Episode 71: Ben and Steve get spicy over AMS, MES, and CRM nonsense, then Stephen tears off on a startup rant before introducing the sponsor: AM Radio, and finally going into a testbed update. Seriously, he wouldn’t shut up. Oh, and then Steve opens with the first article on repairing the F35 with AM. Benjamin finally gets a word in with autonomous painting for mass customization, then an article on more titanium AM, this time having to do with bone reconstruction. Stephen found an op-ed about Tesla’s recent 144-page report. Ben closes with the White House’s AM Forward initiative (not to be confused with AM Ford).
https://metrology.news/additive-manufacturing-to-repair-f35-large-titanium-blisks/
https://www.americamakes.us/america-makes-statement-on-white-house-am-forward-initiative/
Tune in to the AM Radio podcast https://www.additivemanufacturing.media/zc/am-radio-podcast
For the latest in Manufacturing Technology news https://www.amtonline.org/resources
Transcript
Benjamin Moses: Hello, everyone. Welcome to AMT's Tech Trend Podcast where we discuss the latest manufacturing technology research and news. Today's episode is sponsored by AM Radio, more on one that shortly. I am the Director of Technology, Benjamin Moses. And here with ...
Stephen LaMarca: The Technology Analyst of AMT, Stephen LaMarca.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, I'm stressed out.
Stephen LaMarca: Why are you stressed out?
Benjamin Moses: I'm in the middle of deploying our association management software.
Stephen LaMarca: You have every right to be stressed out.
Benjamin Moses: So a parallel for the rest of the industry would be similar to if you're migrating from between ERP systems. You've got a bunch of configuration, software applications, and data underneath. So we're going to an old basically access database to an application built on top of SalesForce. We designed the configuration. We kind of know how the software should work. Now we're in the middle of migrating all of our data, and it's never as simple as copy and paste. That's the worst thing you could assume to do. You've got table A and table Z and you got to figure out how to make them work.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. Dude, I tell you what we were, I say we, Dayton, Nina, and I were here late last night planning our attack on Rapid next week. As Nina was going through the exhibitor list for Rapid, Dayton was basically shouting off for Nina's spreadsheet whether the company is a non-member or a member. And on a rating from one to five, how hot they are and are they worth going to talk to. Should we make an attempt to talk to them at the show. And as we're going through member, non-member, Dayton, I'm very impressed. For being as new to AMT as he is, he knows a lot of companies whether or not they're members. Which is something you do pick up pretty quick working here. Even I still don't know who's a member and who's not to 100%. So I just had TIMSS open, our old AMS, our legacy AMS. Man it's old.
Benjamin Moses: Legacy is the right word.
Stephen LaMarca: I used another word before the show that wasn't right, but-
Benjamin Moses: A curse word.
Stephen LaMarca: No, it was not profane. I could have said it here and I wish I did, but I don't remember it anymore.
Benjamin Moses: I've been cursing a lot.
Stephen LaMarca: I believe it. Nina and Dayton, two of the smartest people that we have here look at me, and they're like, "You know how to use TIMSS?" And I'm like, "What you guys don't?" They're like, "No. We were just told not to touch that thing with a 10 foot pole." I don't change any of the data in there, but I know how to search for companies and Tell whether or not they're members or not, or what's their membership status if they are, or were, or are a prospect. It's got all of that stuff in there. It's still really useful. There's a reason why the people who are buried in TIMSS still kind of like it a little bit. It's not good for anybody else. And they want interns to be able to use an AMS. TIMSS is not an intern AMS, which is why we're going to something else.
Benjamin Moses: And that's a good takeaway to be honest. And the source data, it's still super relevant. So being able to export that into another SQL database or a [inaudible 00:03:48] where you can dashboard information.
Stephen LaMarca: These are all words I don't know.
Benjamin Moses: The big takeaway for me is that the evolution of user interfaces have changed so rapidly. Especially now, every year you get some type of new feature that is propagated through either websites, or phones, or computer programs. If you're not carrying that over into enterprise applications, the ability to scale up the application to new users kind of limits you. Being able to switch to this new software and keeping it current to what we expect our current user and experiences and interfaces is very pivotal for us. Especially when we look at the externally facing side of the application too. So I completely agree with you that using legacy, this is like 15 years old type application that we're moving away from. And being able to-
Stephen LaMarca: At least.
Benjamin Moses: Maneuver through this is a challenge because everyone's so used to what is current between now and five years ago?
Stephen LaMarca: what's crazy is it doesn't have simple mechanics that everybody's used to today, like with search engines. Using Google, you type something in, you don't need to format. You can, if you want to be specific. But you don't need to format what you type in, and then you press enter. TIMSS, uh-uh.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Put a percentage sign around every single word and enter does nothing. You have to click on a button, which is also F12. It's one of the F function keys. I just click on it because I can never remember my function keys. And then you have to scroll through a bunch of companies that come up in the search. You know what? We were talking, I went to the bar last Thursday in Whole Foods in Tysons. They have bar. It is an experience. Dude, it's cheap.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: You can go to the Whole Foods bar and get a lot of drinks for $15. It's insane.
Benjamin Moses: That's their trick. They get you drunk to buy their expensive ass food in there.
Stephen LaMarca: That's true. But anyway, I'm there at the bar. I don't even really drink that much anymore. I was there with people. But some of the people that we met there, random people we met there, we met at these three guys that made a startup. They formed a startup company to do AMSs, specifically associations. Exactly AMSs, association management systems. Their primary competitor, as they know, is Fonteva's SalesForce. What offended me at first, because what I'm about to tell you is may sound a little mean.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: But-
Benjamin Moses: You were drunk.
Stephen LaMarca: I was not, I was absolutely not. But the reason why I had a mean response was because they were telling me what they did. They were also selling it to me. I'm like, dude, I don't want, I'm not the person to talk to, number one. Number two, how dare you try to sell me something on off time, downtime. It's not work hour right now. I respect the hustle. But now it's my turn. Here comes the retaliation. You have a huge uphill battle against Fonteva.
Benjamin Moses: And SalesForce.
Stephen LaMarca: It is potentially, yeah, SalesForce. It is potentially an easy and both extremely difficult battle.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Let's start with the easy part. All you have to do to make a superior product to SalesForce, good customer service, actually listen to your customers, deliver on time. And don't squeeze them for every single nickel and dime possible.
Benjamin Moses: Fair.
Stephen LaMarca: That's it. That's all you have to do to be successful. And the product has to work. It has to work.
Benjamin Moses: I would say for them to be a successful startup is if someone types in CRM that they show up as one of the ads on top of CRM.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm not marketing. I'm not marketing. Don't talk to me about that. Here's the big fight. All of these corporate executive dummies always shove SalesForce onto their people who actually use it while they can't figure out how to open a PDF. They shove SalesForce onto these people and then say this awful thing, which I'm still not sure holds any merit or truth, says, yeah, but SalesForce will look really good on your resume. Meaning, I don't want you to work here anymore. So when you go job hunting for someplace else, SalesForce will look good. And how SalesForce managed to get that is incredible.
Benjamin Moses: Super Bowl ads. That's how they got it.
Stephen LaMarca: Maybe it was Super Bowl. And they are on the sides of F1 tracks now.
Benjamin Moses: That's true.
Stephen LaMarca: During the various countries Grand Prix.
Benjamin Moses: That's big time.
Stephen LaMarca: But I told this startup, these three guys, I was like, that's all you have to do.
Benjamin Moses: That's all they have to do.
Stephen LaMarca: That's all you have to do. But already, I don't want to speak ill of them, but at the same time I saw this guy walking, we crossed paths as I was leaving the bathroom. This one guy was walking to the bathroom. They're a startup company. They're not established at all yet. He's already wearing a Salvatore Ferragamo belt. Are you kidding me? Way to not look full of yourself at all. Good job. Man that executive life though, bro.
Benjamin Moses: The three man startup.
Stephen LaMarca: Glad you're at the top of the three man totem pole.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, tell us about our sponsor today.
Stephen LaMarca: Our sponsor today AM Radio is the new podcast from Additive Manufacturing Media. Join editors Pete Zelinsky, Stephanie Hendrixson, and Julia Hider as they share stories of companies succeeding with 3D printing today. Talk about emerging trends and discuss the future opportunities and potential for AM in the context of the larger manufacturing landscape. New episodes are published every other week. Subscribe now on Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts. Tune into Additive.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome, man. Speaking of which, let's talk about our test bed.
Stephen LaMarca: The test bed.
Benjamin Moses: It's seen some action recently.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh right.
Benjamin Moses: International action.
Stephen LaMarca: Dude, so much international action.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: Interactional.
Benjamin Moses: Do you need a starting point?
Stephen LaMarca: No. We've said like a million times now, the first pocket NC that we got. The first piece of equipment for our test bed, we sent it during the pandemic to Monterrey, the Mexico tech center. Monterrey Mexico, not California. To hell with them. They loved it so much that we were like, nah, don't send it back. We'll just buy a new one because I kind of want the new one anyway. And the new one was supposed to arrive this week or supposed to be arriving this week. I'm not going to worry about it. But we got a new one on the way. MFG was not last week, but MFG is an AMT event of ours. It was really awesome, by the way. You should have been there. Hopefully you were. At MFG, I got to talk to Carlos, who's the head of the Mexico tech center for AMT. And I told Carlos that, oh yeah, our manufacturing test bed also has a seven joint collaborative robot.
Benjamin Moses: That was a mistake.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm not going to say it was a mistake.
Benjamin Moses: No, no, he's known actually.
Stephen LaMarca: But basically he goes to talk. He's telling me, oh, tell me more about this robot. And basically I tell him about it. And then a week later, he sends an email to Tim, and Tim emails us. And he's like, "Hey, so Carlos knows that we have a collaborative robot. What's the plan on sending it to him?" We might send that to him. Frankly, you're the one who knows the budget. So you're going to be the one who's opposed to this, but I'm not opposed to that because let's send him the xArm, and then we can order from this new German company that I spoke about a few podcasts ago. Let's order one of their robots.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, so the goal is to continue feeding our Mexico test center with a demonstrator. So we've got the subtractive manufacturing side with the 5-axis machine. Now we're going to incorporate automation, which hopefully we can send you down and you and Daniella can collaborate and learn.
Stephen LaMarca: Yes, that's the next plan. I'll talk with Carlos. We'll get something set up. I'll put the xArm in my luggage and go down there with it.
Benjamin Moses: I want to hear you explain that to the person you're checking your luggage in to.
Stephen LaMarca: I have been stopped at TSA for the weirdest things. When Russ and Pam used to send me to the MT Connect Standards Committee meetings. Before they were called the Standards, the TAC, Technical Advisory Committee. Was that it? TAG.
Benjamin Moses: TAG.
Stephen LaMarca: TAG, Technical Advisory Group.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: Forget tag. Now it's the Standards Committee. When they used to send me to those, they used to give me all of the magnetic name tag badges. Flagged right away. I remember in college when the news broke that TSA was getting mass spectrometers.
Benjamin Moses: Oh yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: And I told my chem and physics professors this and they face palmed immediately. They were like, so many people are going to be traveling with hand lotion and get flagged for plastique.
Benjamin Moses: It was fun trying to travel with manufacturing equipment.
Stephen LaMarca: Yes.
Benjamin Moses: I've traveled with cutters, tool holders, instead of shipping.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh, that heavy carbide and inconel.
Benjamin Moses: I'm right underneath the weight limit. Here's some cutting equipment. What do I do with this? Please take it. When I was working for our site in Phelps, New York, just south of Rochester, they're doing electromagnetic [inaudible 00:13:46] valves, little guys for hydraulic applications and airplanes. They had a demonstrator valve that they wanted to be shipped around. It's basically just coils and windings and wires. When I take it to the check-in counter, I was like, "Hey guys, I have to check this in. Is this cool?" Talking to the agent right up front that you're carrying equipment's pretty important. Just keep that in mind.
Stephen LaMarca: The craziest thing I've done. In college, deer season ended.
Benjamin Moses: Oh yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: When I went down that year, I brought my Remington 700 planning to do some deer hunting in Vermont. Brought it up there. And deer season in Vermont is three days and each day a different weapon is supposed to be used. So it's rifle, then it's bow, then it's muzzle loader.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: And once those three days are over, I had no reason to have the rifle there. And I didn't want it to be in my college house. So I wanted it home where it was safe. So I flew back with it and I had a TSA grade gun case for it and everything. And they flagged me right away.
Benjamin Moses: Of course.
Stephen LaMarca: Burlington International Airport, it's a shoebox of an airport and they have F-35s. We'll get into that later though. Burlington International, I get to security. I'm the only one in line. They don't have pre-check there because they don't need it. I'm going through the line and immediately two police officers come up behind me. I've already checked my bag mind you.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Rather, I've checked my gun case.
Benjamin Moses: Correct.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh, wait a minute. Go back to when I checked it. When I checked it, they told me, "Sir, you're going to have to open this up."
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: So I unlock it. It's got the TSA locks. And they see the rifle right there. And they ask me, "Is there any ammunition in this vessel?" And I'm like, "No."
Benjamin Moses: Not a dummy.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm not going to risk anything. I'm already flying with a gun. So they bring in this TSA guy. Well the two police officers, they were the ones who told me to open it. And then they bring in this TSA guy, he's got the rubber gloves on. He swabs the gun case. And he's like, "Sir, this just came up positive for volatile chemicals." And I was like, "Yeah, it's a gun. It needs volatile chemicals to work."
Benjamin Moses: Captain Obvious over there.
Stephen LaMarca: And they just let me pass. I locked it back up and they let me go to security. At security, two different police officers, or they may have been the same I didn't get a good look at their faces, come up behind me. He's like, "Sir, you've been flagged for a random security screening." Oh, I'm sure it was totally random. Because I'm the only guy here and I'm white. I'm the one guy here who's flying with a gun too. But that was a wild time.
Benjamin Moses: So if you guys have to meet me at one of our conferences or events.
Stephen LaMarca: Please don't give me anything cool.
Benjamin Moses: Ask me what my mother-in-law brought back from Florida.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh no.
Benjamin Moses: Oh, it's fun. It's very fun.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh geez.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, let's get into our first article. You got one.
Stephen LaMarca: I have one about the F-35.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Speaking of the Green Mountain Boys, this article has nothing to do with them, but the Green Mountain Boys are stationed at the Burlington International Airport in Vermont. And they were one of the first, I don't know if you call them divisions or-
Benjamin Moses: Squadrons.
Stephen LaMarca: Squadrons that got the F-35. So when I was in college, a long time ago, at least to me, while we were waiting for our flights and stuff to go home for winter break and whatnot, you would see in between commercial airliners taking off, you would see F-16s. And one time I saw an F-35 and I was like, wow, it actually works.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: But anyway, the article that I have from Metrology News, of course-
Benjamin Moses: While you're doing that, can I bring up a time reference for you?
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: Now you mentioned that, I actually worked on the STOVL version of F-35.
Stephen LaMarca: On the what?
Benjamin Moses: The STOVL version, the vertical takeoff version of F-35. I did some design work on one of their stabilizing units on their wings. So that gives you a time reference on when I worked on F-35 versus when you saw it in Vermont.
Stephen LaMarca: What I'm giggling about is that you get a lot of people talking smack about the F-35. It's the most expensive plane ever. Number one, they made a lot of them. There's not a huge amount. They're not in the thousands, but they're getting there. They've made a lot of them, number one. Number two, it's also expensive because look in any direction where you see people, somebody in that group of people has worked on the F-35.
Benjamin Moses: This is true.
Stephen LaMarca: Everybody and their mother has worked on the F-35.
Benjamin Moses: That's right.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, those are mouths to feed. It's going to be an expensive plane. It's America's plane.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, that's right.
Stephen LaMarca: I never thought I would hype it up that much. But anyway, Metrology News, additive manufacturing to repair the F-35 large titanium blisks. Blisk.
Benjamin Moses: They're expensive.
Stephen LaMarca: Blisk is a, what's the fancy word for describing a word that is the combination of multiple words. I forget. Not an ANM and it's not an onomatopoeia. [inaudible 00:19:04].
Benjamin Moses: Let's keep going, Steve.
Stephen LaMarca: Whatever. Blisk means bladed disc.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: And the bladed discs are inside turbine engines. The F-35 has one turbine engine, but with a handful of blisks on it. Those blisks are made out of titanium. Each one of those blisks cost half a million dollars.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: Instead of replacing a blisk once it gets worn out, the government, the DOD has determined it would be advantageous for us to be able to just fix them.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Instead of entirely replacing them since they are half a million dollars. So they have turned to a company Optomec and awarded them 1.5 million dollars in a contract to use additive manufacturing, specifically printing titanium, to fix said blisks.
Benjamin Moses: That's cool.
Stephen LaMarca: It's cool until you realize $1.5 million, and the blisk costs half a million dollars, they can repair three blisks. There's close to 700 of these planes out there.
Benjamin Moses: It's a good proof of concept for that.
Stephen LaMarca: You're getting your name out there, buddy.
Benjamin Moses: No, but that is a really good use case for additive that we've kind of talked about exploring a lot more. Aerospace has a really big maintenance repair overhaul cycle and being able to get into instead of replacing parts constantly. So if you have a bracket on a duct assembly that gets damaged, the common process is replace a whole duct, which is very, very expensive. That's often three to five times the cost of the OEM part in the aftermarket. Or you replace that bracket, but as anyone that's trying to buy a screw or a small component in a car, it's really hard to find that part number within that sub-assembly.
I tried to replace the light that shines on the rear license plate on my Xterra. And they said, no, you have to buy the whole bumper. I said, what? It's a pretty old car. I giggled and I said, Nope. But the concept is, it's kind of difficult to drill down to a specific component sometimes. The ability to repair parts on an assembly and obviously grow the part or grow that portion of it. A lot of times you'll see them actually excavate. They'll cut out a square corner or cut out a circular piece and then come back and refill it and machine it back down. But the ability for that to occur in defense a lot is really important because these things are abused, right? They get end of life very, very quickly. So instead of having to go through this rotary pool of old inventory or throwing them away, just repair the cracks and then move forward.
Stephen LaMarca: Right. And it's not like these planes are flying through dusty environments all the time. And it's wearing the leading edge down on each blade of the blisk. Yeah, it's just wear and tear.
Benjamin Moses: But repair man, that's a big market for additive.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. Imagine if your brake rotors were so expensive the cheapest way to fix them instead of replacing them was to print more material on it and then grind it down.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: That's wild to me.
Benjamin Moses: Porsche is very close to that.
Stephen LaMarca: They are because they are nuts.
Benjamin Moses: Again, to another theory, we had a discussion before recording, but the concept of it's not just printing.
Stephen LaMarca: You've proven me wrong.
Benjamin Moses: It's not just printing that we're looking at, it's the additive process for the repair. So you're going to have to excavate apart. You're going to have to grow apart or a portion of the part and then continuing machining and manufacturing. So it's coupling the subtractive process with the additive capability. So it's a very big ecosystem we're looking for in this process. I've got an article from Tech Crunch.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh cool.
Benjamin Moses: I really like their fancy titles.
Stephen LaMarca: I like Tech Crunch.
Benjamin Moses: Move over Picasso, watching this robot print a car is mesmerizing.
Stephen LaMarca: Dude.
Benjamin Moses: So it's a-
Stephen LaMarca: Paint a car.
Benjamin Moses: The title isn't as descriptive as I like.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay.
Benjamin Moses: So they're not just painting the raw shell of it. What they're doing is mass customization. So they have this experiment where they took an abstract artist, a young kid who actually has done a lot of paintings, taking his ideas and worked with a digital collector startup company and figured out how to put this abstract painting onto a car. So the car already has a white shell, a white paint job onto it. And they're doing basically a customization. So the use case would be, I want to print Ben on my car or something like that.
So over the past couple years, we've talked about it where automation and painting cars, that's been around for a really long time. What we've seen is progressions on a single robotic arm being able to move on a gantry or keeping the car still. We've seen significant changes on the nozzle head, right? So instead of spraying a ton of stuff, they're changing the spray pattern so it can be more effective in capturing that spray.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: What this iteration is showing is that basically they have an inkjet nozzle head with a thousand different nozzle heads and basically printing on the surface of the car any unique pattern without masking. There was an example a couple of episodes ago we talked about, I think it was BMW doing this also where they're printing racing stripes without masking.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: So in this case it's an inkjet head. So they just move the head along and it's printing just like your inkjet printer would on paper. So they're able to do very, very complex shapes and patterns and colors by going. And of course, accuracy of the robotics and the user interface is also facilitating this type of process to where they've progressed significantly to allow this. But it's a very interesting test where yeah, on the surface, they're doing a demonstrator of this abstract on a car, but the capabilities allow us to do two things. One is mass customization. That's still a very interesting thing of being able to do lot size of one.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: So being able to-
Stephen LaMarca: And not having to be Duesenberg or Rolls Royce to do such a job.
Benjamin Moses: Exactly. Not paying tens of thousands of dollars for a unique paint job where I could just click a couple of buttons and pay a $500 upcharge or something like that. So the ability to have an affordable mass customization. But also-
Stephen LaMarca: I love that term.
Benjamin Moses: The environmental impact where this allows it to be cost effective, right? So you're not masking, you're not paying for a human to mask it.
Stephen LaMarca: It sounds like you can minimize over spray.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, absolutely. You minimize over spray, which you reduce your paint usage. But you reduce your ventilation requirements, right, and anything requiring for a filtration for that. Energy usage goes down significantly. And obviously with a lot of paint, there's always a lot of water usage trying to recapture that debris. So overall it's significantly more efficient. I was thinking about the use case of this too. It may not be at the OEM side. This could be a case where it's a third party paint shop where they have a robotic arm and a nozzle head. It doesn't have to be at Audi or BMW. It could be at Mako or something like that.
Stephen LaMarca: When you started describing it, I was like, I can't wait until I can pull into a flagship car wash place and be like, hey, I have a door ding. And they're like, pull into that bay. And it laser measures your car as you're pulling in to know exactly where your car is placed. And then a robot scoots over on rails. And just grinds down all of the debris. It exposes the cleanest layer of paint. Maybe it applies more of the paint once it does some sort of optical measurement to find out what kind of paint you have. Sprays on some new stuff, dries it. Sprays on clear coat, buffs it out. It sounds wild right now. I think we're 10 years away.
Benjamin Moses: 10 years away.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: Episode 500, we'll come back and revisit this. But it is interesting. It's the progression of all the surrounding technologies with automation, right? You have the nozzle head, you've got the user interface. You've got the ability for the arm to be more mobile within the paint booth. And there's a significant collision of all these things that's making automation significantly more effective and getting us to more mass, which is contrary to what I've thought of mass customization. I would not think that automation would be a vehicle to get us there, but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
Stephen LaMarca: I think automation is the only way you can put the word mass in front of customization.
Benjamin Moses: Fair. I got the next article, Steve.
Stephen LaMarca: All right.
Benjamin Moses: New study assesses the effectiveness of 3D printed titanium implants on bone growth. The reason I brought this up is I found it very interesting where we talked about additive military [inaudible 00:27:58].
Stephen LaMarca: We're talking a lot about titanium this episode.
Benjamin Moses: I love titanium.
Stephen LaMarca: Dude, we're starting to sound like Titan Gilroy.
Benjamin Moses: And this is direct applications into the body. So this is not printing tools, or you could say printing teeth, but there's a couple of use cases here where you have actual 3D printed titanium parts being used as implants. And I thought this was very fascinating where this is probably closest to, I'll call it mass production or end use, where you're printing, or additive manufacturing for a true end use application. So the article starts it off with research that's being done for 3D bone replacements for reconstructive surgery. And a lot of these are reconstructive, but it's a couple other use cases.
One is Texas A&M University has developed a novel 3D printing scaffold that directly facilitates bone growth after surgery. That's one of the biggest problems with implants is the body rejecting the implant. But they're able to grow the pattern and the surface texture and the scaffold basically to allow the bone to grow around it and facilitate more growth. Quebec International Research, and I think there's another one from Canada, they're using Arcam from GE Additive to expedite specific lower jaw implants. And then [inaudible 00:29:17] University has 3D printed facial prosthetic for a Brazilian cancer survivor, which includes her right eye. That blew my mind.
Stephen LaMarca: Printing the right eye as well.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Wow. Out of titanium.
Benjamin Moses: The world's heaviest eyeball.
Stephen LaMarca: Maybe there's a nice lattice.
Benjamin Moses: And the last one I have is from Health Canada approved its first Canadian made 3D printed medical implant, a customizable mandible plate used for facial reconstruction surgery predominantly for patients with oral cancer.
Stephen LaMarca: Wow.
Benjamin Moses: So these are pretty severe cases where they're losing parts of the body. They had no control. It's not like an injury or someone riding around without a helmet. These are things that they had no control over. They lost part of their body and manufacturing and medical institute was like, we can fix that for you. It's pretty impressive.
Stephen LaMarca: Please be our Guinea pig. We're so sorry for you. We want to take pity on you. Be our Guinea pig.
Benjamin Moses: You've gotten an oped that we want to get into.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay. So I found this article from Inc.com. Inc as in incorporated. And what I really like about it. So I shared the link on our podcast article Slack channel. And when you look at the link, when the preview comes up for the link, the article title is, "Tesla's nine word rule every employee has to follow is simply brilliant."
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: And then you click on the link to open it up. The new title, "Tesla's 10 word rule every employee has to follow is simply brilliant."
Benjamin Moses: Wait a second.
Stephen LaMarca: It's whatever. But anyway, this author of this opinion piece basically starts off by saying, yeah, I had a lot of free time so I decided to read Tesla's report. Tesla's a hot company.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: They've got a lot of attention. All companies come out with these reports to say how great they're doing and hype themselves up. And Tesla came out with one that was 144 pages along. And this guy took it upon himself to read the whole thing. And they highlight some really cool metrics and some awesome numbers that Tesla has achieved and accomplished. One of their things they said is because they sold X amount of cars. They said, "We have prevented the emission of this much greenhouse gas."
Benjamin Moses: That's cool.
Stephen LaMarca: Which is a cool way to look at it. It's by no means a conventional metric that anybody else would follow in the auto industry, but they're not conventional.
Benjamin Moses: All of that's true.
Stephen LaMarca: They're probably the most exciting, and extravagant, and extreme, and ridiculous auto manufacturer that we have seen since the birth of Lamborghini.
Benjamin Moses: You and I got in a debate about this, about how kooky Germans are versus-
Stephen LaMarca: Germans are kooky, but they're not ridiculous.
Benjamin Moses: We'll discuss this over-
Stephen LaMarca: They're calculated. And they keep efficiency in mind. And if they can do something fun with it, they do. Germans don't buy fast cars because they're fun.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: They buy fast cars so they can wake up later and still get to work on time.
Benjamin Moses: That's an argument. We'll discuss this further.
Stephen LaMarca: That's cool. But it's not ridiculous.
Benjamin Moses: All right.
Stephen LaMarca: The Ferrari Testarossa and the Lamborghini Countach, they came about not because they had a purpose, because of passion and a few kilograms of cocaine.
Benjamin Moses: I would say the Volkswagen, I think, Nardo, the W16 is a pretty wacky engine.
Stephen LaMarca: That thing is, okay. Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: When you come up with a W16, that's a little bit over the top.
Stephen LaMarca: Let's take two V8s and put them on the same crank shift. Anyway, Inc. Yeah, this guy's talking about the Tesla report. And the thing that has him the most taken aback is he gets to this 10 word sentence goes beyond that. So basically go back to the title. Tesla's 10 word rule every employee has to follow is simply brilliant. And you scroll down to that. Tesla aspires to be a do the right thing company. And then the rest of the articles about how this guy's waxing poetic on how that's so brilliant and what a genius rule that is. And it is cool. It's good, but this is a report. All companies do these reports to hype themselves up and say nice things about themselves to keep their shareholders happy. At the same time, every company of the few companies that I've worked for in my career, they've all had some motto, short motto like that That was very positive and uplifting. Nobody cared.
Benjamin Moses: Mercedes has always the best or something like that.
Stephen LaMarca: Do they really?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. A couple of marketing [inaudible 00:34:25].
Stephen LaMarca: Well, they all do.
Benjamin Moses: They all do.
Stephen LaMarca: They all do.
Benjamin Moses: To your point, every company has some aspirational slogan or meaning that they want the employees to tattoo on their chest.
Stephen LaMarca: It's cool. Elon Musk owns Tesla. Didn't create it. He owns Tesla. They're really proud of this.
Benjamin Moses: So the big takeaway is we want to hear from the audience, which country's the most kooky. Steve debates it's Italians. I think it's Germans. We'll discuss that later.
Stephen LaMarca: Let's start with who's the most unreliable. French. French car. You've never heard a good thing about a French car.
Benjamin Moses: I have not heard good things about Alfa Romeos.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh man.
Benjamin Moses: I love those cars, but man.
Stephen LaMarca: They are pretty
Benjamin Moses: Steve, the last article I have is America Makes statement on White House AM Forward initiative. So America Makes is a manufacturing institute, and they're heavily involved with the AM Forward initiative put forward by the White House and President Biden. So the AM Forward program is a voluntary agreement between.
Stephen LaMarca: Are you saying AM Forward?
Benjamin Moses: AM Forward.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay. It was confusing me because it sounded like AM Ford. I was like, what kind contract do they have with Ford?
Benjamin Moses: Ford is not part of this, but America Makes and the members GE Aviation, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Siemens Energy designed to improve the competitiveness of America's small and medium size manufacturing and strengthen the manufacturing workforce and domestic supply chain through additive manufacturing. So the goal is obviously they've seen issues in supply chain and obviously it's compounded on the manufacturing side through workforce issues. So this AM Forward is part of a bigger innovation bill where they want to solve some of our problems. The AM Forward bill from the administration wants to do a couple of key things.
I think there's three bullets here that I was able to glean. More resilient and innovative supply chain by investing in small and medium sized companies, growing industries of the future, overcoming coordination challenge that limit adoption of new technologies like additive manufacturing, both inventing and making more in America through investments in regional manufacturing ecosystem. It's a part initiative to focus on manufacturing, which the past couple of administrations have done through manufacturing institutes. But I think this is one of the later steps to directly fund the manufacturing industry. And there's a bunch of numbers involved with their innovation bill.
Stephen LaMarca: To curb supply chain issues.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: Utilizing additive manufacturing.
Benjamin Moses: That's right. Fascinating.
Stephen LaMarca: And this is a US project.
Benjamin Moses: Yes.
Stephen LaMarca: So they're trying to do what the Italians did during the pandemic with all of the ventilators and stuff, because the Italians use additive to beat that.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm just saying they did something right.
Benjamin Moses: Let me write the one thing they did right. We'll have links to both the American Makes and the White House fact sheet about this. And I think it's a very good look at where the US is looking to focus their efforts on and how the manufacturing industry can use this to grow US based competitiveness. We're looking at reassuring technologies, but also how can we leap frog some of the other countries in technology advancements or come up with other technologies to compete against those. It's very positive. So I'm happy to see this move forward. John Wilczynski from America Makes has some really good pictures of, I think they hosted an event with President Biden in Youngstown. It was fun times.
Stephen LaMarca: That is awesome.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, who was our sponsor today? And can you tell us where they can find more info about us?
Stephen LaMarca: Our sponsor today was AM Radio, and you can find more about us at AMTonline.org/resources. Make sure to subscribe.
Benjamin Moses: Bye everyone.
Stephen LaMarca: Comment down below. Ring that bell.
