Jim Anderton: If you're a short to medium run manufacturer, you’re focused on mass production. Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is not a process that we commonly think of as a production or manufacturing-intensive way of making things. I’m with Kent Firestone, he's CEO of Stratasys Direct Manufacturing. Kent, I understand that we need to start thinking about additive as a true manufacturing process now, and not something that is sort of a prototyping, lab type of way of making things?
Kent Firestone: Yes, absolutely. Additive manufacturing has been used in many end-use part applications for ten plus years, but it hasn't been well publicized in a lot of cases. We first started out with making nylon ducts for aircraft, we've recently branched into making end-use metal parts. These are all serialized production parts for major OEM manufacturers.
JA: Typically, when we think of this process, we think that the equipment is very expensive. So, if you're a short or medium run manufacturer, for example, there's naturally some reluctance to making a major capex investment, not to mention developing an in-house capability. Stratasys is a well-known manufacturer of machinery, but I understand Stratasys Direct Manufacturing is actually a service provider, so you're something different. Tell us about it!
KF: That's correct, we're a service provider. We are all about customer service. What we need to do is make sure that we have the right technologies in-house to serve our customers’ varying needs. We use competitor’s machines from many of the major manufacturers, from metals, SLS plastics, SLA, as well as FDM. Our focus is on having the right equipment to provide the right solutions to our customers.
JA: That’s interesting, although you’re a Stratasys company, you don't use exclusively Stratasys machinery.
KF: That's correct.
JA: Now, tell me how the process works. If I'm a design engineer, for example, and I've got a design that looks too complex to machine perhaps, or too expensive to machine, how would I approach Stratasys Direct Manufacturing?
KF: Basically, you would connect with one of our project engineers. Their job is to take the customer requirements and match those requirements with the best process to meet their application. It could be simple one-off parts, but it could also be high requirement serialized production,
JA: When you talk about volumes, historically we've often thought of this as a “onesies or twosies” kind of technology. Can you make 20, 30, 50 of a component?
KF: Absolutely. we have production parts that we've been making for a number of years, that we are into the tens of thousands on these parts. It's the same economics that you've heard all along, which is that there is a sweet spot where certain quantities are going to push you to go to cut hard tooling. In our experience, it really depends on the quantities, and the quantities per year. So, many times a customer may do three to five hundred parts a year and continue to do that via additive over a number of years, just to cut down on the tooling cost.
JA: Typically, when a customer brings a 3D preview, a rendering? Would they bring g-code? How would they bring the digital part to you?
KF: Typically, they'd bring us a 3D CAD file. Well over 99% of our work starts with a 3D CAD file from the customer.
JA: You mentioned some of the commodity resins, and some metals as well. I understand that you have a sample of a very interesting heat exchanger part printed out of solid copper. Tell me about that.
KF: This is the part here. Basically, a customer came to us wanting us to develop a copper material for direct metal laser sintering. This is not a commercially available material, at least it wasn't when we first started this program maybe three years ago. What we had to do is get our manufacturing engineers to first source the copper and make sure it was going to meet the customers end requirements, and then we had to develop process parameters to produce the part you see here today.
JA: Now, heat exchangers are of course the ‘holy grail’ for 3D printing because it’s all about surface area, and it's really hard to get internal surface area, impossible in fact, with conventional machining processes. So, this is not an off-the-shelf stock material?
KF: It's an off-the-shelf stock material in the metallurgy industry, but it is not an off-the-shelf material for additive manufacturing.
JA: Do your customers know what they want? Do they typically say, “I want this exact material,” or do they say I want to do this and I'm not sure what to do?
KF: I would say about 60-70 percent of the time, they know what they want. It's that other 30% where we really have to guide them to the best solution, and we may have solutions that the customer is not aware of.
JA: In metal alloys, materials proliferation has reached a point where no one can know all the available materials. For example, all the ferrous alloys that are available. Is that what's happening the materials in this industry the same way?
KF: Metals is a unique area, because basically if it can be produced in spherical metal powder, we can run it in a metals machine. Plastics are a little bit trickier. Certain plastics lend themselves to certain technologies better than others, and so that has to be considered when we're looking at what materials to run, for example, in an FDM machine versus what we might run in an SLS machine,
JA: How can potential customers reach out? How can they find you?
KF: StratasysDirect.com is a good way to connect with us. You can do online quoting there, and also there's a link there to contact our project engineers that will step you through the process of getting the right solution for your for your application.
JA: Kent Firestone of Stratasys Direct Manufacturing: leveraging Stratasys brand expertise with 3D printing.