Additive Manufacturing on the Shop Floor: Hype, Reality, and Where It Actually Works, Ep #37

[0:00] I think a lot of what we talked about kind of points to the fact that this is still a developing technology. Based on where additive is today, you know, I hear a lot of people in a machine shop environment kind of allude to it as, hey, you know, there’s application here for jigs and fixtures. There’s application for specific end-use parts.

Are those good applications? What other real-world shop floor use cases do you come across, Mark, that would be relevant for our audience? Yep. Definitely jigs and fixtures. That has been by far the biggest area.

Most people often justify the machine on the jigs and fixtures and then end up moving into other things, right? So you do a justification scenario. And again, any jig and fixture you can produce, especially if you’re a higher volume production guy, you know, like if you can save seconds on a part that you’re running millions of, all of a sudden you just paid for your $200,000 machine, no problem, right? So definitely jigs and fixtures, whether it be customized jaws, customized workholding fixtures, those kinds of things are, you know, on the metal side, people are doing tooling, you know? So there’s a lot of people moving towards kind of make end of arm tooling with additives. You can make it lighter, you can lattice it out so that, you know, all of a sudden you’re saving weight, but it’s still got the metal strength.

[1:24] So that can be a benefit. Hello, folks, and welcome to the Lights Out podcast. Joining me today is my co-host Nick Golner.

Unfortunately, Eric can’t join us as he’s off doing important things, gallivanting across the plains of frozen Southern Ontario. However, we are joined by a very special guest, a leading expert in additive manufacturing, Mark Barfoot, VP of Global Sales with Xact Metal. Mark, thank you for being on the show today.

[2:05] I’m glad to be here. Awesome. Xact Metal.

So, okay. Not close enough metal, but Xact Metal. Is there some brand positioning that’s a part of the name? Because when we think of 3D printing, we often think of close, but not exact.

That’s where you need to finish machining, right? Yeah, I guess you could say that, but I think it’s come a long way. And, you know, more and more, you don’t have to do a lot of finish machining for certain geometries. Yes, there’s always a case you do, but a lot of cases you don’t.

[2:40] Yeah. So, you know, what I think would be great to do today, Mark, since you’re here with us is, you know, we’d really love to hear a bit about your professional journey. I know that, you know, you started off, you know, in the engineering office and then really became involved with additive at a very early state in the technology’s evolution, you know, up until today, now being with Xact Metal.

You know, would you be willing to kind of share a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are today? Yeah, sure. So, originally from Canada, went to the University of Waterloo, graduated there as a mechanical engineer, worked in the aerospace industry for a short bit, doing, you know, multiplexers for space satellites, and then moved over to Krista Digital Systems and built digital projectors for movie theaters, rock concerts, road shows. And that’s really where I got started in additive.

I’d went to one of our suppliers over in Norway, and they had an additive machine. This was the first machine I’d seen with it. It was still relatively new, only really industrial type machines available.

And while I was there for a week, we iterated three or four times, we tried a bunch of things. And I’m like, this is really interesting. And so, I remember calling my boss on the train on the way back to the airport, poor self-connection, and he’s like, I don’t know what nerve he was asking, but something’s got him wired up, right.

And so, when I came back, explained it to them what it was, him as well as our president and our CFO jumped on, and we started adding additive equipment to our thing. So, we started in the plastics realm, brought in a bunch of plastics, the capabilities. And then, you know, it just kind of kept going from there.

Started with FDM, added in poly jet, because we wanted some rubbers and things like that. And then we went into SLS, so plastics, SLS. And then, you know, started getting into some of the metals there, but it really wasn’t at that point a fit with Christie, just was still early stage for a lot of things.

[4:46] And then, that’s where an opportunity at the University of Waterloo opened up. So, I went and ran their additive manufacturing lab at the MSAM lab there, where they have all the different metal technologies. So, I was wanting to learn more about metal.

So, I ran that lab for a year, wasn’t as much into the academic realm. So, I ended up back in industry, reselling machines for a little bit. And then, I got the opportunity to come to the U.S. and I worked for EWI for quite a few years, ran their additive manufacturing consortium.

[5:18] Again, focused on metal, all the different types of metal, and trying to help these companies, whether it be aerospace or medical or industrial applications. How do you use metal? How do you get it going? And this is, you know, metal still had its path and it’s still not quite fully there. We were doing laser powder bed, DED, wire arc, you name it, we were doing it there.

Did that for quite a few years. Then, got tired of the cold, so moved down to Raleigh area. Left additive for a little bit, tried doing some electrochemical machining, but then, you know, I had to get back into additive.

[5:55] And so, Wanmera from Exact reached out. And so, I’ve been now with Exact since October and really loving it. I’ve always loved their team and so glad to be part of it.

Yeah, wow. That’s incredible. You know, we joke a lot in subtractive machining, in the context of a machine shop, about folks like, you know, getting bit or getting inflicted with the disease of CNC machining because it’s such a cool, rewarding process.

Sounds like you had a similar experience with additive that, you know, you got attracted to it really early on and just have been there through that technology’s, you know, development over the last number of years. Around when was it, around what year was it, Mark, when you first kind of laid eyes on a 3D printer and thought to yourself, hey, I could use one of those? It was probably around about 25 years ago, 2001-2002 kind of time frame. So, quite a few years ago.

Although, I wouldn’t necessarily feel like I’ve been in it forever. I know others that, you know, I know Scott Trump that started the technology, right? And so, you know, those that have been in 10-15 years before me, you know, they’ve already been through a lot of it. And we’ve seen these hype cycles with additive, right? Where it’s like, oh, we’re going to be making everything with additives.

And then, you know, you watch the newscast from 10 years later, we’re going to be making everything with additives. And then in the newscast 10 years later, we’re going to be making everything with additives. It just kind of keeps snowballing.

But yeah, it’s definitely a unique industry. I don’t think anybody gets it if you haven’t been in the industry. You know, it’s a very close-knit group.

A lot of people stay in the industry when they get in it. Because it’s still a relatively new technology, I think a lot of people are more than willing to help and share because we want it to grow, right? So, trying to help people figure out what’s the right application? How do you get into it? What do you know? You know, that’s what the AMUG group’s all about. And that’s what I’ve always tried to do is, you know, you want to make sure people are using the right technology.

There’s a lot of different technologies people could use. The user group. Talk a little bit more about kind of who makes up that group and what kind of conversations you’re having.

Are they mostly business owners who are using the technology for their day-to-day? Yep. So, AMUG is a volunteer organization. So, you know, everybody that runs it is volunteers.

So, they work for various companies. They’re actual users of the technology. That’s kind of a requirement to be there.

They do have some sponsors and that to come in as well. But for the most part, it’s actual users. So, you know, I always equivalent it if you’re looking to get into a new technology, there’s other shows, Rapid, FormNet, IMTS, etc.

that you can go to to kind of see the technology. But if you’re really trying to push it, understand how to use it, that’s where you can kind of get to know people and go and talk to them. And, you know, from the early days, you know, I started going there when I got my first SLS machine.

And it was like, back then, the companies didn’t necessarily know how it worked or couldn’t give you a whole lot of support because they delivered a machine but hadn’t built a lot of parts. And so, you know, we got to know people, especially back then, the variations of the machine were just slightly different. Every machine that kind of came out.

And so, I got to learn, you know, who in our group, you know, had a machine that was almost exactly the same as ours. So then when I had an issue, I would call them and vice versa. When they had an issue, they’d call me because we probably had a better idea of how to solve each other’s problems than the OEM.

And so, it’s come a long way. I think the OEMs are a lot better than they used to be. But, you know, that was where we kind of got into.

And that’s what the AMUG group’s all been about, trying to educate you how to use the right technology, how do you use it well, you got it in the door. Because that’s the one thing some people forget. Some of the plastics now is pretty plug and play, you get in pretty quickly.

But there’s a long learning curve on some of the other technologies, SLS, or especially on the metal side. I’m working with a reseller that we have now that, you know, but more on the plastic than moving into metal. And it’s like, you know, they’re like, whoa, this is a different beast, right? It’s different things you got to think about when you’re thinking about metal.

Have you seen those problems that you’re discussing in those groups evolve quite a bit as the technology advances? For sure. Yeah, when it first came out, you know, they were very basic. It was like you had to tweak a lot of different things.

The systems weren’t reliable. You know, my SLS, for example, I used to say it had a heat temperature map of the bed was more like the state of Texas. And so you had to know where you’re putting it apart, because it would not perform well if it was outside of that zone versus inside that zone.

You know, then they improved with a multi zone here. So now it’s a uniform bed. Now all of a sudden, all the parts were building well.

So there’s definitely been improvement. Some of the you know, the FDM technology, especially with the consumer market coming in, you know, now you can get lower end consumer market machines that produce pretty well. And that helped push some of the industrial type machines as well to be more active.

We’ve seen a proliferation of other technologies out there. You know, certain ones have still kind of stayed on the forefront, you know, FDM, SLA, SLS has always been there, but kind of been a little bit behind. And then then now you have more metal that that is becoming more and more mainstream.

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So Mark, you’ve you’ve been with the technology through the hype cycles through, you know, the the commercial market, maybe being a little skeptical of what’s possible. And just through the infancy of the technology and the challenges with supporting it in a commercial sense, what has made you kind of stick with it, you know, over over the long haul? I mean, do you just have this this optimism about the technology and where it’s headed? You know, what what kind of gets you out of bed every morning and just happy to, you know, kind of further the cause of of additive? Yeah, well, I think I really I thought when I was at Christie, right when we brought that first machine in, we bought it, brought it in for a specific need. We had a basis of what we thought we’d be able to do with it.

And then once we got it in the door, we realized, oh, we could do this, this, this and this. So we, you know, we brought it in for prototyping, but then all of a sudden we could do fixtures for production and save weeks, months of lead time to try to do that kind of thing. You know, and that’s really what I’ve I’ve always got excited about, how you can revitalize the way you do things, you know, even the metal parts, right? We can make geometries that you can’t see in the machine or not without a lot of complex work.

So that’s always exciting. It’s like, hey, we can’t make this part if we don’t do it with additive. So I think that kind of got me out of bed with it.

When I was with EWI and the consortium, we were leading the technologies with some of the other metal technology, laser powder bed that Xactaz is pretty well established, you can, it’s, it’s getting closer to that push button sort of operation. But then you’ve got all these other metal technologies like laser DED, wire arc DED, cold spray, et cetera. They’re much earlier stage, right? It’s, it’s further along than I’d looked at some of those technologies 10, 15 years before that.

And it was like, you needed a PhD in programming to be able to actually do anything. It’s definitely better, but it’s still not that push button. You can’t do these really complex geometries, but so, you know, it’s neat to see the technology, the things changing more and more than you can actually do with it.

But if you can make parts that you can’t make any other way, that’s, that’s what really gets me excited. And that’s the right approach that too many people come and say, Hey, I can machine this part for, you know, $22. I want to do it cheaper with additive.

Well, chances are, you’re not going to do it cheaper with additive. But if you can add internal channels or some weird geometry that you can’t get in there to CNC now, all of a sudden, yeah, it’s a $75 part, but you’ve maybe merged parts together or you’ve changed all those things. That’s the right approach when you’re, you’re looking at it.

[14:30] Yeah. And it sounds almost like for, for uptake of the technology, it kind of starts in the engineering office a little bit with just design for manufacturability and understanding how those technologies can work together to create, you know, parts and sub assemblies that previously weren’t, weren’t possible. We talked about this a little bit, just the concept in a previous episode, talking about cobots on, yeah, there’s a lot of hype about it.

And then the market uptake was a little bit different. It’s not so much that the technology was bad. It’s just about understanding the appropriate application where that technology thrives and really solves, solves a problem.

Right. And you need to get the, like you said, the engineering on side, right? When I, we brought it into Christie, my boss and I worked very hard to try to push it to the engineers to get them to iterate, to get them to try the technology. We actually had it that I paid for all the parts so that we didn’t have a program manager that was saying, Hey, I’m not paying, you know, this higher price that, you know, it’s going to be injection molded in the end and cost $3.

No, it’s going to cost $7,500 now, but it’s like, yeah, but you can iterate three times and just say $50,000 in tooling. So, you know, those kinds of things are, are a big benefit with the technology. And now with metal, you’re able to, you know, do it early stage, do these geometries that you can’t do, you know, some of the tooling areas, people are, that’s a big area for us now where we’re making tooling.

So you can actually generate surfaces that you can’t do, or you minimize the amount of, you know, hand polishing or hand machining and things like that you have to do right under the machine. Wow. I mean, that’s a, that’s an awesome segue.

So, I mean, we’ve kind of talked about your history with additive, how you’ve watched it evolve over the course of 25 years. Let’s, let’s get the honest report card on where we are today. And maybe the caveat there is just talking about methods of additive that are more mainstream right now, as opposed to maybe some of the, the edge case kind of early, early state versions that you alluded to.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, if you’re talking in the plastics realm, you know, FDM has been a primary, it’s got a lot of your, your consumer type machines out there. You got the bamboos, you got, you know, originally it was maker bought, you’ve got all the love bought all those guys out there.

Then you have kind of more of the industrial machines like the Stratasys does. But then, you know, and those machines are very much push button, you can get those machines in, you can start making parts, you know, certain ones will make a better part, of course, and they have different materials. But for the most part, you can be up and running 90% of the time, 95% of the time, within days within hours kind of thing.

You know, SLA, kind of the other plastic technology, it’s a little bit more complex, there’s a little bit nuances, you got to learn with it, it’s a bit messier process, but it’s been established for a lot of years since Jekyll invented it. And it, it works fairly well, right. And so it’s more of that push button toward operations, plastic polymer based, you know, either SLS or the HP technology that has come now further along, and it’s more of a push button sort of operation.

[17:39] When I relate that over onto the metal side, you know, really, we have laser powder bed fusion, which is what the exact systems use, it’s getting closer to being that push button operation, you know, we have a lot of people, you know, we’re just doing an install this week for the customer. Our tech got there yesterday morning, yesterday afternoon, they were running parts, right. So it’s, it’s fairly quick, fairly easy to set up.

You know, there is some nuances around it. And especially if you use plastics and then move to metal, you know, in plastics, you have to have support so that things don’t collapse while being built. In metal, the supports are there to stop from collapsing, but they’re also there to help duct heat away so that you don’t have, you know, if you have an hourglass, you can’t print that because you’re gonna have all that heat going through that little hourglass type part.

So how do you, you know, add those type of supports in to do those kinds of things? If you look at the other metal technologies out there, DED based technologies, they’re earlier stage, right, they do need a bunch of work. There’s limited geometries you can do in a lot of cases of them. I used to have a chart with EWI of the checkboxes of what types of geometries you could do.

You know, you can do a circle, you can do a rectangular type shape, but can you do an organic lattice with DED right now? Probably not or not without a lot of work. So there is more research, I would say needed for those. It’s coming along.

There’s a lot of money going into it because they want to make big parts. It’s the technology if you really want to make a really large part. But it’s not quite there yet versus the, you know, laser powder bed.

People are making parts and, you know, that’s where laser powder bed fits. It’s great for materials that you can’t produce easily with machines. So, you know, we don’t see a lot of aluminum, for example, although there is more and more wanting to do aluminum, aluminum is so easy to machine, it’s harder to justify the need.

But now put that into Inconel, put that into titanium or Hastelloy, those ones that are really a pain to machine. Now it makes a lot more sense because now you can, even if you produce it and it still needs a finished machining, you’re taking off, you know, a finished coat versus having to hog out, you know, inches of material to make your type of geometry. Yeah, that kind of takes us back to, you know, my little joke at the beginning of exact and how exact is it compared to how it used to be are we just dusting for finishing or is it, you know, like, how far has that come from your experience, Mark? It’s definitely come a long ways, right? On the metal side, when you first were producing it, I would say 95% of the parts, 99% of the parts were probably being post-machined.

[20:29] Now, typically what you’re doing is it’s facing a thread, it’s dialing in those critical tolerance areas, but many of the features are often being left as is. It depends a lot on the geometry. You’ll find that in additive, the typical thing, it depends because it really does depend a lot on the geometry and what you’re trying to do.

You know, you’re going to have rougher down surfaces than you’re going to have on the top face. You’re going to have, you know, so depending on what you’re needing to do, you might have to do some level of machining, but it’s usually minimal compared to if you’re trying to start from a block of whatever to machining it, it’s going to be a much easier task. Are you starting to see changes in, like, the type of customers that are buying this equipment and utilizing it? I think of a lot of our audiences like a contract manufacturer, like a job shop, you know, not everyone who listens has a product line where they need to do rapid prototyping and things like that.

So are you starting to see that kind of bleed into some of the more just service only companies or? Yeah, definitely. And that’s what we’re seeing, you know, our machine is a lower cost laser powder bed. So it’s more in that 200 to 250 kind of range can go up from there, depending on what options, you know, so you’re not talking the million dollar machine that a lot of the other systems are.

So that’s helped some of those kinds of companies get into it. I would say, you know, we have with metals, especially, I would say it’s less about the prototyping that people are doing. It’s more about making finished parts, right? So whether it be, you know, you’re making that really specialized one big piece, and you need only one of them or a handful of them, we’re starting to see the shift where people are wanting to actually produce higher volume.

I have a customer right now that’s just setting up machines and they’re aiming to make 10,000 of them a year. Now, it’s a small part, they can build a bunch of them on our machine. And then, you know, they’re going to have multiple machines so that if something does go wrong, they only lose one bill out of, you know, however many machines they have going.

But, you know, so it is moving towards more production. And in higher volume, you know, additives always been lower volume, you’re not making millions usually. But now we’re getting into especially on metal, you know, you can make 10,000 kind of parts, it’s got to be fairly small.

[22:47] Most metal parts, I would say are, you know, you’re smaller than a coffee cup, and they’re making, you know, hundreds of thousands. Now, these ones that are making 10,000, you know, they’re more the size of a USB-C kind of thing, or, you know, a little bit bigger than that. Just because of time, it does take time to produce this.

[23:07] Are you seeing a, you know, like a like near net shape or kind of replacing forgings or, you know, more on the supply side of a machine shop? Are you seeing the business case for some additive to where it’s actually more economically justifiable to print the near net shape and finish it? There are some that are doing that. So there’s, there’s definitely a variety of people trying different things. There’s, you know, there’s casting methods that let you make a near net shape of the casting, but then you post machine.

So you print the master and then make a casting. There is others that are just creating a quick and dirty kind of model that then they actually, you know, can post machine. You actually have a lot of the forging.

I’ve contacted one of them working in the forging industry, and they’re trying to take these massive forgings and instead of adding on hundreds of pounds of product, they’re trying to build the basic shape and then now additively add on the boxes and things like that to try to help produce that amount of material. So there’s, there’s definitely avenues around that as well. But again, that though you get to those sides, you’re more talking in the DED realm and things like that, which have a little bit more research, it’s not quite there yet.

But definitely, we’ve got a lot of people that, you know, produce the near net, you know, a lot of tooling vendors we’re working with, they’re either using it natively, or they’re, you know, taking the part and then doing some skim passes, some hand polishing afterwards to get it out. Or like I said, just a rough near net. But again, typically, it depends because you’re usually wanting to do a more advanced geometry.

So then you’re kind of negating that. So is it cost effective? It just depends on your application. Alright, shop owners, listen up here.

I think all of us know we are in one of the most in capital intensive businesses there is and margins are tight. And we’re always fighting issues. And then when we make money, what do we do with it? Stock markets up and down all over the place.

Well, I get asked a lot about where can I invest my money? I’m a firm believer as business owners, you’ve got to invest in yourself first, you need to reinvest capital into yourself. So the number one thing that I’ve done in this industry investing was ProShop ERP. We’ve been using ProShop since 2018.

And my payback literally was within weeks with their per user based pricing. I knew when I made the decision, I only needed to save my workers roughly one hour per month, we saw within the first week, we were saving multiple hours per day, that type of ROI just doesn’t come along very often. Outside of that, the real value has been able to quickly implement best practices across my entire shop, from the time we get an order to the time we ship it, scaling my business with confidence, being able to go out and know that I can deliver on my promise to deliver quality parts to my customer, and then gaining insights into every job, employee, machine and every process in our business to really drive efficiency and look for opportunities for improvement.

That’s where the real value in your business drives. So visit ProShopERP.com, book a demo and start realizing ROI today. That’s ProShopERP.com. So Mark, I mean, I’d love to understand, let’s say I’ve got a part that’s a great candidate for metal additive, maybe it’s the size of my iPhone.

What does that look like if I want to integrate that technology onto my shop floor and I’m starting from scratch? What’s the peripheral equipment that needs to be installed? What do I need to think about so that my facilities are in a good state to really support metal additive in what is traditionally a machine shop setting? Because I’m guessing it’s more than just the base machine itself. There’s material storage considerations and all kinds of stuff. And then, how long can that machine print at a time? And what kind of volumes? This is the Lights Out podcast, we allude to automation.

Is that something where you can press print and walk away from it for days at a time and come back and then have a bunch of finished parts? What would that look like? Kind of that cradle to grave, I’m just starting into metal additive. Yeah, that’s a very good question. I think I answer that question a lot with our customers.

[27:37] And I’m a big proponent around safety. I was a safety officer at Christie. I think coming from Canada, you think a lot more about safety than sometimes happens in the US.

But it is metal powder you’re dealing with. So you do want to think about safety precautions around it. Again, if you’re doing non-reactive materials, so basically, any of your steels, inconels, half deloys, those are all considered non-reactive.

You don’t need as stringent of requirements than if you’re doing aluminum and titanium, those reactive materials. That being said, I would say most people that are putting in a metal printer, you’re typically putting it into its own room of some sort, because you kind of want to isolate that powder. You don’t want a person who’s maybe not got a popper on and you’ve got the thing open with all the metal powder.

You don’t want them walking up to you while you’re working on those kind of things to startle you or for them to be exposed. So usually you want it in a separate room. You also don’t want that powder getting onto your CNCs and everything else.

So it’s wise to put it in a separate room. Powder is also susceptible to humidity. So you really want good temperature control, good humidity control, because again, you’re going to get a difference if you’re printing in the summer or turning in the winter.

No different if you did a plastic, metal, plastic powder mixing, same kind of thing. So you want some sort of humidity control. From there, you know, if it’s non-reactive, you could get away with just that.

But most places, I would say, are putting in an ESD floor, especially if you’re reactive, you’re going to want an ESD floor. And then you’re also going to probably want to have some level of ventilation to get that air out of the room to have more cycles of air going in and out of the room. The other thing with reactive is typically you want to have some intrinsically safe lighting and electrical plugs.

Again, because it’s reactive, it has an explosive potential. Again, you don’t really need to worry about it if you handle it all properly. But you do want to try to, you know, make sure that is set up in your facility.

And then, you know, other than that, you just need a respirator whenever you’re handling the material. You know, we have a glove box for our machine that we highly recommend for our customers so that then that way you’re desifting, depowdering everything in the unit without needing a respirator on. And then only you’re really putting the respirator on when you’re pulling the unit out, or maybe when you’re adding powder in to kind of minimize that exposure to the powder.

But, you know, it’s relatively simple, you know, it’s a minimal facility in terms of other ancillary things. You need an explosion proof vacuum, because again, you’re going to have to vacuum up some of the powders that you don’t need. And then we have some automated sifters.

So you can add an automated sifter where you’re sifting your powder. But in reality, you can just use a manual sifter and just take it. You know, our spill volume is a little bit smaller, so it doesn’t need a ton.

[30:36] But, you know, an automated sifter makes it a lot easier. You will need some sort of a waste drum. Typically, people are using a 55 gallon drum.

There’s filters, there’s going to be some FOD and things that you have to filter out that does need to get dumped in that is considered a hazardous waste. So you’re going to dispose of that. But other than that, you know, then then the other ancillary things, again, if you’re a machine shop, you already have them, because what you have to do is you have to cut it off the base plate.

So typically, a lot of people are just using a bandsaw. Or if you get fancy, you’re using an EDM. You know, you don’t need an EDM, the only time you need an EDM is if you’re making parts maybe and you’re really critical on the height of them, you may want to use an EDM to actually, you know, cut it off at the exact height.

[31:26] Or if you have some really complex shape and some weird support, maybe you want to use an EDM to remove the support. And then the other thing you need is when you resurface your base plates, because you want to keep reusing those, you’re going to need a way to resurface them. You know, you can use it quick and dirty and just a hand grinder on a plate is going to be great, not as good, but you can, or just a manual mill and run the mill back and forth a few times, or put it on a surface grinder or, you know, something a little more exotic.

But, you know, you need some way of surfacing those plates. But other than that, that’s pretty much what you need for a metal, you know, laser powder bed based system. If you’re in wire arc or some of these other technologies, if it’s a wire, it’s a little more easier to integrate on your floor because you can just put it right beside your CNC.

You don’t necessarily need a separate machine room, but usually those systems are a lot bigger. And like I said, they’re a lot harder to program. There’s a lot more idiosyncrasies on running them.

They’re not going to be up and running the next day for you, you’re going to need some time. I do recommend with laser powder bed, though, you are going to have a learning curve. So, you know, if you’re always going to run the exact same build, you run that build a couple times, you’re going to figure it out.

And away you go. But if you’re going to be a job shop, and you’re kind of making different parts every day, you know, there’s always going to be this new part to just, I don’t know how to support that, I don’t know how to work that. And so you might have to do a couple iterations to dial that in.

[32:54] You know, there’s always going to be something right. You know, I remember when I was at the university, I’d hired a guy that had worked for BlackBerry. And he was used to printing these little wee tiny BlackBerry parts.

And then all of a sudden, I gave him a tool mold that was massive. And he’s like, Whoops, I can’t support it the way I would my BlackBerry part. So, you know, it does take a little bit of knowledge to know how to handle, you know, different types of parts, different types of geometry.

Sure. What is up metalworking nation, making chips family, it is an even year, which means IMTS is coming September 14 through 19 at McCormick Place in beautiful Chicago. It is the largest manufacturing trade show in North America, bringing together 1000s of manufacturers, OEMs and solution providers every two years to explore how new technologies are being applied to real shop floors.

So whether you’re planning future capital investments, benchmarking operations or simply trying to cut through the noise around emerging technologies, IMTS is designed to help manufacturers make better, more informed decisions. Whether you’ve been going for years, or this might be your first time, put it on your calendar right now, schedule your time away from the shop, it’s good to get out and see new things. It’s going to be a big party.

I hope to see you there. Go to IMTS.com and register today. Is the Wohler’s report still a thing, Mark? I remember reading that early in my career because I was interested in where the technology was headed.

And if there’s other resources you want to provide to our audience, because I think, you know, we get so busy, shop owners and leaders of manufacturing companies get so busy just in the way we do things. We don’t always know where to look or how to broaden our horizons and consider additive. Yep.

So Wohler’s report is still around. It got bought by ASTM. So it’s actually owned by ASTM now, but they still issue that report yearly.

So I think it comes out in February, Mark’s timeframe. So, you know, it is a, it’s kind of one of the knowledge bases out there. Is it perfect? No, but it’s got a lot of information.

So if you’re looking to try to get in that, there are some other littler reports I would say out there. You could look at some, some of the magazines are good. TCC has a lot of good things in there.

Metal AM is a really good magazine that has some really great articles. So those are a couple of magazines you could look at to learn more. In terms of trade shows, I highly recommend Rapid is one in here in North America that really showcases additive.

AMUG’s great if you have a machine, but you kind of have to have the machine first. Rapid’s the better place if you’re just trying to kick the tires and understand the technology. Or if you have a little bit more budget, Formnext in Germany, uh, happens in November and it’s a massive show.

Every manufacturer is there. Great show, uh, just a little bit more expensive to go, go over there. You know, it can be overwhelming because it’s a massive show.

It’s kind of like an INTS for, uh, for additive over there. Cool. You’re, you’re calling all of these out and I’m like, I think I’m on all of these newsletters because it all sounds familiar.

No, those are, those are great resources. Thanks for, for sharing Mark. And I mean, in, in general, on the heels of everything that we we’ve just talked about, I mean, are there any, you know, longstanding misconceptions about AM in general or, or metal AM in particular, um, that you think deserve to be corrected right now? Um, maybe from the perspective of, of someone on a, on a machine shop floor.

[36:25] Yeah. So there’s, there’s definitely, you know, some of those misconceptions that I think it’s less of one than it used to be, but there used to be back when the consumer came out, they were like, Oh, everybody’s going to have one next to their toaster. Their dryer will break.

They’ll just print a part and replace it, et cetera. That’s really hard to do because, you know, number one, who’s going to design it. You know, the general person isn’t going to have the knowledge to create the CAD, design it up.

Do they have the right material to produce it? All those kinds of things. So that’s one of the big misconceptions I would say. Um, the other misconception I already kind of talked about is, you know, well, I want to do it in additive because it’s going to be cheaper.

Typically it’s not going to be cheaper. It’s going to be, it’s going to allow you design freedom that you can’t do with other technologies. That’s really the benefit of additive.

You know, if you, you know, I’ve seen it so many times, people are like, I’ve got this part, I want to produce it in additive. That’s really not the best approach. You can do it that way.

But you know, what you want to do is how do I design this part for additive? So, you know, a simple thing with our technology, right? If you have just round holes throughout your part, you’re trying to do some internal channels, those round holes at the end are going to collapse as you’re building them because they don’t have any support. But if you can change that state to be a teardrop, all of a sudden now that top is not going to collapse and it can build without any support. Then now you just blow up the excess powder and you’ve got a path.

So that’s an example of, you know, you need to design that in at the beginning. You can’t just go and put a hole that already has a hole in it, it’s gun drilled, and now expect to print that, you know, angles are a big one, right? If you can design it such that you don’t have, you know, used to be 45 degrees, we’re getting better and being able to do lower and lower angle, some of the low angle features that are out there. But, you know, you want to try to avoid these big, long overhung angles, because those are going to be a challenge.

[38:18] Same thing with, you know, especially with metal, you know, ducting heat, you know, think about ducting heat, right? So if you’ve got a geometry that has some little fine little feature, that everything above it is going to have to pass through that. Now all of a sudden, you’re going to have to add support and things like that, which makes it harder to remove. So, you know, if you can think upfront about additive, that’s the way to do it versus just take a part that you already had and produce it in additive, that’s a little bit harder.

So yeah, in terms of the thinking and the design and, you know, additive was one of these crazy trends, that’s not so new anymore. It’s still pretty new, but it’s not as crazy and wild as it was when it first started. And now everything’s AI, you know, AI is going to, and it is changing everything.

So how are those worlds colliding when you think of design and how you, like all those considerations you just described, I imagine there’s got to be someone working on AI to help you design with that new freedom that additive provides. Yeah, definitely. Maybe just before you answer that, Mark, I’m curious how like topology optimization and some of these CAD tools maybe play into what Nick’s asking about.

[39:29] Yeah, no, that’s a good question. You know, I think AI is still getting started, so I don’t think we’ve seen the full benefits of it yet. Where I see people are using AI, it’s often in interrogating your model, can this model build well? How does it build? There’s other packages we work with, a company in our building, I’ve drawn a blank on their name, that does some analysis of your model to say, hey, is this model going to build well? Do we need to add more material here? Those kind of things.

So that’s where I see a lot of the AI is more on how do you improve the build or predict them? How is this build going to build and what’s the predictive failure rate or where are the weak points so you can kind of redesign those? That’s probably the biggest thing that people are using in terms of AI. The other avenue is, like you said, topology optimization. So it used to be you had to just kind of pick a standard topology pattern and that got spread across your whole geometry.

Was that the best pattern throughout the whole area? No. So now with the AI tools, it can kind of tweak that topology optimization and try to put a lot of structure or something in it and tweak it and put it thicker where it needs to be thicker, thinner where it needs to be thinner and match that to your strength requirements or something like that. So some of the CAD tools have some minimal AI, I would say, yet.

But that’s definitely a trend that I’m seeing some people go to. And then, you know, kind of a bit more of that background of upload your model, you see it in some of the ones that are doing more service, large service real work, where you upload your model and they’ll tell you right away, no, this can’t be built in the additive. So it’s doing some very basic checks.

I would still say it’s even the tools, you know, we’ve had a few people approach us about, you know, working with their tool. It’s still very basic. I would say it does tell you a little bit, but if you know additive, it’s probably not going to catch all the things that you would catch on your own, right? It’s going to catch the blatant things, but it’s going to miss some of these little idiosyncrasies, because the database isn’t really that to know that.

The other avenue with AI is maybe where we’re trying to tweak parameters. So helping you dial in, okay, here’s what you’ve got, look at a microstructure, and then where do you go next for the next parameter set? And how does that match back to your digital twin or that? So you can kind of pile those things together. So that’s, that’s the other area that people are looking at AI.

Are you seeing that the design technology evolve quickly because of AI’s influence? And like, in five years, do you think a lot more of these applications are going to be push button than they are today? Possibly, yeah, it’s hard to tell, you know, like I said, AI’s just really getting going. You know, we’ve come a long way, right? It’s more of a push button, green button, used to be you have to manually do all your supports and stuff, you know, on the plastic side, you know, it’s more green button put, you know, I think we’re going to see that with some of the metal side, and we’ll get there. Ours has some of that in there.

Is it fully there? No. But, but I do expect a lot of advances in AI in the next two or three years. So you know, it’s just which area of AI gets the focus, I think, is additive going to be the primary focus? Or is it going to go to other things like, you know, some of the AI research around drugs or around, you know, medicines and that kind of stuff that I think are maybe of higher priority.

So that’s kind of taking a lot of the demand, but I think we will see we’re seeing a lot of companies trying to integrate that into their software. Cool. I think a lot of what we talked about, it kind of points to the fact that this is still a developing technology based on where additive is today.

You know, I hear a lot of people in a machine shop environment kind of allude to it as hey, you know, there’s application here for jigs and fixtures. There’s application for specific end use parts. Are those good applications? What what other real world shop floor use cases do you come across, Mark, that would be relevant for our audience? Yep, definitely jigs and fixtures.

That has been by far the biggest area. Most people often justify the machine on the jigs and fixtures, and then end up moving into other things, right? So I see you do a justification scenario. And again, any jig and fixture you can produce, especially your higher volume production guy, you know, like, if you can save seconds on a part that you’re running millions of, all of a sudden, you just paid for your $200,000 machine, no problem, right? So definitely jigs and fixtures, whether it be customized jaws, customized work holding fixtures, those kind of things are, you know, on the metal side, people are doing tooling, you know, so there’s a lot of people moving towards kind of make end of arm tooling with additive, you can make it lighter, you can lattice it out.

So you know, all of a sudden, you’re saving weight, but it’s still got the metal strength. So that can be a benefit. Your production parts are definitely there.

And I think that’s where people want to get to. But so there’s that chicken, the egg, right? They want to do production, but they don’t want to buy a machine till they have a confirmed production. But you they won’t give you a confirmed production until you can show you’ve got additive and you know how to make it well.

So you know, if you can figure out other ways in your shop to use it, it’s a great way to bring that machine in house and start utilizing it, you know, and a lot of that’s what a lot of our customers have done. They brought it in, they started using it for their own jigs and fixtures and, and own one off kind of parts for their own systems, repairing some of their part machines, etc. And then they slowly started bringing in production work on top of that.

[45:07] Or, you know, they’re using it for their tools, or they’re using it for an insert. Those kind of avenues are great, great ways to get your feet wet and get into it. You know, I recommend, you know, our machine is great, because it is a lower, lower cost, it is a smaller build size was like a 150 by 150 build size.

But, you know, a lot of parts can fit in that that you want to do an additive. So it’s a great one to try out, you know, maybe you want to later go on to bigger machines. But, you know, get in a small machine, it’s much easier to get in a $200,000 machine and learn it.

And, and when get that going, then spend a million dollars and now you’re under the gun, you know, I got to start producing parts tomorrow. Maybe you can have a little bit more leeway and runaway to try to work on it. And that’s what you know, for training for education, that’s what we’re seeing a lot of applications of that for our machines as well as a way of maybe in the end, they want to go to a bigger part.

But hey, let’s get everybody’s feet wet. Let’s try it with a smaller machine. So very capable machines, same type of gavel, same type of system that’s setting up the machine, you know, I ran us as a ran, Renaissance, etc.

You know, coming in exact, it was like, Oh, where’s the button for that? Oh, it’s there. Okay. Yep.

Okay, I’ve got it way I go. So it’s very easy to run. And it’s, you know, and that’s the one thing I like about everything is, it is a quick switchover, right? Some of the bigger machines, you know, you got to wait for it to cool down, it takes, you know, a lot longer to switch over, a lot more cleaning and things like that you have to do, versus, you know, the exact machine is a small bill, you can pretty much switch it over in 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your geometry.

That’s not something you typically see in some of the other bigger machines. Yeah, you know, something kind of just struck me, Mark, there’s a lot about this technology that is so appealing, just in terms of design freedom, and in the ability to iterate. And, but also sounds like, if you want to take full advantage of this, you need to start developing the expertise, both from a design perspective, which we talked about, also from just the workflow you described of bringing Metal AM into your shop and having the facilities, but also the people to follow those processes.

[47:28] Where do people go to learn how to do this stuff? Are people, is it kind of like trial by fire, we buy a machine, and then we kind of figure it out? Are the institutions offering good training on this? How are people developing these expertise? Yeah, that’s a really good question. You know, I definitely recommend you need to have that forerunner in your facility, right? So you need somebody on the engineering side, you need somebody that runs the machine as well. And I would say you need somebody, you know, relating it to CNC, right? You need that programmer setter, five-axis programmer type person, right? You don’t, you know, if you have a lot of machines, the push button operator can work, but you still need that other person to debug it when something doesn’t go well, get it set up, try out those first builds, those kind of things.

In terms of education, you know, whenever you buy a machine, you know, pretty much every OEM will provide a level of training, anywhere from a few days to several, you know, to a week, that gives you some overview, gives you the basics of it. There is a lot of schools, so a lot of schools are now offering an additive program as part of their program. So, you know, you can, you know, I know here at NC State, they have some, University of Waterloo has a little bit, so does a lot of the other schools here in the U.S., you know, are starting to do that, Texas, UTAP, Pennsylvania, etc.

So there’s a lot of different schools that have it either as a course or as an add-on that you can do. There are also other organizations out there that do training. So ASTM has a whole series of training courses.

FME has some training courses you can take. ASTM has a whole program where you can be certified on specific machines. More for a push button operator standpoint, less about the, you know, the higher level, but that’s a way, you know, to kind of, you know, educate people.

I’ve always found, you know, the best type of people that run it are either, you know, engineers, engineering technologists, or, you know, CNC machinists are actually really good. You know, like that’s what I found, because they’re usually that bit of a practical, hands-on kind of person. You know, it does need a little bit of tweaking.

You got to be not afraid to put your, you know, get your hands dirty at times. Sometimes when things go wrong, those are great, right? That’s what ran most of my machines when I was at Christie and in a lot of the jobs I’ve worked at. So, you know, I think if you’ve got the aptitude of how to set up a CNC, you’re probably going to figure out the additive.

You know, it’s a little different, but it’s clearly got that same type of aptitude. That’s awesome. Mark, thank you so much for just the tremendous amount of insight you shared in 45 minutes.

And yeah, I love what you just said about where to start and where to learn and where to start to build this expertise, because I think so many of us in the, you know, subtractive world, you know, we think additive’s cool. We just think that’s for somebody else. You know, probably not really much application for me in my life, but I mean, shoot, we have a business unit where we design and build fixtures.

And I’ve once or twice a year had this idea, oh, what about additive? I wonder if that would have a fit. And there obviously is. I just don’t know how much my team is really exploring that.

And I think we ought to be exploring it more than we are. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing all of that and sharing your story a little bit with us. Yeah, if anybody, you know, is trying to get into it, we do it a lot with our customers, where it’s like, here’s a part, we’ll walk you through, how do we set it up? Here’s the cost and try to help you understand, you know, oh, that part’s going to cost me $55 to pretty, you know, so that you can kind of gauge those ROIs and justifications as well, because that’s really what you need to get into your thought.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There’s got to be a business case. So Dave, you’re always so good at closing things up.

Do you have any final thoughts before you wrap this up? Well, Nick, as you know, we always try to leave the audience with a bit of a plan of action. And perhaps the question, we didn’t say this at the start of the episode, but perhaps the question we’re trying to answer is, should your shop at the very least be exploring additive? And Mark, I don’t know, is there a few qualifiers that folks should consider when they’re looking at additive just in terms of, you know, we talked about part complexity and material requirements, any, any just specific criteria that, hey, if these three or four things are present, additive might be a good fit? Yeah, so I would say if you’re looking at metal additive, laser powder bed, I would say, at least at this point, most times you want a smaller part, smaller than a coffee cup, ideally smaller still would be good. And then something that needs a feature that you can’t make other ways.

That’s really the big caveat. Or it’s in out of a material that’s hard to machine. And so then additive kind of plays a role in it.

But you know, there’s lots of avenues that make sense to get in additive, I would just try it, right, get into it, reach out, do your research. That’s the other thing I would say, you know, don’t just take my word for it, look at the other OEMs, look at the things, there’s a lot of knowledge out there, try to weed through the hype, because there’s a lot of hype out there, you got to make sure you know, who you’re talking to, and whether it’s a pure sales guy, that’s not technical, or somebody that’s actually trying to, you know, help you solve your problem. Because that’s, that’s what we focus on here at Xact.

But, you know, you really want to be that person that tries to, to help you, you know, you want the right machine, you don’t want a machine that’s going to be a boat once you put it. Don’t get stuck in a hype cycle spinning around. Too many times.

That’s awesome. Oh man, we should create an AI image of, like someone stuck in a washing machine, we’ll call it the additive hype cycle. So good.

Awesome. Well, Mark, thank you so much for being on the show and really schooling everybody on kind of additive as a technology, more specifically about metal additive and its current applications. I know that our audience loved learning about it.

So thank you so much for being here. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

If anyone has any questions for you, or they want to investigate anywhere, you want to point them towards a website or anything like this? Yeah, you can reach, you know, we have our website, XactMetal, X-A-C-T-Metal.com, or you can send me an email at just mark at XactMetal.com. Awesome. That’s great. All right.

Well, I think it’s time to turn the lights out on this episode. Thank you very much for watching and listening. Make sure that you like and subscribe the show and share it with anyone who might also enjoy it, whether that’s a coworker or another industry professional, you know.

Thanks everyone. And we’ll catch you on the next episode.