to program and operate the machine, as well as less straightforward parts of the learning curve, such as determining the most effective print strategy and maximizing available space inside the build box. At the same time, the Waupaca engineering team had to rethink some of its core designs.

“A lot of times, our more complex cores are made from multiple pieces that are then glued together,” Osborn explains. “But with 3D printing, you can make them all as one piece, which saves time and assembly costs while making the design process easier. As we gain more experience with the machine, I expect we’ll begin to collaborate with our customers and possibly redesign parts to leverage its capabilities even further.”

None of this comes as a surprise to Desktop Metal founder and CEO Ric Fulop. “Foundries that adopt binder jetting know the digital additive manufacturing technology can produce more complex geometries, but the ROI is often better than they anticipate,” he says. “After installing a sand 3D printer, customers are able to streamline their overall production process and see benefits from reduced assembly steps, tooling storage elimination or less post processing from near-net shape parts. That’s why over half of our machines are installed at the facilities of repeat customers who have seen business opportunities grow after adopting binder jetting.” 

Saddle Up

From Italy, there’s Andrea Barchi, head of the Prototyping and 3D Manufacturing Division at the Italian service bureau Prototek, a manufacturing brand of Trust Technology Services Srl in Valenza, Alessandria. The company owns a variety of 3D-printing technologies and has built a business on prototyping and low-volume production. Since its founding in 2006, much of this work has been for the jewelry and automotive sectors, but that focus has begun to shift recently as Prototek moved into what Barchi terms large-scale production.

“We were approached by several potential customers that were each looking for many thousands of parts per month,” he says. “Our existing stereolithography and selective-laser-sintering equipment could not keep up with those demands, so we started looking for an alternative, even though we knew it would probably mean significant investment. Fortunately, we were wrong about the last part.”

Barchi is talking about Carbon Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based 3D printer manufacturer that promises “ideas to production on one platform.” And while that concept was certainly intriguing to the small service bureau, the ability to “rent” the machine on a subscription basis was no less appealing. “I knew from past experience that it can easily take a month or even several months to ramp up with new equipment, during which there’s no revenue.”

Due to non-disclosure agreements, Barchi can only share one of the resulting success stories—that of bicycle saddle and accessory manufacturer Selle Italia, which Prototek worked with on a new racing saddle design for the better part of a year and is now in full-scale production. “It was a huge accomplishment and the customer is very pleased, as are we,” he says. “From prototype to final design, we scaled up very quickly and now have our fifth and sixth machine on order, with plans to have ten by early next year. Carbon’s rental approach made this rapid growth much easier.”

Carbon co-founder Phil DeSimone agrees. “Carbon’s subscription model really allows us to help customers succeed in their mission to deliver better products faster—not just one-time sale of the equipment,” he says. “It lets us build a mutually beneficial ongoing relationship and offer technology updates, expertise, and support to each user. The flexible subscription model also allows customers to pay as they go, providing all the benefits of the Carbon platform with a much lower upfront cost.”