The new BBCOR Atlas baseball bat is a prime example of a premium product designed with the advanced innovation techniques used at the Louisville Slugger innovation center. (Image Source: Louisville Slugger)
At the Slugger Innovation Center, product designer John Steel uses a combination of traditional and modern tools for the design and manufacturing of aluminum and composite baseball bats.
Steel has incorporated a stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer from Formlabs to create both prototypes and manufacturing aids for the composite and aluminum bats used by youth and collegiate players around the world.
“If you’re not 3D printing, you’re not going to keep up,” Steel says.
Eye on the Ball
Players are always looking for an edge or little tweak that will help them swing faster and hit harder. For youth players, that edge might be as simple as finding a bat with the right weight that lets them make solid contact and keep their grip while they learn the game.Both the Innovation Center, which focuses on equipment improvement, and the Slugger Science facility, which focuses on athletic analytics, help Louisville Slugger find that edge from a manufacturing and product development perspective.
Speed of Development
At the Louisville Slugger Innovation center in Roseville, engineers and designers have access to the latest tools and processes to develop the best products possible.Steel’s first manufacturing job provided a solid introduction to the combination of traditional and modern techniques. He then moved to a product design startup where he was using two Formlabs Form 1+ machines to rapidly iterate.
At Louisville Slugger, Steel has used his experience in merging the traditional with the modern to combine desktop 3D printing with traditional lathes, a CNC metal shop and a composites workshop. “We’re able to rapidly produce prototypes for quick iteration and testing. We use it every week, and if we’re working through a new design, we’ll iterate on it every day,” says Steel.
The speed of iteration allows the Slugger team to release new products regularly while also keeping up with demand for bats. “3D printing is a great tool to reduce the amount of time it takes to get to market. You can use it from prototyping the initial design, to problem-solving the final manufacturing,” he says.
Steel and his innovation team are continuously iterating and pitching new ideas, and the Form 3+ helps them get those ideas through to the next stage even faster. “I’ll have an idea, design it and send it to the printer in 30 minutes, then bring it to the next meeting. 3D printed visual aids are worth their weight in gold,” says Steel.
3D printing improves the understanding of the product development process and can help eliminate any crossed wires down the road. That team cohesion enables Steel and other designers to keep their workflow streamlined and the productivity high. “Often when looking at 3D renderings, we lack scale. Printing parts helps when attempting to reference how something compares in size along with being able to test ergonomics and fitment into existing products.”
Greater Control
Though integral for prototyping, Steel also uses additive for other applications, like creating silicone molds and other manufacturing aids. The diverse material library in the Form 3+ enables a wide range of possible workflows and allows Steel to gain greater control over different processes. “[It] also allows us to leverage the breadth of materials available for other processes, like forming mold positives in silicone to backpour in urethane, silicone or an epoxy,” says Steel.Before incorporating stereolithography into the workflow, if Steel wanted silicone parts made, his team would have to get aluminum tooling, but now they can 3D print the positive geometry, then backpour silicone, cut the silicone mold apart, and then use the resulting negative to create other types of parts, like functional prototypes.
Outsourcing is a common and often necessary part of many manufacturing operations. But when multiple stages have to be outsourced, timelines can get pushed back, and product development will stagnate. Taking control of one more part of the process can reap rewardsr. In the silicone molding example, iterating the positive and practicing the silicone pour process can illuminate flaws in the design that would otherwise take weeks of waiting and testing to uncover when using an outside vendor.
“3D printers are the easiest technology to make something on quickly—you’re able to sketch it out then produce it yourself, rather than hand it off to a specialist and wait to get it back to test,” says Steel.
Launch Angle
Looking forward, Steel is working on expanding the number and range of ways to use 3D printing, including in manufacturing. “Creating tools with the printer can be more valuable than creating parts,” he says.Though Slugger uses 3D printed tools like the silicone mold positives already, the problem-solving ability of 3D printing means that there’s more to come. “Good equipment makes the sport more fun to play, and that’s what the Innovation Center is all about,” says Steel. “We’re using technology like the 3D printers to keep improving, and we’re constantly looking at what’s next.”