Published 11/13/2025

Video: 3D Printed Polymer Composite Tool Riser Wins Against Aluminum Casting

Plastics specialist KraussMaffei applies its own large format additive manufacturing (LFAM) equipment to produce tooling risers in polymer composite as an alternative to metal.

Stephanie Hendrixson

Editor-in-Chief, Additive Manufacturing | Manufacturing Connected

Transcript

When we talk about 3D printing being used as a replacement for castings, usually we're talking about metal 3D printing, but this is an example where large format additive manufacturing in composite polymer has been used to replace aluminum castings.

I'm Stephanie Hendrixson, I'm at KraussMaffei in Brighton, Michigan.

KraussMaffei is a German-owned company that specializes in plastics processing, everything from injection molding and extrusion all the way to now additive manufacturing.

They offer machines in two different formats. There is a gantry style 3D printer with a 2 by 2 by 2.5-meter build volume, as well as a more flexible six-axis robot based system.

KraussMaffei sells these machines to users, but they've also found a lot of great applications for additive manufacturing technology right here internally.

This is one example. This is a foam-in-place tool. And you can see that there are 3D printed portions at the top and bottom.

These are called the risers. But they used to be called the castings.

In previous iterations of tooling like this, KraussMaffei used aluminum castings to provide the support for the tools that are then used to inject foam in between a skin and a substrate to produce things like instrument panels, armrests, and a lot of other car interior components, among other applications. That used to be an outsourced operation, something that they would have to get from a casting supplier.

But now, thanks to their 3D printing technology that's also running here in this same facility, they're able to 3D print these risers in-house, do the machining, and produce these much more quickly.

The timeline to sourcing aluminum casting could be as long as 8 to 10 weeks, whereas one of these risers can be printed here in just about 8 to 10 hours.

There's still some machining that needs to happen and some finishing in assembly steps, but the machining itself is a little bit easier because you're dealing with plastic. In this case, a carbon-filled polycarbonate versus machining with aluminum or some other metal.

There are also some other benefits that come along with changing both the material and the process.

One is the material cost is a lot less, about [30%] less than the aluminum.

Second is the weight savings. One of these risers is about 40% less weight than an equivalent aluminum part would be.

That means there's less wear and tear on the press on the machine that's actually going to be running a tool like this, which means longer lifespan and, just less maintenance and repair overall.

But the really promising thing here comes from the material properties.

The 3D printed polymer riser, in this case, a carbon-filled polycarbonate is a better insulator than machined aluminum. That means that the tool gets hot and stays hot, using about only 30% the amount of energy that would be required for the aluminum tool over the life of a tool like this, which is probably five years in production, followed by five years and service. That is a huge amount of energy savings and a big sustainability benefit on top of all of the cost savings and the time savings as well.

This is just one of the internal applications that KraussMaffei has found for their large format additive manufacturing machines and also, just one of the ways that its customers are using this technology as well.

If you want to learn more about large format additive manufacturing at KraussMaffei and how they're supporting their customers with this, see our full story on AdditiveManufacturing.media, and you can find more stories of large format additive manufacturing, LFAM, on the website as well. Thanks for watching.