One of the big challenges we had with
the bending cell was to basically design
and integrate everything in a really
timely fashion. We were able to actually
do it in about six months and that would
not have been possible without the additive
We found Markforged by
researching for the best printers out there
for commercial and industrial
quality printing. One of the parts we
make at Lean Machine is aluminum wire
clip like this. The tooling in general,
what we used to use, was a big heavy
steel tooling like this to put in our press break
So one thing we found we could do with printing was actually print these tools instead
The big thing that we saw with Markforged was
They took a big step from a hobby printer
to something that you can actually make parts out of
And we saw a few sample parts
and then we kind of jumped in with it
and haven't look back
So the first
step is that you load the blanks into
the trays which hold 200 parts each.
After that the robot picks the parts out
of that tray using an array system and
then takes it into the press break to
bend them one at a time. Because of the
3D printing you have complete control
over the profile of your bend. The Onyx
is actually very good for a friction and
it doesn't leave any marring on the part
at all, so we have a much nicer part with
the printed tooling and that's easier
and cheaper to make the tools, so it's
kind of a win-win
With the continuous fiber, you make a printed part that not only could compete with aluminum parts
but in many cases actually, be a better part
One of the biggest real gains
that we found with the 3D printer is
that if we want to get parts made we
don't have to go and schedule them out
in the machine shop. We don't have to
order tools. We don't have to make drawings
We can skip all of that and we
can just get the parts made on the printer
We come in the next day, the
parts are ready, we can start testing
with them, and we don't have to go and
check that they're right
And being able to have every single feature on a
printed part coming out within two or
three thousand, with zed accuracies of less than a thou. I mean, the accuracy stuff is huge.
As soon as we heard about metal printing, it's the next level, so we started looking into it
we're excited about it because I mean if
we can make some tools work really well
on a plastic, it kind of blows
your mind on what we could probably do out of steel.
For the grippers, they'll just
look really awesome on there
The metal printed parts they look nicer than most machine parts. We just keep bending
thousands of parts and the tools are not
wearing
they're just bending perfect parts. It's
like okay these guys can pretty much do anything
