Who is using additive manufacturing at work?

[mega]

I was wondering if any of you guys are using additive now for manufacturing?
If so, which machines and software?

[Tim Johnson]

We used to but now we're farming it out.

[mega]

We used to but now we're farming it out.

China?

[Tim Johnson]

China?

I would think not.Leco is a family business and prefers to give work to other family businesses.

[Rstewart]

We have a building full of composite and metal printers.  I'll have to go over there to see what the brands are.  I usually avoid the guy that handles most of them (I'm not a fan of him).
We also house one of those DMG/Mori additative / subtractive mill-turns, it belongs to another division tho.   

[mega]

I would think not.Leco is a family business and prefers to give work to other family businesses.

I love to hear that!!

[mega]

We have a building full of composite and metal printers.  I'll have to go over there to see what the brands are.  I usually avoid the guy that handles most of them (I'm not a fan of him).
We also house one of those DMG/Mori additative / subtractive mill-turns, it belongs to another division tho.   

That mill-turn sounds very interesting!! Mcam Northwest featured A-Plus in a presentation about hybrid manufacturing using additive and subtractive manufacturing in Mastercam for repair and manufacturing. ( I actually worked on this behind the scenes.)

[civiceg]

I work in Additive everyday. Haas Meltio Hybrids exclusively, the part from Aplus at 5:38 looks awfully familiar

[gcode]

We did some inconel parts last year
The stock was made with an additive welding process.
The job turned out OK and it was WAY better than hogging out billets of inconel
but it was very difficult to set up
The stock was out of round and sagged a little and finding the good part inside
the stock was a challenge.

[JParis]

We have several different ones around here from printing plastics, to desktop metal, to a printer that's putting out titanium parts...

[Jeff]

We have a small ($400) 3D printer here that I've been toying with for over a year now. Just making stuff for the shop like racks to hold collets and stuff. Learning as I go. Nothing special but it's kind of fun.
I don't see us getting into the metal printing stuff.

[mega]

We have a small ($400) 3D printer here that I've been toying with for over a year now. Just making stuff for the shop like racks to hold collets and stuff. Learning as I go. Nothing special but it's kind of fun.
I don't see us getting into the metal printing stuff.

At the last place I worked, they kept their industrial engineers busy doing stuff like that. They had bought some really expensive 3d printer that was very fast, it was also just plastic stuff.

[mega]

We did some inconel parts last year
The stock was made with an additive welding process.
The job turned out OK and it was WAY better than hogging out billets of inconel
but it was very difficult to set up
The stock was out of round and sagged a little and finding the good part inside
the stock was a challenge.

Is there any work hardening that occurs after the additive process?

[JParis]

We did some inconel parts last year
The stock was made with an additive welding process.
The job turned out OK and it was WAY better than hogging out billets of inconel
but it was very difficult to set up
The stock was out of round and sagged a little and finding the good part inside
the stock was a challenge.

I had to setup some fairly complicated probing macros to get it dialed in for position...had to check not only for position but pitch and yaw as well and then calculate to find the average...then checked against a value that was deemed "too far out of range".

Currently have 2 versions of these parts running in two different, 5 axis machines and another on an HMC that will wind up on a 5 axis once the orider goes into full delievery schedule production....while another is programmed, fixtures made, just waiting to get into that same HMC for protoype runs.