Roger,
Rapid Prototyping is not and will not be "the" manufacturing process of the
future! There are several very small pockets of companies that are using
these technologies to help save them time and money of prototyping and yes
maybe small lots of parts. This is a LONG WAY from production runs
particularly for the automotive, toy and consumer electronics industries
where they produce millions of parts per year! I too work for an aerospace
company and if we could fine tune the process a bit more we could
conceivably use the SLA machines for production pattern makers. But that is
only because we produce a small number of a given part per year. And this
would only be on parts that "fit" the tolerance and accuracy range of the
SLA machines. They would not come close to producing our bladed products
with anything that resembled accuracy, Sanders equipment is way to slow and
immature to be considered production! When the fundamental processes change
so that they will work and work en-mass producing the same parts the same
way then maybe we will come close to production.
Karl R. Denton
Lead Engineer
Williams International
-----Original Message-----
From: Spielman, Roger L [SMTP:Roger.Spielman@West.Boeing.com]
Sent: Friday, August 06, 1999 11:05 PM
To: List: Rapid prototyping ; Marshall Burns
Subject: RE: Fabber manufacturing
Marshall, Karl, Sean, et.al.
> Concept --> Iteration --> Concept......Parts? (love it)
>
......Unless there is a change in the equipment that makes it more
affordable,
more accurate, more repeatable, have better tolerance.... Then the
thought
of using these technologies for manufacturing will simply not
happen.
For the past several years, I have been working closely with some
very high
caliber people who seem to spend large amounts of time and effort
figuring
out how I can't do the things I have been doing. True, I can think
of
thousands of things that will be a great challenge with the current
technology, but for every thousand of "can't do" parts, there are a
handful
of "can-do" parts that I can make a significant difference on. I
just
acquired two new DTM systems based on ROI's exceeding 200% (first
year) on
this "handful" of parts. And yes, we ARE making real end use parts.
Consider the advantage of focusing on improvement of what we have
and fine
tuning the process rather than discounting the virtues because it
won't fit
your immediate application.
Building aerospace parts as we speak
Roger Spielman
Rocketdyne
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