Additive manufacturing is often a tool for vertical integration, one that enables manufacturing facilities to do more for customers they already serve. A medical device manufacturer might add polymer 3D printing to support prototyping and short-run production before moving a new project to injection molding. An aerospace supplier might integrate metal 3D printing to become less reliant on castings and their extended lead times.

But among contract manufacturers, additive opens different doors: These businesses are increasingly adopting AM technology not just to enhance existing operations, but to diversify the customer base and reach into new spaces.

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Such diversification makes good business sense. Any manufacturer that primarily serves just one market is subject to the ups and downs of that market. Serving multiple markets tempers these waves.

But why is additive manufacturing the means to do so? How does additive manufacturing help businesses reach beyond their current markets into new ones?

The key is the flexibility that additive manufacturing inherently provides.

A process like casting or injection molding requires hard-tooled certainty before production can begin. Not so for a 3D printer. The same additive machine that is making downhole drill components today can easily switch to making a spacecraft thrust chamber or firearm components tomorrow.

Knust Godwin’s 15 3D printers are used to manufacture parts for oil and gas, the company’s historic primary market, as well as emerging industries like commercial space. Source: Additive Manufacturing Media (All Images)

This exact scenario is playing out at Knust Godwin, an established machine shop business built on the foundation of serving oil and gas customers. But as the company has grown its additive manufacturing expertise, it has also expanded into commercial space and firearms with this capacity.

Both of these application spaces are very different industries from oil and gas, with different standards and even part sizes and common geometries. But both are growing fast, fast enough that existing supply chains can’t keep up, and with enough new products being developed that additive doesn’t need to defeat an incumbent process to be adopted.

With its laser powder bed fusion printers and in-house machining capacity for finishing 3D printed parts, Knust Godwin has been able to offer value for these newer markets that the legacy machining business might not have reached otherwise, even while continuing to 3D print oilfield parts. Knust Godwin has stretched to accommodate these new industries (adding an ITAR-controlled postprocessing area for firearms parts for example), but as a result, it is less subject to the fluctuations of oil and gas, or any market that it serves.

Combustion chambers, rocket nozzles and other combustion system components are a major market for Howco Additive’s services — and a point of differentiation from its parent company’s focus on products for oil and gas. 

Similarly, Howco Additive was launched as a deliberate effort to diversify the business of its parent company, Howco Group, a distributor of barstock, piping and other value-added metal products primarily for oil and gas. While the additive group also produces parts for this market, it has found an equally important niche in 3D printing parts for hypersonics and commercial space — bringing Howco overall into spaces it might never have served otherwise.

Other manufacturers have used AM to diversify by launching their own product lines, or even spinning up service businesses that can make parts for many industries.

Metal 3D printing is just one of many processes operated by Bifrost Manufacturing, but one that has opened opportunities in industrial automation (like this drive sprocket for a roller lead) among other markets.

But additive also makes it possible to establish a diverse customer base from the get-go, as illustrated by Bifrost Manufacturing. This custom engineering firm in North Dakota offers services in everything from metal fabrication to laser cutting to machining, but its most flexible and scalable capability is additive manufacturing. AM has enabled the company, founded in 2023, to establish itself as a reliable supplier for everything from drone bodies to industrial machinery components to power tool prototypes and more — meaning it does not have to rely on any one type of work as its primary breadwinner.

Companies thinking about adopting additive should consider diversification in the calculations. How might AM enable you to reach beyond the confines of the industries you typically serve, and shore up your business over the long haul?