i'm still amazed that itcan do what it can do. this is going to be a gamechanger in manufacturing. because it's built inlayers, it's limitless. it's opening conventionalconstraints on design. [music playing]
3d printing in the automotive industry, i always start with adescription of the technology as being the ability to takewhat's in your imagination and put it in your hands. and that's really what additivemanufacturing and 3d printing
can do. the first time i saw itwas just amazing because i couldn't believe that anythinglike 3d printing existed. the cool thing about it isit's a layer by layer additive process. and you can do very,very complex geometries that you can't do in traditionalmanufacturing techniques. in the old traditionalways, people had to design-- not only forfunctionality-- but how are we
going to manufacture it. now with 3d printing, youdon't have those constraints. you just design your part to fitin the space it needs to be in. it allows you to makeshapes that you couldn't get a tool-- like a millor like a laser cutter-- inside of a geometry-- stuffthat is just not manufacturable any other way. it's finally come into its ownand it's a mature manufacturing process at this point.
so a customer willprovide us a cad file-- a lot of times, a drawing. we prefer cad files sothat we can actually pull their file intoone of our tools and look at thevirtual image of it, and analyze it forits design to see if it's right for the process. and then we canadvise the customer if they need to makeany design changes
or if it can be built as-is. and then we integratethat cad file to create two dimensional slices. those two dimensionalslices are what's going to be used asprimitives to make the object-- the solid object. then that creates a tool paththat's sent to the machine. and once that tool pathis finished on that layer, the table indexes downand the next layer builds.
and that's the additive process. and so your partgrows from nothing into a full 3d geometry. having the full suite of3d printing technologies under one roof is really anadvantage to both our customers as well as a service provider. one of the great thingsabout these processes and about 3dprinting in general-- it's not just limitedto one type of industry.
every single type ofindustry can really benefit from 3d printing. additive manufacturing isreally allowing companies and customers and people to getto market faster than they've ever gotten before. we can do things insometimes a fifth, a sixth, a tenthof the time that it would take them in traditionalmanufacturing methods. so you're able to get tothe market extremely fast,
and fast to market wins. people are reallytesting the waters. we don't know what wecan't do with this yet. but 10, 15 yearsfrom now, what are we going to be able to dowith these types of devices as far as making machinesthat can replicate food or replicate body parts orreplicate any type of device that you need forwhatever it is you're trying to fix or workon or accomplish.
our customers are always finding new ways of utilizing 3d printing and there just doesn't seem to be an end in sight.
