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That's the "freshman's dream" of additive manufacturing. In reality, additive manufacturing is often more labor intensive than conventional manufacturing, part
by Robotbeat 7y ago
That's the "freshman's dream" of additive manufacturing. In reality, additive manufacturing is often more labor intensive than conventional manufacturing, particularly if you're building multiple items or are using the process where it doesn't make sense.
The "minimal human intervention" thing is just not true.
It's nice to not have to make tooling. But post-processing is super labor-intensive. Often post-machining is also needed. And certification of additive parts for aerospace is a nightmare.
- rbanffy 7y agoThese are all limitations of the process itself, but we can design around them. If the printed material is not rigid enough, we make it thicker or add support structures. If the surface is not as smooth as we need, we can machine it or use a thicker gasket. A lot of our tech and tooling is built around subtractive processes and their characteristics, but that's not a hard boundary of the design and process space.