Video: Is Additive Manufacturing a Form of Automation?

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A 3D printer may be very different from a robot, but both offer similar benefits to a manufacturing business: They eliminate process steps, reduce manual labor, and, perhaps most importantly, set humans free to do higher-value work. In this video, we take a look at businesses that are implementing additive manufacturing as a form of automation, and the benefits they are realizing as a result. 

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Transcript

Additive manufacturing is a different way of making parts, building them up layer by layer versus the alternatives of cutting them from solid stock or forming them with a mold or die. It’s a different approach to part production. But is it also a form of automation?

I would argue yes. Additive manufacturing or specifically 3D printing can take many different process steps — multiple cutting operations, a long assembly process, welding, brazing — and effectively consolidate those steps into just one cycle in the 3D printer. One cycle that can run fully unattended, overnight, over the weekend, or during the workday — while the technician goes and does something else. They don’t have to worry about the specifics of this process, because the 3D printer has it covered.

This is not just a different way of thinking about one piece of machinery in a company’s capacity. Implementing a 3D printer can bring benefits to the shop floor similar to those provided by a cobot or other more typical automation. It can help employees’ skills go further, and help a manufacturer augment its workforce.

I recently saw how this plays out at a plastics specialist in Minnesota called General Pattern. The company, founded in 1922, began as a pattern-making business to support foundries. But when casting work began moving overseas in the 1970s, the company took the skill sets it had acquired in pattern making and pivoted into the related field of model making, this time for the toy industry. That work eventually lead to injection molding of toys and other end-use plastic parts, often on a very short timeline.

Keeping up with the pace of product development and production meant that General Pattern also needed to build its own mold tooling. The company invested heavily in CNC machining equipment for toolmaking in order to deliver injection molded parts in a matter of weeks. General Pattern also adopted its first 3D printer in 1987 to help automate modeling and keep up with demand for rapid product development and prototyping as it expanded its customer base.

Today, the company runs 85 injection molding presses across multiple facilities in Blaine, Minnesota. And all of those presses are using mold tooling also made in Blaine, mostly on the company’s 62 CNC milling centers.

Mostly, but not all — because some of General Pattern’s mold inserts are now made via 3D printing.

The company now has a metal 3D printer, one from Mantle 3D, that prints mold inserts from metal paste. The components that come out of the printer are soft and malleable, known as “green” parts — but are sintered in an oven to become solid, dense and ready to go into an injection mold tool.

3D printing is just one of more than a dozen ways that General Pattern makes mold tooling these days. But it’s an important option, because it is the company’s most automated way to produce these necessary tools.

When mold tooling is made through machining, solid blocks of aluminum or tool steel are cut down to the right size and shape in a process that can require many different setups — moments where an operator needs to reach into the machine and position the workpiece for its next cut. A complicated tool can require many such setups, as well as moving between different machines.

The 3D printer is different. Molds are designed with CAD software, just as they would be for machining, but then sliced and sent to the printer which can build complicated geometries completely unattended. Operators can get a complicated tool out of the machine without being directly involved.

General Pattern, like many molders and moldmakers, is facing a labor shortage. 10% of its workforce is toolmakers, which are highly skilled professionals. But most are nearing retirement — and this trend is mirrored across the manufacturing industry broadly. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024, more than one-quarter of the current durable goods manufacturing workforce is 55 or older. 6% are over the age of 65. As those workers retire, there will not be enough incoming toolmakers — or machinists or programmers or fabricators — to fill the void they'll leave behind.

For General Pattern, this is where the 3D printer comes in. When I spoke to Denny Reiland, third-generation owner and CEO, about this, he said that the 3D printer was a way to get more throughput, a tool to enable these skilled technicians to do more with their skills.

At General Pattern, 3D printing is not a replacement for moldmaking expertise, but it is a form of automation that lets expert moldmakers essentially be in two places at once. A moldmaker can design a detailed insert and send it to the printer for manufacturing, and in the meantime turn their attention to making the rest of the mold.

General Pattern is not the only company coming to rely on additive manufacturing for production that doesn’t need constant attention. 

In Alabama, medical device manufacturer Curiteva manufactures implants from PEEK, polyether ether ketone, using a filament-based 3D printing process as well as traditional CNC machining. On any given day you'll find individual operators tending over three or four CNC milling or turning machines. Meanwhile, inside a cleanroom on the company's shop floor, one employee is responsible for 10 3D printers.

Curiteva Vice President of Emerging Technology Todd Reith told me, "the operator-to-machine ratio favors the AM process. [It's] mostly hands-off and requires less machine input from the techs."

Across manufacturing sectors, we routinely see additive manufacturing facilities where fewer employees are needed overall because of the hands-off nature of this process. It can feel almost eerie to visit some of the largest 3D printing users in the United States, for the simple fact of how few people you are likely to see on the production floor at a place like Sintavia, VulcanForms or Norsk Titanium.

Staggered starts and often longer cycles on these machines make it possible for one person to tend to multiple 3D printers at once — producing if not more per shift, then more complete parts with every run.

That completeness also points to another way that additive manufacturing is automation: with the reduction of assembly. We often talk about assembly consolidation, those places where AM makes it possible to take what used to be 10, 20, or hundreds of parts and build them together as just one. But another way to describe assembly consolidation might be assembly automation.

Locomotive manufacturer Wabtec has seen this in converting a line of brake panels for light rail over to AM. What used to be six different parts tediously brazed together is now 3D printed as just one piece through laser powder bed fusion. These are tall parts, so each build of eight takes about 100 hours — but that's 100 hours that technicians can spend focused on something else, like postprocessing the previous batch of panels or developing new AM applications.

Energy technology company Baker Hughes has a similar story. One of its trim products for industrial valves used to take nine months to produce because all the components were being made, shipped and assembled by external suppliers.

When the company converted this trim for 3D printing, taking what used to be a welded stack of machined plates and turning it into one 3D printed metal part, it eliminated not only the assembly process, but also that long supply chain. Arguably making one of these trims is more work because production now happens internally — but it's a far faster production process. The printed parts require only minimal machining and postprocessing, with no finicky joining. 3D printing automates the assembly by effectively removing it from the workflow.

Additive manufacturing is not a perfect solution for companies facing labor shortages or seeking to increase their throughput. It introduces its own requirements and complexities, and without careful planning, time saved in printing could be lost in manual postprocessing or other steps. But for General Pattern and other manufacturers like them, 3D printing is increasingly becoming a form of automation they can lean on.