Release date: 11 December 2020
Episode 39: The penultimate episode of 2020! Ben and Steve conclude winter is officially here. Stephen geeks out over a silly Subaru. Benjamin discusses the future manufacturing technology in the auto industry. Steve presents MIT’s method for “visually perfect” additive surface finish. Ben talks about NASA’s latest additive rocket engine testing and challenges with hydrogen embrittlement. Stephen craves 3D printed food and closes with a shout out and mention of the American Precision Museum’s fundraising campaign.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32I0Qso4sDg
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omN5Uo058Cc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hNtxzZRpsU
- https://www.mmsonline.com/articles/where-is-manufacturing-technology-going-for-auto
- https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/nasa-3d-printed-rocket-engine-parts-survive-23-hot-fire-tests/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
- http://americanprecision.org/IMTScampaign
Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter https://www.amtnews.org/subscribe
MTConnect https://www.mtconnect.org/
American Precision Museum Fundraiser http://americanprecision.org/IMTScampaign
Music provided by www.freestockmusic.com
Transcript:
Benjamin Moses: Hello everyone. And welcome to the Tech Trends podcast, where we discuss the latest manufacturing technology research and news. I am Benjamin Moses, the director of manufacturing technology. And I'm here with-
Stephen LaMarca: Stephen LaMarca, manufacturing technology analysts.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, how are you doing today?
Stephen LaMarca: I'm doing awesome, it's a great day.
Benjamin Moses: It's a great day. It's cold.
Stephen LaMarca: It's getting really cold out there.
Benjamin Moses: Which is your preference I think, right? If I remember correctly you do-
Stephen LaMarca: I love the cold.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: And for some reason, I think when I woke up this morning, it was 32 degrees out and it was hitting differently. It felt a lot colder than 32, but-
Benjamin Moses: My office is very cold, because it's right above the garage. So during the day my feet are just turning blue. So, one thing I was thinking about is, I ran across the commercial, that's my first indicator that it's wintertime. I think it's a Corona commercial where they have... Wishing everyone a happy fully Snavidad. And they have the Florida keys shoreline, you have the single palm tree and that single palm tree gets litten up with the Christmas lights. I think at this point probably 30 years old-
Stephen LaMarca: It's so old.
Benjamin Moses: I think they've remastered it though, because it looks like, it's a full wide screen, but it's such poor resolution that... It's fine, it's a nice chat. But it's my indicator that winter is officially here when I start seeing that commercial, what are your indicators that it's officially here?
Stephen LaMarca: My indicators, I have two. The first one is the more realistic and accurate one. It's when... obviously, it's getting cold out, but it's when you get towards the end of fall because peak leaf changing season is towards the end of fall. Everybody's like, "oh the falls the most beautiful," they think it's everything from green to brown leaves with red, yellow, and oranges in the middle.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: The whole time and fall is my favorite season.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: But the truth is you get the most variations and deviations in color at the very end of fall.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: And then you'll wake up the next day and it's just dead outside. There's nothing on the trees anymore, it's cold, it's dark, the days are really short. And the best way to describe it is, its very post-apocalyptic and you're just waiting for the fallout to start raining from the sky. That's when you know it's winter.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Now, I love the snow, don't get me wrong, making it sound all ominous and dark and depressing. But I do love snow, everything gets... I get cheered up once I finally see snow fall, but the main indicator that is now winter is when the world is just like, "okay, we're ready for the snow now."
Benjamin Moses: Nature has just given out.
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:02:53] your area.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: It's winter, we get it now we're ready for it, just snow already.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: But my second indicator, if I want to sound cool it's when my CPMs light comes on. When my car tells me that "hey, the air pressure is low in your tires and it's down two to four PSI." It's down two PSI, that's just fall, it's the end of fall.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: But once it's down, once it hits four PSI below where it should be, it's winter.
Benjamin Moses: It's enough for that light to come [inaudible 00:03:27] your dashboard.
Stephen LaMarca: That mean, because it's 10 degrees per PSI in your tires, if you're filling up with air and not nitrogen.
Benjamin Moses: Yes.
Stephen LaMarca: Your pressure decreases by one for every 10 degrees fahrenheit that it drops. So that means if it drops four PSI, it dropped 40 degrees.
Benjamin Moses: That's a fair amount.
Stephen LaMarca: Since when you filled up in the summer. So it's winter.
Benjamin Moses: It's definitely winter, happy winter everyone.
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:03:51]. Happy winter, where's the snow already.
Benjamin Moses: All in due time, Steve. I was getting some articles and I think the first one you want to kick us off is very interesting.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. Speaking of winter and snow on the ground, one of the best vehicles available for driving fast in the snow or in snowy roads or even muddy or gravel roads is the Subaru WRX STI, which got its fame and pedigree from rally racing and-
Benjamin Moses: Sure, It's got a long history of pulling trucks out of snow in the US.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. And police cars, when it's dry out, these people who drive these cars are typically a bunch of flat billed cap wearing, vaping hoons that are constantly getting pulled over. But as soon as there's snow on the ground, they're pulling the cops out of ditches. But anyway, that car has a huge pedigree and heritage in rally racing.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And this year, a lot of rally events in North America at least... I haven't been following WRC that much, but I'm sure they've been carrying on. A lot of North American rally races and events have been canceled due to the pandemic and whatnot. So what does a high octane race team that typically competes in North America do? They take part in Gymkhana, which Gymkhana is... I don't think anybody really knows what it means, but if you go onto YouTube and type in Gymkhana, the first one, the first video that was made of Gymkhana was the driver was Ken block in a Subaru rally car, or at least a modified four rally, Subaru WRX STI, and driven by Ken block. At the very beginning of the video, they define Gymkhana, but it's basically using an open area as your automotive playground. And in that first video, they used an abandoned air strip. And Ken block takes this rally car, does a bunch of donuts, drifts it around corners. Does some really impressive tricks if you would... Ken block is to driving rally cars as Tony Hawk is to skateboarding. Tony Hawk is not the best like downhill long board racer.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: But he's really good. And if not, one is one of the best at doing tricks on a skateboard.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And Ken block is the same way. He's not the best rally car driver, but he knows how to hack a four wheel drive turbocharge charge Subaru into some corners and do some impressive stuff with it. Anyway, that first Gymkhana video came out. I want to say close to 10 years ago. I think it's nine to 10 years ago.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: That was a decade ago. And that first video gained so much popularity and so much traction that they've been doing at least one video a year ever since in the production quality and the technology going into the cars and the pedigree of the car drivers has been going up and up over time. Ken block was the original. And I don't think that the current driver for this latest video was Travis Pastrona.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: I don't think he's as good as a rally car driver is Ken block was. But anyway, I'm getting off into a tangent trying to explain what Gymkhana is and I still didn't. I apologize. Anyway, watch that video just type in Gymkhana, G-Y-M-K-H-A-N-A 2020.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: And it actually took place in Maryland. They filmed it in Maryland. It was really sick. Travis Pastrona was the driver, but what interests us, what interests the listeners of this podcast now that we're done with the tantra, I promise, was a video that I actually posted in our weekly teck report of all of the tech that went into the latest car. And the latest car is insane, they put a lot into it. It is a full fledged like WRC style rally car. It's not some modified off the showroom for production cards.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: This is a full on race car.
Benjamin Moses: Cool.
Stephen LaMarca: In one of those things that comes with full on race cars and the highest echelon of automotive racing is the highest echelon of manufacturing technology.
Benjamin Moses: True.
Stephen LaMarca: And one of the things that they showed off in this 20 minute video, which didn't have a whole lot to do with manufacturing sadly, but there was one blip that you can't help, but miss and you even see it in the Gymkhana video, this latest Gymkhana video [inaudible 00:08:56] do get a closeup of the exhaust pipe. And if you look closely at the exhaust pipe, the surface finish the texture of that pipe. In star wars, when they say, "that's no moon [inaudible 00:09:07]," the death star. You look at this exhaust pipe and you'd say, "that's no ordinary pipe, it's a printed. You can tell by the surface finish and texture of the pipe that it's not pipe bar stock, that it was printed. And the second video that I referred to in the weekly tech report, they talk about how they printed a inconel exhaust system-
Benjamin Moses: That's cool-
Stephen LaMarca: ... for this car-
Benjamin Moses: That's [inaudible 00:09:32]-
Stephen LaMarca: Not titanium, inconel. And they even printed the STI logo and they made the logo hollow. So when the car backfires and there's flame from the high octane race fuel burning off in the headers, and in the turbocharger. You can see the flames coming out of the STI and it's actually glowing. It looks really cool. That was one of that video, that's one of the coolest manufacturing technologies that they show off. Another video that I did not link to and I suppose I can throw it into the podcast description when we air this, is talking about all of the really intense CAD design, computer aided technology and programming that went into the design of this car-
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: ... in the engineering. They put this car, they actually put a 40% scale model. There's a perfect physical replica of the race car in a wind tunnel and got a physical baseline. Or in real time, they put it in a wind tunnel to get a baseline of how it would perform aerodynamically. They took that data, put it into their simulator and then were able to simulate based off that baseline actual wind tunnel, we're able to have a simulation wind tunnel and test all of the things on the car like suspension travel, boost at certain speeds, dependent on the air pressure going into the turbocharger with respect to the air resistance hitting the front and sides of the car, depending if it's sliding. And if the thing was sliding a whole lot, and it also had an active [inaudible 00:11:18] dynamics, but the simulation and the programming that went into this was so high level. And so far above even my comprehension that it's just... They know their audience, right?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:11:36] a bunch of gearheads don't know what cards stands for.
Benjamin Moses: That's a really-
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:11:42] this stuff to make these videos, there are so high production value now, all because of Ken Block's first video, 10 years ago.
Benjamin Moses: That's a really interesting approach about the wind tunnel. Because if you look at computational fluid dynamics, there's a few say variables or factors that are difficult to actually predict. So when they do their 40%, I think what they're doing is trying to quantify that from physical testing, take those specific factors and plug that into their simulations. And then they can run the other variables that are more realistic than just making up random numbers or using factors that are out of a textbook. Right? So that's a really interesting approach. And we're seeing that quite a bit. Because Oak Ridge has their moonshot presentations where they're printing a concrete base, a machine tool base, instead of casting it out of the metal. And one of the things that have difficulty predicting is the dampening factor. So what they do is they have their simulation, they come up with a best analysis based on what they know and when they actually print it, they do tap testing to get their dampening factor. And they plug that back into the simulation and then they can run further examples in the future. So I really liked that capability.
Stephen LaMarca: And there's no doubt about it. They didn't mention it in any of the videos, probably because to some degree, they did know their audience.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: And they didn't want to drop the buzzword digital twin. There was no doubt about it. I wouldn't say it was a digital twin of the car's performance, because what if the digital twin, you have to digitally twin everything and they couldn't possibly do that with how much ground this car covered. But they simulated as much as they can. There was an attempt at a digital twin-
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And it was really cool. If you watch the videos, you can see that they really did attempt to digitally twin everything that this car would experience. For this video, this [inaudible 00:13:41], maybe 20 minutes tops. I forget it was 10 to 20 minutes. And they put in, so not just production value in the video recording, but all the technology that went into this car and to simulate this run that they would do once, because they closed down in Annapolis, Maryland, this was done all through in Annapolis, Maryland in one run.
Benjamin Moses: That's a beautiful area.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. It is a really beautiful area, but I guess he can pull that off when you have race team budgets and the season was effectively canceled, but you still have that budget to burn.
Benjamin Moses: That's true. Speaking of automotive, I have next article about manufacturing and automotive, this article from modern machine shop. And it talks about where's manufacturing technology going for auto and spoiler alert. They interview my boss, Steve's boss, boss, Timson Barra about this article. So he highlights a couple of things and I'll boil it down to a couple of key elements, right? So the drive is to increase consistency from part to part, the value to the consumer is increased the perceived quality. There's a couple of ways to look at it once just appear fit and finish, if you're able to maintain a consistent part, you can adjust your assembly procedure. So everything fits together more consistently. There's theoretical implications on life of part also. And the way this is achieved is through analytics and to get to those analytics, to achieve that consistency, it's really about managing data. So getting raw data off the machine and potentially trying to figure out what to do with that is a little bit of a leap. So Tim talks about preparing the data. So then you can run analytics of that data quicker, faster, more efficient, efficiently to achieve your part to part consistency.
The second one is robotics accuracy, [inaudible 00:15:41] economical through vision systems. So vision systems on robotics have been around for quite awhile, but the ability to scale it up across the entire factory. So you can do more interesting things with robots is you could say it's cost prohibitive to some degree. So the idea that the vision systems are becoming more economically friendly, so you can increase the deployment across more applications or more systems, or do different things. If you want to do inspection with those parts. So you can do visual inspection to see if parts are assembled or not assembled. If you want to do [inaudible 00:16:24]-
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:16:25] systems, I'm sorry to cut you off, but robotic vision systems high enough resolution and accurate enough to actually do inspection and metrology work?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. So it depends on the light and type of sensor that [inaudible 00:16:38]. So they have something called structured light metrology. So you're shooting either different types of light at an object and the sensors are modified. So you can do different distance measurements to detect the basically measurement. So you can get a distance from the sensor to the object. And there are ways to increase that accuracy or the field of view or depends on the reflectivity. There's a lot of factors towards it, but you could do a dimensional analysis. And that is a kind of a sneak peek that if there's time for it, we'll talk about it at the end. There's last article I talked about, keeping up with additive manufacturing, where we're going to have to explore different techniques, try and measure these really unique parts.
But back to the initial article for modern machine shop. So being able to scale up robotics across a wider factory floor, that's one case. And also they talk about additive. So additive in automotive is growing in popularity, right? So we've got a bunch of machine tool providers that are providing direct to automotive OEMs, 3d printed parts. You could say some are plastics, both probably are plastics or some could be binder jet. There's a couple of a bunch of different variations of that case. And you look at the high end cases where, you've got Bugatti or some super cars that are doing brake calipers or critical opponents. We've talked about, what's the CSR 21?
Stephen LaMarca: Koenigsegg.
Benjamin Moses: Koenigsegg is one, but there's an American startup-
Stephen LaMarca: Cinger.
Benjamin Moses: Cinger.
Stephen LaMarca: It's spelled with a C in front, but Cinger.
Benjamin Moses: He's got a majority of his frame, 3d printed, or at least the bumper. So additive into automotive is the next challenge and next technology breaking into automotive and a lot of challenges there too. So-
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, it will also... I know that the huge challenge and this cause comes from a couple of weeks ago, I think before Thanksgiving, the week before Thanksgiving, I did a weekly tech report that had a article about how additive can be used to mass produce parts for automotive assembly.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And as we know, additive is a terrible option for mass production. You want a one-off? It's great. Additive is the dream technology for English and Italian automotive engineer.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: As long as you don't want more than one, we've got you covered, but you want mass production? They're not additive, but this one, I forget who it was that was experimenting with it. But you can mass produce with additive. If you nest a bunch of different parts that would make up an assembly, a bunch of different components that would make up an assembly in a single print, it can be done for mass production, but you're just doing... You are nesting instead of making a batch a bunch of the same parts at once. You're nesting all these different parts that would go into one car at one time.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And it's really cool. I thought it was worth mentioning for this.
Benjamin Moses: That was a good mention. And we've been working with Oak Ridge on IMTS park also. And Lonnie's big thing for additive in production is dies, molds and dies. If he can print molds and dies, getting the cooling cavity is getting very unique shapes. Even doing short runs, if you need 10 parts while your tools being fixed or three months of parts, while your dyes being made, that is a huge benefit or a huge value to the industry for additive of printing molds and dyes. So Steve, you got an article also in 3d printing from MIT?
Stephen LaMarca: I have two more articles, both on additive.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: The first one from MIT. MIT research, it's from 3d printing industry. And the title is MIT researchers take one step closer to visually perfect 3d printing with variable gloss printer development.
Benjamin Moses: That's cool.
Stephen LaMarca: This was cool, man. This is going to be tough keeping this podcast episode to 30 minutes because we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about. Anyway, MIT developed a 3d printing system that uses customer off the shelf equipment and materials like the specifically varnishes into additive machines to vary the glossiness of the surface finish of printed parts. And so there are additive machines that in the process of growing apart, layer by layer, they will also apply a varnish to the outside of the part to create a surface coating that makes the surface finish smoother and better looking than it actually is not to slam additive for anything, but these machines already exist. But the problem is, you apply this varnish, you get a glossy finish, glossy smooth surface finish, but that's the only type of surface finish you can get.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: You don't always want glossy. Sometimes you want matte.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Or a matte finisher or slightly not rougher, but the way light reflects off something, you may have a specific type of refraction or reflection of light coming from your part. And MIT took a stab at trying to figure this out. And Ben and I made a joke that they probably discovered this accidentally, [crosstalk 00:22:52]. So with these machines, you can use different varnishes. You could use a matte finish varnish, but that matte finish varnish needs to be paired with a narrower and thinner nozzle that applies the varnish and this particular matte, or these particular matte finished varnishes that have to be paired with these thin nozzles, get gummed up and clogged quickly and so much so that you would have to stop growing your part before it's even done, like midway through your operation, your run for the one part to clean, [inaudible 00:23:36] and clean the nozzle just to keep going. So, and that obviously causes an inconsistency, not just from start to finish of the single part, but right in the middle of the production of that part. And this is obviously very... it's non-ideal.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: So MIT has discovered a way to vary the glossiness of their parts by... They print a part, apply the varnish, the varnish is glossy in parts of the glossy finish, where they want to be matte. They then go over that part, there that area with what could be the whole part, but they go over that area that they want to be more matte with structural support material. So they apply, they print structural support material to that area. And when the part's done and they quench or wash their final, the finished part in whatever device it is that removes the support material, the disintegrating support material. The support material had affected the varnish in a certain way to make what would be a glossy varnished finish more matte and seemingly rougher, or just less reflective.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And it's genius. Nobody's doubting that, but-
Benjamin Moses: I can tell you-
Stephen LaMarca: ... there's no way that it wasn't discovered by accident. In fact, there's no way it was actually MIT that discovered this first, somebody had to have discovered this first. It's just MIT has the strong arm of academia and the credibility to say, "yeah, we discovered this." No, you just wrote the paper first, but it's really cool. [inaudible 00:25:28] I'm not trying to discredit anybody, but it's fascinating.
Benjamin Moses: It is very fascinating. I like the ability to enhance the surface finish of the other pins apart, but also the idea that some engineer just printed [inaudible 00:25:41] press the print button twice and they got a better service. They're like, "wow, look what I did." "Oh, you did that by mistake. You know you did." That's awesome.
Stephen LaMarca: Totally. It's cool that doing something again actually makes it less smooth. I mean, it's not uncommon, they were playing. That's how they discovered it.
Benjamin Moses: The article I've got is also about this episode is heavily 3d is a heavily additive manufacturing, but the next one is from 3d printing media and it talks about NASA 3d prints, rocket engine parts to survive 23 LM hot fire test. Now, what the hell is LM? It's a... Where did I write that down here? It's a long life additive manufacturing assembly. So they have a specific testing plan for testing out additive in the rocket engines. And I find this really fascinating for a couple of reasons. One, NASA has a pretty robust plan for testing advanced manufacturing in their space program. And for this article specifically, they did a series of hot fire tests to demonstrate the structural integrity of these parts. One was a copper alloy combustion chamber, and the other one was a high strength, hydrogen resistant alloy. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, copper is fairly difficult material to handle welding wise because it transfers heat so well, it's actually-
Stephen LaMarca: And expensive.
Benjamin Moses: It is surprisingly expensive for some reason, even though every single house is made of copper pipes, funneling water everywhere, but it's not the easiest to actually go through a solid liquid solid transfer phase for welding. And they are able to print these parts. And also the idea of a hydrogen embrittlement. So this is the idea of hydrogen attacking the apparent material and weakening the structural integrity of the apparent material. Briefly, we're looking up the article on hydrogen embrittlement and the true mechanics, I don't think are fully defined yet, but the-
Stephen LaMarca: Really?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, but the symptoms of hydrogen embrittlement, also known as hydrogen assisted cracking or hydrogen induced cracking. They're all very similar, in the end it's hydrogen penetrating into the part and weakening the part itself. It could create voids or bubbles, or that help build pressure and they call it decohesion or reducing the structural integrity of the part. And that's a fairly important because in rocket fuel, hydrogen is a big part of rocket fuel. So you're conveying this thing that could theoretically destroy what's containing it and obviously you don't want that. So this tested at 23 hot fighter test, so they actually fired the engine 23 times. The total test of all 23 tests lasted 28 seconds. So it's fairly quick task, but once it reaches temperatures [inaudible 00:28:43] it's going to resolve a state and then they did it over 10 days. So they ran these tasks. They are doing 23 tests over 10 days, sounds like a long time, but once you do a visual inspection, once you're gathering all the data, it's a fairly quick turnaround, I think, for this type of test. And it's fairly really interesting that they're taking the time to do this validation, to verify that this material, this process, this capability is survivable in that atmosphere. And it is really rough atmosphere.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it. I don't mean to sound like a broken record. Pretty sure I've mentioned before that in my undergrad, one of my physics professors explained to us when my classmates and I were being instructed on the dangers of radiation poisoning.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Our professor conveyed to us that radiation poisoning is one of the worst deaths you can experience, right up there with being exposed to space without a space suit. But when he described what happens to the human body exposed to the vacuum of space, really terrifying stuff, I'm sure I've talked about before. Space is a little bit harsh, but did you mention earlier that... So hydrogen embrittlement isn't fully defined?
Benjamin Moses: The two mechanics of how the hydrogen actually penetrates the material and starts attacking the... It starts integrating [inaudible 00:30:20] attacking subsurface that mechanic isn't fully understood yet.
Stephen LaMarca: So does that also mean that there's not a clear way to prevent hydrogen embrittlement other than to just don't use hydrogen, but [inaudible 00:30:36].
Benjamin Moses: They know there's certain materials that are resistant to that attack. So they mainly stay with those materials. I mean, I'm sure there's codings or there's different manufacturing processes to prevent that kind of attack. But since we don't know the true [inaudible 00:30:49] of it, it's kind of hard to get around that. I mean, it requires, do you do that test and you expose it to hydrogen and it depends on the environment, the hydrogen too, so in this case, it's a hot fire test, right? Or you could have a cold atmosphere or... depending on what environment, it could be radiation induced environment. So-
Stephen LaMarca: Oh man, and that would definitely screw everything up. Because radiation [inaudible 00:31:15] to the atomic level changes, the composition of everything around it. That's what radiation does best.
Benjamin Moses: Now I think this article is a fair article to end with Steve. I got to know more about your 3d printing custom food.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay. All right. So slash gear popped up on tech trends. Slash gear are not necessarily a website that does manufacturing technology news-
Benjamin Moses: [inaudible 00:31:41] website though.
Stephen LaMarca: But it popped up in tech trends. It is a very fun website. And the article is titled researchers create gel ink ingredients for 3d printing custom food. Now let's stop right there because in all honesty, I didn't read the article. I don't know what they're talking about other than 3d printing food, because immediately as soon as I read or got halfway through the first paragraph, I was like, "why don't I have 3d printed pizzas yet? Why is there not a service that is delivering me 3d printed pizzas?" I don't want Amazon doing it, even though they definitely have the R and D funds and just the money to do such a thing.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: But I definitely want Musk coming out at us [crosstalk 00:32:25], "Hey, I'm going to print, I am a Musk fan. I don't care." And I want him like everything, every ingredient, every component of a pizza is 3d printable. The dough can be material extruded, sauce, material extreme, you squeeze it out of it. You can squeeze tomato paste out of a tube. That's material extrusion. Yes. Cheese, cheese melts. It can be material extruded. We print a pizza, you bake it just how you want, now and now you put toppings on it. Don't get crazy. That I don't know if you can additively produce.
Benjamin Moses: [crosstalk 00:33:07]
Stephen LaMarca: That could totally be material extruded.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: But anyway, the umbrella company of the Tesla and space X to also get into, the Boring company to get into making pizzas and delivering them by drone for $5, because that something Musk would do, pizza ingredients are dirt cheap. And I realize it wouldn't be a true pizza. I have to say that being 50% Italian that you don't 3d print a pizza but you can and we should.
Benjamin Moses: The trick is if you can get them to serve it in this cafeteria, then you realize how good it is, and they'll spin it off to a separate company.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh yeah.
Benjamin Moses: I'll call Musk.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh, and another thing that I was thinking when pondering 3d printed pizzas and this additive food article, I was thinking, you know what food is additively produced and we didn't realize it? Might not be with CNCS. It might be done manually, but it's still technically additive what?
Benjamin Moses: It is my favorite food anywhere. It is literally my favorite food.
Stephen LaMarca: Funnel cake.
Benjamin Moses: Funnel cake.
Stephen LaMarca: Funnel cake is additively manufactured
Benjamin Moses: At Disney. I stood in line for 20 minutes for funnel cake
Stephen LaMarca: [crosstalk 00:34:30] is material excluded out of a funnel into a vat that polymerizes it. It's not photo polymerization. You take the photo out of there, but that's a hybrid of two different additive technologies manually produced. By the way.
Benjamin Moses: We'll talk to ASC. [inaudible 00:34:49] an added to the family of additive processes, funnel cake. That's a good one. I appreciate that Steve, thanks for the custom food article. So tell me about American precision museum. I think this one, your favorite trips, road trip with Steve.
Stephen LaMarca: With Road trip and with Steve on the IMTS network, starring yours truly spoiler alert. The very first episode we visit the American precision museum in Windsor, Vermont. It's Vermont but Vermont's my favorite state of the union. I've said that before, I've gone on record saying that in the spoilers of the series it was my favorite stop. I apologize, Sandvik Jarvis. I love you guys. I swear to God, I do, but it was Vermont. Number one, number two, it's the history of our industry.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Of manufacturing technology. They cover everything and they have exhibits displaying, all sorts of machines and tools from before the term machine tool was even a thing.
Benjamin Moses: That's cool.
Stephen LaMarca: And anyway, the American precision museum graciously put my name on their website. I guess I didn't do too terrible of a job visiting them and making a fool of myself, but they're running this holiday season a fundraiser and I implore everybody to either donate. And if you don't at the very least, please go to their website, learn a little bit more about the museum because it's really an awesome, it's Smithsonian grade, Smithsonian level museum. And if you want to see a little bit more, check out my episode of road tripping with Steve, where I go to Vermont and visit them. It was an awesome time. And I absolutely recommend you check it out.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome. Thanks Steve. Where can they find more info about us?
Stephen LaMarca: They can find more info about us at amtnews.org. And if you want to be my best friend, go to amtnews.org/subscribe.
Benjamin Moses: That's the only way to get to see you. Sorry, just subscribe.
Stephen LaMarca: And actually enter your stuff. Don't just go there, go there and enter your credentials.
Benjamin Moses: Also, don't forget the fundraiser for the American position museum.
Stephen LaMarca: For that and I'll throw a link to that in the description below.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome. Take care everyone.
Stephen LaMarca: Bye.
Benjamin Moses: Bye.
