A direct result of 3D printing's impact on the design process is the rate at which new products can be developed. Instead of having to wait for tooling for a given design, designers can simply print onsite or send a CAD file to a service bureau and get parts in hours or days. Previously, weeks, months, or even years were the norm. This has a compressive effect on the overall product development life cycle. Decisions on final part designs can be reached much faster because the amount of time required for effective design is compressed.
3D printing grew up as a prototyping technology. It offered a faster way to go from an idea to a tangible model than previously imaginable. By allowing for designs to be drafted in a computer program and then sent to be printed, the time to market for new designs was drastically shortened. In conjunction with this speed, 3D printing has also helped better products come to market. With the ability to create fast iterations on tangible designs, engineering flaws, and bad ergonomics that might have taken months (and a lot of additional investment in tooling) to identify can be identified sooner and fixes incorporated into the final design. As a result, the general quality of parts is improved by designers’ ability to explore numerous designs in a shorter period of time, arriving at a better final design.
Another way that 3D printing changes manufacturing today is in how we fix things. 3D printing allows for on-demand fabrication of replacement parts. Naturally, this is not always necessary. Sometimes a replacement part is readily available at the local big box hardware store. But sometimes those parts are difficult to come by, especially for products out of production. If your collector car from the 1950s breaks down, it can sometimes make sense to print replacement parts rather than hunt them down in the global marketplace.
This is perhaps even more pronounced if you are missing a part from a 50-year-old assembly line and the holdup is costing you revenue every minute. Or perhaps you are in a forward-deployed location and your aircraft cannot fly without printing a replacement part straight away. In any of these circumstances, the ability to 3D print stopgap solutions is significant, and with the advancement in printing quality, these “short-term solutions” may soon become “long-term” ones.
Additive manufacturing has fundamentally changed the way we manufacture things. From design to tooling to replacement parts, additive manufacturing is a game changer. And its impact is just beginning to be felt, as the speed and capability of machines have just passed a tipping point. Read our next blog post when we talk about how additive manufacturing will come to further impact manufacturing in the years to come.