Are you worried about 3d printing?

[Donkey Hotey]

Are you worried about 3d metal printing making machinists 90% obsolete? Eventually...

I'm worried about shops who still try to make a living with manual machines or think an Anilam retrofit is a real CNC.

 

[pcm81]

Hi again pcm81:
Yeah, I get what you're saying but consider this:
I can turn parts completely unattended from a 12 foot bar and my bar feed time from part to part is measured in seconds or fractions of a second.
My material is consistent, my workholding consists of a 40 dollar collet from the collet store, and I can turn within tenths.
I can buy the whole bar for 50 bucks and make ten grand worth of parts from it (if I have the right parts to make! ).
I can load the bar, push the button and walk away until the magazine of bars is empty. (well almost...things still break and fuck up and etc etc)

If I had a Willemin Macodel, I could do the same thing with complex milled parts.
I'd get them dead nuts accurate.
I'd get net shape parts from one machine in one chucking (plus a subspindle operation) completely autonomously and very fast.

My Whippo Zippo Willemin would cost about the same as a DMLM printer from Eos but I could do so much more productive work with it and it would be faster, more energy efficient and would make better parts too, with less maintenance, no special fire proof structure, no special material handling facility etc etc..

My customers could choose any material that can be machined and I could certify the material to meet customer specs for chemistry and physical properties simply by my material ordering choices.

Something you must realize (if you're not already experienced with it) is that near net shaped parts that need to be finished on only some surfaces are a right royal pain in the ass by comparison.
Doesn't matter if they're castings, forgings or 3D prints.
They're hard to hold onto, hard to establish consistent datums for, and hard to fixture consistently.
Automating a process for handling and machining them is harder and more expensive...usually by an order of magnitude.

When a near net shape preform is useful, is when most of the features do not need to be all that accurate, and when a ton of material would have to be removed from a billet, when you can get better physical properties from the preform (like the strength from a forging for example) and when the internal geometry of the part doesn't lend itself to machining it.
Automating workholding and a machining process for a near net shape part is a major challenge that billet parts do not suffer...there's always something to grab onto until the very last operation, and when you can feed a bar, you gain efficiency and cut your labour costs while making more and better parts.

So yeah, 3D printed parts can slide into a place where castings maybe used to live, but they won't transform the metalworking industry...if anything, they'll augment it.

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

Good post. Thanks for the input.
I think there are several different types of machining environments that all fit under "machining". Large batch production of parts like pistons, or crank shaft or other large batch things that land itself for creation of machining line from a billet will probably be always cheaper/more efficient without the use of 3d printed parts. When i am thinking a machinist profession, I am not really thinking about a computer nerd that programs a 5 axis haas cnc mill, but rather a guy with a lathe/mill, a set of gage blocks and a micrometer.

 

[Donkey Hotey]

I am not really thinking about a computer nerd that programs a 5 axis haas cnc mill, but rather a guy with a lathe/mill, a set of gage blocks and a micrometer.

This type of manufacturing of parts is already more dead than 3D printing metal is alive.

Exceptions:

• Repair industries (agricultural, engine rebuilders, heavy equipment service)
• Specialty niche machinery (screw machines, giant or unusual specialty machine)
• Hobbyists

Around 2008 I was in a teleconference with a very large customer on a very important program. We were discussing some tooling they used and needed to have redesigned. We were talking past each other, about different hardware and where each came from. One of the guys on the other end was trying to describe a piece of tooling to us and said, "No, you guys didn't make this. This one looks professionally done."

That was the last turd we made with a Bridgeport, a clapped out 14" lathe, a bandsaw and a claw hammer.

 

[EPAIII]

3d print a hardened, metal part with 100K or 150K PSI tensile strength? Oh, and +/-0.0001" tolerances with a mirror surface finish.

It's gonna be a while. Don't hold your breath or sell off your lathes, milling machines, and surface grinders just yet.

I am presently designing a project with about a dozen parts. I have a 3D printer and want to use it. But, so far, only one part definitely qualifies for that. Perhaps the final cover plate will also be 3D printed. That would make two. The remaining ten or so will REQUIRE more conventional methods.

So, NO! Don't hold your breath. But do adopt as many new technologies as you can. That way you won't become obsolete.

There's no rest for the wicked.

 

[rcoope]

Another challenge with metal 3d printing is there aren't actually a lot of use cases where the advantages of printing, eg making closed channels or large thin surfaces with complex shapes, is required. The industry keeps coming back to rocket motors and heat exchangers, and maybe some injector nozzles, but they haven't been able to find much else. Yes there's Atherton bikes and the odd Stanhope 3D printed mandible or pelvis but these are niches. And I say this having recently completed a killer 3D printed and machined project, a cold stage for a droplet digital PCR machine, consisting of a 316 stainless block for a 96-well semi-skirted PCR plate that has a water channel in it so we can keep an RNA polymerase enzyme cool for a couple of hours. I can't share a photo but we machined the extra material off after the print and you cannot tell it was printed except it has the water channel inside. But this was a unique use case as we're putting the part on the deck of an existing robot where we can't move the sample plate without screwing up all the limit switches that tell the robot everything is correct. If we were developing the robot ourselves we would give ourselves a bit more room and just use a conventional aluminum block with a water chilled peltier cooler underneath. And when you talk to people in the industry this is the challenge, they can't find use cases where they really beat existing methods. I suspect there are areas wihere printing will impact die casting or investment casting, and in general support powder metallurgy by making it easier to prototype powder moulded parts. But as others have said, it doesn't do the things that CNC currently does in terms of accuracy and surface finish. It's worth it though for the amusement of seeing people comparing current printing to essentially a 1940's conception of machining. I'm here for the Lolz.

 

[boslab]

I’m not entirely sure what the hell the 4 th dimension is, most say time, but I read a book once where no4 was “ inwardness “ ( think it was mr Sagan in cosmos, not sure have to look)
He reckoned on 60 somthing dimensions but I think they were mathematically constructed to make the now defunct Big Bang work, not certain.
Perhaps it’s 3D extrusion or rolling lol
Think I saw an example of 3D extrusion, the die produced a twisted extrusion accidentally, at the right pressure the Ali twisted helically like a thread, weird.
No amount of stretching and untwisting could remove it.
It’s an odd world
Mark

 

[EmGo]

Are you worried about 3d metal printing making machinists 90% obsolete?

No.

 

[???]

I was speaking to a laser physicist at the university of Wollongong and he summed it up. 3D printing is not a replacement tool it is just another tool. I clearly remember the first injection mould I made. Simple single cavity with a through hole across the part line so one sliding core. Electrodes were made to the same size and then one was etched to be undersize and used as a rougher. Die set had had to be hand built from bandsawn blocks. Took a month to finish. Same die would take me less than a week now. Technology increases efficiency and the ability to make more intricate parts. If you took a toolmaker from 100 years ago he would probably recognise a lot of the equipment that we use in a modern toolroom and the fact that a lot of it is just automated and more efficient.

 

[???]

I’m not entirely sure what the hell the 4 th dimension is,

It's when you fit a 4th axis to your 3d printer

 

[gbent]

I recall working with a manufacturer in the mid '80's. The shop I worked in prototyped a lot of parts for them. They just bought a stereo-lithography machine and were going to produce their own casting patterns. A couple of good guys worked on it for a couple of years and it never did come to fruition. A few projects were set back considerably waiting for usable parts, and my work had a couple of accelerated projects to try to get back to timeline.

We've seen it before, we will see it again. New technology is worthless until someone figures out how to make it productive and profitable. There are a lot of seemingly good ideas that turn out to be neat, but useless. Then there is a sleeper idea that someone repurposes and turns out to be quite useful. It sure took the copy machine a lot of time to overcome the inertia of carbon paper.