The Risks of In-house Additive Manufacturing
Assessing Additive Manufacturing Suitability
I've been reading a number of articles that act as a warning to be cautious when deciding to go down the route of Additive Manufacturing (AM). It was all sage advice and I highlight some of the suggestions here.
Just a 3D Printer?
When you invest in a 3D printer, especially your first one, it is important to remember the other necessary items. Just like a movie, you need more than just a star actor! You then need to anticipate what you will end up printing, so size then matters. This is a list of necessary items, taken from our experience of FFF or resin printers:
- Tools to remove the prints and to separate supports
- Finishing tools
- Wash and cure unit for resin removal and final hardening
- Conumables
- Fluids to clean and wash
- Alcohol or proprietary wash
- Acetone
- Printing materials - can you get what you need for your products?
- Filaments or pellets
- Resins (and don't forget their use-by-date
- Finishing materials
- Polish
- Paint
- Fluids to clean and wash
- Power for equipment
- Space heating or cooling for optimum printing performance
That is for a simple setup, but the bigger the machine, the more supporting items (and power) are required (and likely to be different for different organisations and requirements):
- Lab equipment
- Safety equipment and clothing (especially where powder is the print medium)
- Post processing station
- Air scrubbers and extractors
It's not just the hardware. You might have some of the software but you need CAD for modelling and slicers to prepare for fabrication.
Holistic Thinking
Identifying the hardware and software is relatively straight forward. You also need to identify skills training needs, reliable material suppliers too.
Analyse the requirement to see if it solves issues or meets your manufacturing needs. Can it do so cost effectively, especially as technology moves so rapidly? Will the output be of adequate quality, or how long will it take to bring it up to the desired quality. Will your SOPs be up to date? It can be easy to be over optimistic, so be as honest as possible.
But it can be All Good Too
That said, there can be substantial benefits:
- Careful choice of parts for AM can:
- Reduce costs, especially for small number runs
- Make parts that might be vey difficult with subtractive processes
- AM can produce very complex parts
- Reduce part count by combining some groups of parts
- Reduce weight without loosing out on part strength
- Add the possibility of customising parts without re-tooling
- Potentially reducing waste and moving towards net-zero
- Support moves towards data-driven manufacturing
- Reduce physical stock holdings, store as digital, print on demand
We do Additive Manufacturing too
It is easy to summarise with a list of suggestions, but we also do AM. If you want to see if we can help we could start with making parts for you or consulting with you on your AM journey.
Our manufacturing is not on a grand scale, but see our portfolio for the GuvTool that we designed, developed for AM and are now, having manufactured them, we're in the fulfilment step of our own process.