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Transcript
Ramia Lloyd:
Welcome to the TechTrends Podcast, where we discuss the latest manufacturing technology, research, and news. Today's episode is sponsored by Modern Machine Shop, Made in the USA Podcast. I'm Ramia Lloyd and I'm here with?
Stephen LaMarca:
Stephen LaMarca.
Benjamin Moses:
I am Plump Ben.
Ramia Lloyd:
Plump Ben.
Benjamin Moses:
We'll get into why I'm round today.
Ramia Lloyd:
Why I'm round today.
Benjamin Moses:
Before we get into our lives, let's talk about some test bed. I know we made a lot of iterations, we're getting close to the end of the year, so we've got a lot going on.
Stephen LaMarca:
A lot is, I'm actually looking back, I'm really impressed with how much has been accomplished with the test bed in this last year. At least 60% of that's probably on Chloe, but in terms of recent updates, a few things. To start, we got the new computer hooked up with the devices and actually talking to each other. It's not set up the way we want it to, where there is a universal hub that everything can tap into and then boom, access to all of the devices on that network.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
We have a hub, which is our sonic wall, but right now our new computer is being used as the hub, which is okay. It's powerful enough to do that, but it shouldn't be doing that, but at least it's hooked up. And now from our new computer, we can use the Pocket NC and use the robot, great. It's a band-aid solution, it's not the final form yet, but IT is not ready, we've probably got to schedule some meetings and I'm going to need more than just me in on those meetings. I'm probably going to need you and I'm probably going to need Chloe and Sharab, of course, nobody else. I don't think anybody else is necessary to be there other than Austin and Sean, because they're going to be doing the work.
But speaking of Sean doing some work, Sean, the most recent update that I have, I think last time I talked about how he found something on modern PC motherboards, because virtually everybody uses a solid state drive, a fast NVMe solid state drive and a really powerful GPU. Motherboards are currently, at least majority of motherboards are designed where that first solid state drive slot shares the same lane to the CPU and RAM, as the top PCIe slot or graphics card slot, which means those two were clashing for the same lane of access, which is no bueno. If you have a really fast drive and a really powerful graphics card, you want them having their own lanes so they can both run their own race.
Benjamin Moses:
So to be fair, it's not a conflict, the computer will share the bandwidth. So you loose-
Stephen LaMarca:
But it has to share it.
Benjamin Moses:
So you lose a little performance. So if you have a high-end graphics card and some high-end memory, you're not getting full optimization. So that's a big concern, it's no point in having a high performance computer and not having the high performance.
Stephen LaMarca:
This is not going to go over well, but if you were to compare this to cars, it's like how a lot of enthusiasts complain today, how modern hypercars, modern supercars have these great powerful engines and these awesome chassis and suspension setups, but still have open differentials.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
Give me a limited slip differential, that way 100% of the engines torque goes to the wheels, instead of an awful 50/50 split in-
Benjamin Moses:
You're losing power, that's right.
Stephen LaMarca:
It's a loss of power, but people think electronics are better. Never mind, stop. So anyway, we determined that this does affect our motherboard and we took the half hour to make the swap, restarted, or started up the computer, it posted, great, took a half hour to do it. We measured, we took benchmark tests before and after the fix, the solution, and we're only able to detect a 1.5, a negligible increase, 1.5%, something like that, a negligible increase in performance after the fix, which is barely anything. If you've watched any YouTube videos of people comparing dyno results, you know that changing an air filter to get a five horsepower increase is negligible, that's not real. It could be colder outside and you just got more power that way, because cold air is denser.
Benjamin Moses:
I do like this exercise, because particularly with high performance computing, particularly for us, since we took down the path of building our own PC as opposed to buying something off the shelf. The nuances and understanding that we know we're getting the best, the peace of mind related to that. So yeah, I agree. One a half percent on performance increase across the board, gaming, laptops, Chromebooks, nobody cares. But the fact that we know that the memory is split or that the components are being optimized to their full potential, that is a really big piece of mind.
Stephen LaMarca:
When Sharab gets that thing going, we know that it is set up for him, go wild.
Benjamin Moses:
Exactly. So that was a very useful exercise, so I'm glad we went through that and also, I got an update. So as you mentioned, Chloe's working on testbed and adding a vision system to the robotic arm, and we decided to add the Intel RealSense to the top of the robotic arm, just ahead of or forward of the gripper. So it's in a non-rotating section of the robotic arm, but it can actually look down and see the grippers, so it's a unique mounting location. So you're not going to have something off the shelf from Igus or anyone else, that you can decide, hey, put the camera here and here's the clamping system.
So I iterated, based on Chloe's concept of where to locate it, developed a little clamping system with a bracket that you can change the angle to. So we actually had that printed over the Thanksgiving week and we just mounted that yesterday actually. The parts came in Monday, I went to Lowe's to pick up some nuts and bolts, which is an interesting experience, because it's not labeled correctly, which I should have known, which I've been through parts drawers in my own factory. And here is like a quarter-twenty half-inch bolt is going to be in the three five-sixteenths bolts, or everywhere else but where it should be.
Stephen LaMarca:
And if you reach into a little box of hardware that's labeled what you want to look for, you could grab the one bolt in there that just came from a different box, but some dingus, when they realized it wasn't what they wanted, they put it back in the wrong box.
Benjamin Moses:
So I took out all the bolts that I wanted from those containers and I checked all the bolts I was getting in the little thread checker too, to make sure-
Stephen LaMarca:
Nice.
Benjamin Moses:
... the thread pitch is correct and the length is correct. So we have all that mounted and when Chloe gets back, we'll be able to verify that the focusing length is correct and the correct placement. It does allow rotation, radially and actual adjustments-
Stephen LaMarca:
No way.
Benjamin Moses:
... and she can also tilt the head down to see the correct angle. So I'm very happy with the flexibility and it's rigid enough that once we actually tighten everything down, I don't think it'll move, but that'll be part of the testing, is the functional capability. But before we move on, back to the computer, one thing I was thinking about is we've had an interesting journey setting up the computer. I want to get your thoughts on, you are fairly computer savvy in terms of everyday user, a little bit advanced in terms of you running the Pocket NC, you know how the cell works. Has it been easy adding that computer so it's connected to all the devices? Because I feel like IT black magic has to play a part into setting this thing up.
Stephen LaMarca:
Oh man, I feel like my job is at risk here, but I'm going to say, no, it's not easy. I love picking out components, buying them and physically setting them up. But when it comes to making the computer beep-boop, black magic work and the things talking to each other, I need IT there. And it's funny, because there is this disconnect, there's a relationship, the strong relationship between me and IT, but there's such a disconnect. And even though we're speaking the same language, there's so much lost in translation, because they know what needs to be done to make connections happen, but they don't know what those connections are doing and I do. I know that we need something with static IPs and they know what that means, and you had to remind me that the opposite of a static IP is a dynamic IP. But with our use case, we can't have any dynamic IPs, which every computer, whether it's a $10,000 digital twin rig or a $50 Raspberry Pi, they all want dynamic IPs, but there's a lot of wizardry, but it's-
Benjamin Moses:
I think one of the... Oh, go ahead.
Stephen LaMarca:
It's just the relationship between IT and OT-
Benjamin Moses:
Exactly.
Stephen LaMarca:
I think today, both, not just in industry, but in everything, because the world is going digital is more important than ever.
Benjamin Moses:
And that's the takeaway that I was thinking about as we go in setting this up, is the architecture between IT and OT. We're applying lessons learned to manufacturing equipment, to the OT equipment and there are nuances that I missed quite a bit. And that's the biggest thing I've picked up, in terms of once you start looking at the digital side of manufacturing, there's a lot of nuances that we gloss over and there's a lot of parallels that we're trying to apply to IT. But I think OT needs a little more of a more robust paradigm in terms of how we implement equipment. Our IT department is very familiar, very fluent in managing office, but the context of applying the IT practices to OT gets lost.
We see that in data scientists a lot too, where a data scientist is trying to pull data from a cell on manufacturing floor, but they're missing context of what that data actually means. And I think there's a parallel that still exists in setting up the equipment, where I think the journey is a little bit longer than people expect. And I think that's the biggest takeaway, is that if we're going down the path of digital manufacturing, we need to add a little buffer time and buffer costs in terms of that journey, because the nuances are going to be missed and we have to iterate a little bit throughout that process. So I'm glad we went through that, that was really good.
Ramia Lloyd:
I just had to Google what OT meant, because my brain was going occupational therapy and I know that's not what it is, but now I know.
Benjamin Moses:
Now you know.
Ramia Lloyd:
So I'm glad that we had this conversation too.
Benjamin Moses:
So going off a new computer, which last week I took vacation time for Thanksgiving. What did you guys do? How are you guys feeling after Thanksgiving? You guys hung over, you guys tripped a fan still.
Ramia Lloyd:
The trip the fan was there.
Benjamin Moses:
Trip the fan was there?
Ramia Lloyd:
It was real?
Stephen LaMarca:
I'm still full on humble pie. I got to say, I had a great Thanksgiving, the food was amazing. There was no family in fighting, everybody was genuinely on their best behavior and it's not like everybody was going for that, because Melissa's sister showed up with a Trump hat on, fully ready to swing, but it never came to that and it was really fun. Everybody was just behaved, it was a great time
Benjamin Moses:
On that point, we're in the precipice of a conflict in the house.
Stephen LaMarca:
No way.
Benjamin Moses:
So my wife and my father have different political views-
Ramia Lloyd:
No.
Benjamin Moses:
... and they got into it just a little bit and I jumped right through that to break it right up.
Ramia Lloyd:
Good job. Good job, Ben.
Benjamin Moses:
That conversation went real quick.
Stephen LaMarca:
But I've mentioned this in previous Thanksgiving podcasts of ours, but I've never liked turkey. One of the earliest times in life where I finally had good turkey on Thanksgiving, was when my mom had Thanksgiving catered from Neiman Marcus. Which was just a contractor for some place in Texas that shipped us a deep-fried Cajun turkey for Thanksgiving and all we had to do is throw it in the oven. The first good turkey I've ever had in my life and it was too spicy for some of the meat and potatoes, white people in the family. But the last few things giving has happened at Melissa's dad's place in Delaware and he has a Traeger Grill, that's IT/OT, it's internet of things connected, he controls it from his phone. He just had knee surgery on both knees.
Ramia Lloyd:
Oh my gosh.
Stephen LaMarca:
So he couldn't get up off the couch and he was controlling the grill from his phone, smoked turkey with a blend. I don't remember what the blend was, but he's got three different types of wood pellets in the Traeger, it was an incredible turkey.
Benjamin Moses:
Nice.
Stephen LaMarca:
It was an incredible turkey and turkey sucks.
Benjamin Moses:
I'm not a fan.
Stephen LaMarca:
Anyway, it was such a good turkey.
Ramia Lloyd:
It's got to be really good.
Stephen LaMarca:
The food was great, everybody was on their best behavior. It was a great time, but I will say this, if I go through one more Thanksgiving without mac and cheese, I'm going to discontinue my existence.
Benjamin Moses:
Oh man. Are you that upset?
Ramia Lloyd:
Strong feelings about mac and cheese?
Stephen LaMarca:
I want mac and cheese-
Ramia Lloyd:
And that's understandable.
Stephen LaMarca:
Every time I look on Instagram and I see all these other families and people in life having mac and cheese at Thanksgiving and it's like, why not me? Never in my life.
Ramia Lloyd:
You've never had mac and cheese?
Stephen LaMarca:
Maybe once or twice, but it's this needs to be a staple.
Ramia Lloyd:
I'm going to say that's a staple in our house, but my family, we're super particular on all of our Thanksgiving foods.
Stephen LaMarca:
There's no experimenting on the mac and cheese.
Ramia Lloyd:
We do not mess with it. So anytime we have to go somewhere else for Thanksgiving, we absolutely have our own. My mom will make a full course Thanksgiving and we'll eat it either before or after we leave to go to the other Thanksgiving. We'll just take little nibbles when we get there and we're like, "Oh, it's so good." We get home and we're like, "Who made that? We're going home and we're eating, we're not doing this."
Benjamin Moses:
There's two concepts I realized when I was much older in life about Thanksgiving, is one, if you're at a potluck Thanksgiving, bring the food that you're going to eat, just bring it.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yes, absolutely.
Benjamin Moses:
And the second is, your food is going to get judged no matter what. You could be a cuisine chef, it's going to be judged either at the Thanksgiving dinner or after.
Ramia Lloyd:
Yes.
Stephen LaMarca:
But just to your point and I agree with you, to emphasize how low of a point I am in my life with Thanksgiving, I don't care if it's like somebody experiments with a gluten-free vegan mac and cheese, or somebody just put six boxes of Velveeta in a casserole dish. I don't care, I want it, I want it there.
Benjamin Moses:
I like me some Velveeta. I think next year-
Ramia Lloyd:
I put Velveeta in my mac and cheese.
Stephen LaMarca:
I do not discriminate mac and cheese, I love it at all.
Ramia Lloyd:
It doesn't matter, eat it all.
Stephen LaMarca:
Just bring it, it just needs to be there.
Benjamin Moses:
We've been trying to do more homemade stuff or made from scratch. I'm going to try making the pasta for the mac and cheese and our own mac and cheese, I'm going to try.
Ramia Lloyd:
Just not on Thanksgiving, that's like you try that in October, see how you like it.
Benjamin Moses:
I'm going to do it Thanksgiving just for spite.
Ramia Lloyd:
Just because, you're like-
Benjamin Moses:
That is something that would just [inaudible 00:15:46]-
Ramia Lloyd:
You get what you get.
Stephen LaMarca:
It's Thanksgiving Day, it's time to experiment. Ben's got his lab coat on in the kitchen-
Ramia Lloyd:
With the noodle maker, he is cutting it.
Benjamin Moses:
I got my goggles on, the old safety goggles from high school.
Stephen LaMarca:
And somebody's going to be like, "Is this like blue box Kraft mac and cheese?" No, this is a perfect from scratch replica of blue box, you're welcome.
Benjamin Moses:
If someone ask that, I'm going to flip the table, [inaudible 00:16:13].
Ramia Lloyd:
Excuse me? That's amazing.
Benjamin Moses:
So guys, as we transition to some technology topics later, can you tell us about today's sponsor?
Ramia Lloyd:
Yes, I can. Tune in for Modern Machine Shop's, Made in the USA Podcast, to explore manufacturing issues faced by companies making an intentional choice to manufacture in the US, featuring commentary from OEM leaders. Made in the USA, blends its nearly century-long expertise with a unique audio storytelling experience to shine a spotlight on the past, present, and future of American manufacturing. Find Made in the USA on Apple Podcast, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. Follow Modern Machine Shop on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Benjamin Moses:
Thanks, Ramia.
Ramia Lloyd:
Anytime.
Benjamin Moses:
So I've been preparing for a small presentation on trends and additive. So I've got a couple of interesting things that I want to bounce off you guys, where I think they're pretty game change. So the background, the context of the conversation is, I've been perceived as being mellow on additive. There's a lot of hype around additive, which is cool.
Stephen LaMarca:
Wait a minute, hold on. What does that mean? Mellow on, you're not giving it enough attention?
Benjamin Moses:
Yeah, I'm more reserved about additive in the future. Partly it's because we're a big organization, some people need to focus on additive, other people need to focus on automation, subtractive process. I'm focusing on all that stuff for everyone. I was focused on additive, but the kind of sentiment I've taken away is, the positions that I have is additive has a lot of opportunity, but there's a lot of problems that we need to fix before we harvest that opportunity, which is fine. But there's a couple of things that I think are changing the face of additive manufacturing, that will get us to the future state of more production environments, more innovative designs. That's where I think the value for additive is, the uniqueness of it. So one of those concepts that I want to hit on was presented last year when our committee meetings from Oak Ridge National Labs, was the interleaved hybrid processes.
Stephen LaMarca:
Interleaved?
Benjamin Moses:
Interleaved hybrid processes. So the core concept that I actually embrace a lot is, I think hybrid manufacturing processes, or additive and subtractive cell or machine has a lot of opportunity. So the concept that was presented was, if I'm going to grow a part, it benefits me significantly to include many subtractive processes in that entire process. So if you look at just steps, I'm going to print, machine, print, machine and rinse and repeat until I get my finished part. There's a couple of things that comes into mind where this actually benefits quite a bit. So there are two scenarios where they're working on nose cones for rockets or test leads-
Stephen LaMarca:
Hypersonics baby.
Benjamin Moses:
Or hypersonics, where the aspect ratio is very, very long, so it's a very long slender part. In this case, this table is four or five feet wide, the nose cone could be that long and they want a unique shape. Say they're printing it and they have to come back and machine that entire surface, because they want a smooth surface or they want a contoured interior. I need a machine that has to be able to go that length or if I'm machining the inside of it, that's a long tooling bar or boring bar that I need. But in the concept of interleaved processes, I print say a foot of it, machine it, print another foot, machine it and continue down that path where I can control the processes, control the build. As opposed to printing it where I'm going to get thermal distortion throughout that entire part and then hopefully, the best I have enough material that I can machine.
The other scenarios that Tom talked about was hidden features. So him and I agree that printing holes is not the best idea. There's a lot of debate about that, but one of the concept that he displayed in his use case, where if I have a part where I have a hole inside the part, say a cooling feature or something like that where there's no line of sight. I could theoretically print that entire hole or the entire piece and then assume that printed hole is correct, surface finish is fine. Or what I could do is print the inside feature, drill out all the features that I want, or clean it up, subtract processes, and then come back into the additive and then print around that. So I thought that was a very fascinating approach, where I think the concept of additive and manufacturing needs to be broken up a little bit more. Getting away from just print and machine to print, machine, print and machine.
Stephen LaMarca:
I have so many thoughts.
Benjamin Moses:
I can see them running around in your head.
Stephen LaMarca:
Because it's brilliant. The last process you just mentioned about don't print holes, instead... We have the perfect tools today to make holes, they're called drills and they make perfect holes. So you can print a rough hole and then bore it out with a perfect drill, because there's a lot of problems with that. When you think about exhausts, which was my first thought while you were talking about this last thing, was if you have a printed internal channels with no line of sight through them.
Because of the surface finish of 3D printing, there's probably going to be a rough inner surface and that's probably going to generate some uncalculated, something that simulation, I promise you misses, corrosion, erosion rather. Like gas port erosion in a rifle barrel of a gas-operated semi-automatic rifle, or automatic rifle, or when people are welding exhaust pipes together. If they don't deburr the inner pipe before that outer pipe goes on it, that little burr inward as the exhaust is going through, can create these little eddy currents that can slowly wear away on the outer pipe that going forward and eventually break it. And it doesn't break at the weld, it breaks just past the weld, it causes a gaseous erosion.
It made me think of farts. But this is fun, because the part about really do as much subtractive as you can and then additive everything together, reminds me, because before we started recording, you were talking about IEMs and you were looking at Shure IEMs and because they use all numbers in their naming convention. You don't know which ones and why is this one better than the other ones? One of their IEMs, the SE846, I think, they advertise it having real bass and they say that because there's no dynamic drivers in it.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
It uses hearing aid drivers, which are balanced armature drivers and the low-frequency bass driver, they get an accurate representation of what a subwoofer actually sounds like. Because instead of having a tube going from that bass balanced armature driver straight into your ear, to get that bass frequency, you need to stretch out the path as long as possible to get that low frequency. And they do that by welding microscopic, these little plates that zigzag the path as much as it possibly can to get that low bass frequency and that's why I'm really excited. Also, mind you, those are a thousand dollar IEMs, don't recommend throwing that much money down on audio unless you're really into it.
But I digress, but something that you said earlier that's escaping me. You might have to keep talking, because I forgot what I wanted to mention. Oh, I got it. So we were talking about the nose cones and how long they need to be, and I didn't realize this, but it makes sense now why hypersonics have so much modern manufacturing thrown at them, is because conventional missiles, I didn't realize were so simple and dumb. Not to say that something like an AIM-9 Sidewinder's dumb, but when you look at it, first off, I also didn't realize how big missiles were, an air-to-air. I thought you could put an AIM-9X on this table.
Benjamin Moses:
No, no, no.
Stephen LaMarca:
It's the length of the room, missiles are really long, but it's all, conventional missile is a big long tube and it's like a perfectly consistent tube all the way. But hypersonic, when you're trying to push that missile past five times the speed of sound, it needs to be shaped more like a really long bullet. So it's never consistent, it's constantly, there's an ogive to it and manufacturing that is a pain in the butt.
Benjamin Moses:
Yeah, it's very difficult.
Stephen LaMarca:
And that's why, and I didn't realize that until literally last night when I was reading up on hypersonics. Lockheed Martin just expanded their Grand Prairie, Texas facility, which is, go figure, for making the Mako hypersonic missile with, they added another 16,000 square feet and it's all Nikon SLM machines or a majority of them.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
Just to make these long noses, because it's not a pipe anymore.
Benjamin Moses:
And that's the takeaway I was thinking about, when we talked about the IT/OT. So the scenarios where I really like additive manufacturing processes are fluid conveyance. There's a lot of opportunity optimizing the fluid path and a lot of our designs, to get more performance, more efficiency out of it, and the nuances of a surface finish on that gas path. To your point, where if it's rough, it's going to create more turbulence, it may create more erosion in that scenarios. Those are all nuances that are going to play out in the future that we're still figuring out. So if I print something and it's got a decent surface, 3D printing, like powder bed fusion does a very good job on terms of surface finish, but is it as smooth as a subtractively process part? It's going to be different and I think that's what we're probably going to see in the future, is future iterations of fluid conveyance product, where the surface finish becomes a critical feature at some point.
Stephen LaMarca:
And the part of it all that, at least going back to hypersonics, that hurts my heart and pocketbook the most, is that first off, these missiles are a couple million dollars. First time watching Top Gun, you're like, whoa, a fighter jet costs tens of millions of dollars and it's like fast-forward to 2024, a hypersonic missile costs tens of millions of dollars. But then you realize fighter jet can land and be maintained and go up and down and up and down a lot. Hypersonic missile, the longest time a hypersonic missile, an intercontinental hypersonic missile, 15 minutes, all of this effort is going into buoy something for 15 minutes and then it's gone forever.
Benjamin Moses:
You know what's also really expensive that only last 15 minutes, Checkers fast food. So one other-
Stephen LaMarca:
Not even.
Ramia Lloyd:
Right, maybe 10.
Benjamin Moses:
So another technology that I think is helping additive get into higher production or more influence in the manufacturing is beam shaping. So I need a little knowledge from you, Steve. Tell me about what is beam shaping in 3D printing?
Stephen LaMarca:
So everything I know about beam shaping, I learned from Alex Kingsbury, so I hope I don't let her down with this. So beam shaping is the shaping of a laser beam and lasers and even electron beams are used commonly to melt powdered metals for metal additive manufacturing. One of the problems that's run into in metal additive is spattering, which is when you have molten metal getting on your part that wasn't supposed to be there. And that's because the beam, a laser beam or an electron beam is this concentrated perfectly thin line of energy and that while you have most of the light going in one perfect little spot right in the middle. If you shine a laser pointer at the wall and you have it across the room, somebody's holding it and you put it at the wall. And then you go up to that laser pointer on the wall, there is that perfectly concentrated dense little spot of light, but then there's a bunch of spattering around it and that's not good when you're using it to melt material and working in an optics lab.
In my undergrad, one of the things that we did a lot was use beam collimators. So a collimator, basically you put the collimator, you have your laser source and then shortly after the laser source you have a collimator. Which that laser goes into the collimator and the collimator aligns all of the light coming from that source into a even parallel column, collimator. And then that light coming out, all of those rays of light, all of those beams are perfectly parallel, well, close to parallel as possible to each other. So if you take a laser, that same laser that you shined at the wall and you put a collimator in front of it, you no longer have the perfectly concentrated dot of light, but it's now a little bit wider and a little bit dimmer, but there's now no more spattering. That's the first step in beam shaping.
Now you talk to Tom Feldhausen and anybody at the MDF in Oak Ridge, they will tell you about, spattering is the enemy of when you're trying to do multi-material, multi-metal additive manufacturing. The big test that they put every laser additive, metal additive machine through is going from printing stainless steel, then printing copper on top of the stainless steel and then printing stainless steel back on top of that copper. And if the laser is worth its salt or the circuitry, it's not circuit, but the optics between that source and the material is good, you'll have no problems. But if not, the stainless steel back on top of the copper won't stick, it won't work because the copper is too reflective.
So some companies that they like to clown on have gone to use different colored lasers to avoid this problem. But the two better solutions are you can either turn down the power of the laser and not inject any material. So you're just going over your surface with the laser alone to toast the copper first, that decreases its reflectivity. Then you can put stainless steel on top of it, or can use a shaped beam, because shaped beams are good for so much more than just this test. They can do so much more, but the idea of the shaped beam is it's a next level up from collimation, it's now shaping the beam.
So instead of a dot or a perfectly concentric column of light, now you can have a dot in the middle and your scattering around it is now shaped into a ring around it. Or you can just have a ring of light instead of a dot, with no dot at all and just the ring, or I'm sure there's other shapes they experiment with too. But beam shaping allows for the use and printing of so many other metals that we could not imagine before, without having to invest in some other dumb colored laser.
Benjamin Moses:
And I think that's the biggest takeaway. I want to talk about materials in a second, is that the ability to control the shape. So we've talked about-
Stephen LaMarca:
Alex, Tom Feldhausen, I really hope I got that right.
Benjamin Moses:
We've talked about colors, you just hit on colors, power is a big thing, but now similar to. So the analogy I'm going to use for myself is very simple, when I have a watering hose, I can control the pressure by the tap, but now with the beam shaping, I have a nozzle control. So if I want a wide water, or a jet stream, or several different sprays, that's where we're headed.
Stephen LaMarca:
That's such a better way of explaining it.
Ramia Lloyd:
So sorry.
Benjamin Moses:
So I do like this idea, because it gets to the nuances of, as I print a part, the needs of the base are going to be significantly different than what I want at the top, and being able to control that, the fidelity of it, it's super important. You did hit on the last thing that I think where Edith has a big breakthrough is materials. So I'm going to lump this into a bigger category of custom materials and multi-materials, because I'm really interested in the overall concept of multi-material scenarios, based on hybrid manufacturing processes. Where at IMTS, one of the interesting thing that caught my eye in the subtractive area, it was more towards the gear manufacturing, but the analogy is very similar to other scenarios, where I saw a couple of scenarios of a three foot diameter gear, very big.
They're starting with a big forging and then willing their way down, that process is tried and proven, works great. But what if the scenario is I've got a shaft that's a material, but my gear teeth are a different material, why can't I grow from there? Or in some scenarios where I've seen a couple of demonstrators of fins, I have a 300 series stainless bar or tube and I print Inconel 625 on top of that for the fins or a bus port. That's where I think the multi-material and specificity of the design can drive more value back to the end user and cost, because to be fair, printing parts is not cheap. Cost avoidance or cost containment through printing process, that does not exist. You shift from a cast part to an additive grown part, because you can't get the casting within a year. So there's timeframe and cost adjustments through that, but I really like the idea of getting to new materials and new material combinations, to your point.
Stephen LaMarca:
I don't know if it's been published yet, but one of my most recent, the follow-up to the Inconel article that I wrote was to talk about some other notable alloys that at least are special to me, that have been developed since Inconel, which was again, 1932 was when it was developed, that's old. I talked a lot about some of the Carpenter alloys that are very popular and Carpenter and another company that they now own, Crucible, came to light in the last couple of decades, certainly not as far back as the 1930s, for powder metallurgy. Long before additive was in everybody's mouth, they were into powder metallurgy and so Carpenter's is big into that. That was a huge evolutionary step forward in alloys, was powder metallurgy.
But it seems like virtually every company today that's making a product, that probably has a Department of Defense contract for it, they want a specialty alloy. Heck, Apple wants a specialty aluminum alloy for all of their devices. But what's really cool about that, I'm not against that, because everybody wants a bespoke alloy for their product and everybody thinks their product is special and warranting one. But what's really cool is as time goes on and people have their bespoke alloys, these alloy providing companies, these metal providing companies realize, these companies have their bespoke alloy is actually very similar to these other companies. And maybe we should make this one all-encompassing specialty alloy and that becomes the next special metal, with the Carpenter 158 or 154, is the new 300 series stainless and then we're getting much further.
And the latest alloy that people are talking about, myself included, without knowing much about is GRX-810, the one that NASA developed and they're having, you guessed it, Carpenter and our friends at Elementum 3D verify, to make sure it's as awesome as NASA says it is. Man, the evolutionary step forward from just throwing a bunch of metals in a crucible and melting them together and be like, "Let's see if this alloy is legit." It went from that in the 1930s to a couple of decades ago with Carpenters, now we're doing powdered metals now. We're not selling ingots, you get a vat of powder and you make your thing out of it.
Benjamin Moses:
I'd really like the idea of the custom materials, your point of the NASA and we've talked about that.
Stephen LaMarca:
NASAs dude, this evolutionary jump forward, they're talking about the atomic matrix of the molecules going into this metal and I'm like, what? We're just figuring out Inconel, it's 90 years old and we're figuring out how to use it and you're talking about metal matrixes, dog. Nobody's going to... All I'm saying is I'm probably not going to be alive for the first GRX-810 part.
Benjamin Moses:
The concern I run into, so I'm very excited for that, but almost I'm tempered by the fact where defense has, I've kept an eye on maintenance repair and overall, MR&O, I used to do that back in my previous company. So Singapore Airlines say this thing has a dent in it, send us a random part, say, "Can you fix it?" We determine material, determine shape, can we replicate balls there previously, make some assumptions. One of the things I found interesting were a couple of stories in predicting the number of aircrafts they want to produce and designing the production process around that. I forgot the specific aircraft the US Air Force design, but they said it landed on the aircraft carrier, so it needed the tailhook to catch the line. So they said, "We're only going to produce 600 of these." So the guys producing the tailhook said, "I'm going to produce 2,000, that's enough spares for you." 10,000 aircraft later, they're like, "We need some other parts." 30 years later, the ability to go back of these custom, because they designed a custom material for that tailhook, insane.
Stephen LaMarca:
That alloy, that custom alloy is AerMet 100, and that's a Carpenter product.
Benjamin Moses:
So the ability for us to do custom products now, I'm very concerned about 30 years from now, when we said we're going to end of life this, but we are going to continue this an extra 10 years, how do we service those parts? So those are the questions, those are lessons learned, we've over and over again stumble upon, that we need to stop stumbling upon.
Stephen LaMarca:
When the INCO company, before they developed Inconel, they developed Monel, and there was so much Monel that they made and had no use for. That it went into dog tags and Acura ended up making the NSX key out of Monel and it's like, why though? It's corrosion resistant.
Benjamin Moses:
Super high strength material. Last thing I want to talk about, is you found an article about materials getting banned.
Stephen LaMarca:
Oh yeah, the ban hammer. So first off, let's start, let's preface this with the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was an incentive program to bring East Asian companies that make semiconductors for everybody, bring them their manufacturing to the US, because it's getting a little spicy over there. And at first, the CHIPS Act is an incentive package, being like, "Hey, if you come over here, we'll give you all the money to do it. Well, a lot of the money to do it." And with presidencies changing, the new incoming president is basically saying, "We're not giving you money anymore. Now if you don't come over here, we're going to stop letting your products go to certain countries." And I don't exactly know how that works, but it's instead of incentive, it's a punishment.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
So China's clapping back with a ban on certain metals and before I get into it, Ben, I know that you are a fellow enthusiast, you like to dabble in the firearms.
Benjamin Moses:
Correct.
Stephen LaMarca:
You got a lot of ammo? You don't have to answer that, but if you don't think you have enough ammo, I would start buying, I'd get onto Lucky Gunner right now and start buying a lot more, because China is, come on, unlock. China is imposing a export ban on gallium germanium and antimony. Antimony is a real element, by the way, it's not alimony, it's actually a word or an element.
Benjamin Moses:
The sentence also says super hard material. So I think they're jamming a little bit more than that, so it's not just those, but definitely.
Stephen LaMarca:
But those are the big ones and what's funny about that is the one side of American politics that isn't a big fan of China, is also the side, not you specifically, but is also the side that really likes to dabble in firearms and likes really cheap ammo. Antimony is a metal element that is commonly alloyed with lead, to make bullets harder and thus perform better in firearms. And if we can't get antimony from China anymore, it is going to increase the price of that cheap ammo to not so cheap ammo. And then they're going to be like, "Why are we banning the stuff? Why are we being so mean to China? I want to be able to shoot." And it's just funny. We're going to see some tables turn and they're going to hit the pocketbooks of gun people.
Benjamin Moses:
I am concerned about the, let's call it trade wars for now. I think that's a fair statement of tit-for-tat and I think we're getting down to materials that are... I mean, there's only so many places in the world where you get certain materials and these are hard materials. And we talk about custom materials, the need for more harsh environments, more difficult gases, more difficult environments for our materials to be in. This is contradictory to where we're headed, where we may need more difficult materials, super hard materials, as the article said, and other countries are going to say, "No, we're going to keep that, and then they're going to continue innovating." That is innovation in product design. One of the streams that we've stretched back to is raw materials and I'm a little concerned about that.
Stephen LaMarca:
I do see some hope, and maybe I'm just letting my imagination run wild, but a ban on super hard materials from China, export ban from China to the US might actually turn the tide on some views on energy.
Benjamin Moses:
Sure.
Stephen LaMarca:
... and may shift focus towards nuclear energy, because what's a resultant of nuclear energy? Depleted uranium. What's depleted uranium? A super hard material that we would love to have. So that could be, I don't think that's a near future, but in the next decade or so.
Benjamin Moses:
Have it in your car.
Stephen LaMarca:
That could be a thing, man.
Benjamin Moses:
That could be. So really happy-
Stephen LaMarca:
Palmetto State Armory's pushing out DU bullets for super cheap, it'd be kind of sick.
Benjamin Moses:
Thanks. Great episode on materials. I found out that's what a lot of our topic was about for today. Ramia, where can they find more info about materials and us?
Ramia Lloyd:
Amtonline.org/resources. Make sure you subscribe.
Stephen LaMarca:
Bing-bong.
