Tyler + Adam Talk 3D Printing Technology and Its Benefits + Value in Manufacturing

QuickWire & Old-World Automotive

Adam: So what's QuickWire been using
their 3D printer for? They have one or they have two?

Tyler: They have two. They've been
making electrical connectors that have been essentially discontinued. So
they're in the old-world automotive space, and there's still a subset of people
that are restoring old cars and they like to keep things original. They've got
connectors like headlight connectors and things like that that they're printing
now, because they've lost access to supply.

Adam: And obviously they buy a lot of
connectors from a variety of vendors, but those specific connectors must not be
high enough volume through their standard catalogs.

Tyler: But the cars still need to be
made — harnesses for the cars. It falls under like the low- to medium-volume
number, which isn't enough to keep the injection molding going. So they'll need
them.

Adam: They're making the plastic
components only, or they combine it?

Tyler: Okay — so where do they source
the other, like the copper and the terminals? The terminal is a more universal
terminal. It's used across many different connectors, so the terminals aren't
the issue. Just by using the machine, it gives them the flexibility to
literally use any terminal as long as it meets the spade specs.

Plastic 3D Printing — Beyond Toys

Adam: I think it's interesting,
because when a lot of people think about plastic 3D printers, they think about
the use cases being knickknacks and trinkets and toys.

Tyler: Toys and charms on necklaces.

Adam: When I first started paying
attention to 3D printing, there was — was it a maker space? There was some
website where you could download the CAD models, and most of the CAD models
that were being designed were kids' toys.

Tyler: Thingiverse. Probably the most
popular one.

Adam: And then you and I were at a
small 3D printing conference a couple years back in Texas. A lot of geeks there
— straight-up geeks, coders, and software engineers, people that were trying to
find applications to use their programming skills and their computing
background. But it seemed like they were more disconnected from traditional
CNC-type manufacturing. This technology — additive manufacturing, building up
layers — when it comes to computerized digital manufacturing, there's a lot of
other processes that we've been used to in a lot of machine shops in this area.
People that aren't necessarily considered tech people have been programming and
using digital manufacturing for a long time.

Tyler: No doubt. The CNC — it's
essentially the same technology. Same code. It's X, Y, Z, along with other
commands to define things like temperatures and flow rates and layer heights.
But it's the same principles as CNC machines taking billet or blocks and machining
it down to certain dimensions. In that case, getting rid of material. In this
case, adding material. So there's no waste. There's interesting benefits to
both. There's things you can do in that world that can't be done here, and
obviously things that can be done here that can't be done in that world. Mostly
a lot of it is material availability. There's a lot of time, effort, energy,
and resources being put into material development in the 3D print world. It's
come a long way in the last few years since I started getting into it, but it's
still not close to the CNC world of aluminum.

Material Categories

Adam: So how do you classify the
different materials? The printers that we have here at Wisconsin Lighting Lab
use a plastic that comes on a roll, it gets heated up, and the layers get
applied. What are the different material categories?

Tyler: Pretty much everything. A lot
of the material categories you'd put in more of a hobbyist-type category. But
there are some more professional or higher-grade materials that come on the
scene. That's kind of the space that we live in. A lot of times it's not
thought of — there's a small difference between PLA, which is considered the
most common and simple material, and then there's this whole material
technology world where we've got chemists more or less creating brews and
batches to allow the plastic to get to different ratings when it comes to
temperatures, rigidity, or flammability. Those types of materials are becoming
more available, and they're being recognized through certification companies
and things like that, that are starting to make a lot of these materials more
relevant in the commercial space.

Certifications & Commercial Use

Adam: I think to a lot of the
tinkerers, that is one thing that maybe isn't part of the consideration when
making things. If you're making a charm and a necklace, you're not really
considering the flame rating or having to run it through —

Tyler: And there's been a thousand
different milestones and checkpoints that we've had to go through the last two
years.

Adam: How long have we had them?

Tyler: I think we've had them two
years. And it's been a great process, because we now can make — I think we've
done the calculation — 50,000 or 60,000 parts a year. If we have our printers
going constantly, it's tens of thousands of parts. But certainly there were a
lot of challenges along the way.

Tyler's Background & Skills

Adam: As far as CNC, what is your
background? How much of the skills that you've developed related to 3D printing
— was it more of the programming side, the hands-on side, the CNC side? If you
kind of had to weight those different things, what does it look like for you?

Tyler: CNC world — little experience.
I did take a shop class in high school; that's about the extent of it.
Programming on physical machines — little experience. Most of my programming
knowledge has been on web and computer software-type things. No experience in
the material world. It's been mostly just — it's come out of interest of just
kind of building things and seeing the process as kind of fascinating. And it's
been like a weird little interesting drive to get creative with this simple
machine to make it useful in an industrial-type atmosphere.

Adam: We've taken more of the
print-farm approach, where we have print cells as opposed to giant expensive
printers. We have a whole room with 11–12 printers. That has allowed us to get
in the game. A lot of 3D printers — the more industrial-grade ones — are hundreds
of thousands of dollars. We pretty much spent like $10,000–$12,000 to get a
bunch of them.

Tyler: In the ballpark. And obviously
a lot of time to get them set up.

Adam: You started tinkering with this
type of printing at home a few years ago? What did that look like — was it a
lot of YouTube videos, just following your curiosity?

Tyler: The 3D printing world's just
been kind of interesting. I started to realize it didn't cost that much to get
into it, which is still where 3D printing mostly lives — it's a hobby world.
That's one of the digs against it, that it's not going to get out of the hobby
space. But I don't think that's quite true. I think it's more that you've got
to get more creative and flexible with the use cases. It's not going to solve
everything. There's a nuanced approach to digital manufacturing — in some cases
you might need milling, some cases you might need injection molding, some cases
3D printing works.

Adam: When we were down in Texas at
that conference, you could tell there was this hope that 3D printing was just
going to completely take over all the other types of manufacturing — and
obviously that's not the case.

Tyler: The big pitch is distributed
manufacturing — decentralized. Instead of shipping parts to everybody's home,
you just ship them a file and they make it. I think there's some weight to
that, but like you said, it doesn't solve everything by any means.

Speed: From Idea to Production in Three Hours

Tyler: The most interesting thing here
has been the speed of turning ideas into a real thing. I was just telling a
story yesterday — we print this enclosure for a circuit board that we use.
There aren't any requirements for the casing — it doesn't need to go outside,
it's pretty much just a handling protective cover. And the provisions we had
for mounting the case weren't quite set up ideally for the application. I think
it was a 10-minute discussion around how to make it better. One of our
engineers went back to the drawing board, had a new design, was printing a
prototype within 20 minutes. That took a couple hours to print. Everything
looked good after that couple hours, another 10 minutes later we had a file on
the printer, and we had seven machines printing that case in production. So a
three-hour turnaround was a design adjustment, discussion, prototype, and
product in production. It'd be impossible to do that with an outside vendor.

How We Got Started

Adam: You'd have to buy a generic
enclosure on the internet that isn't designed for our custom circuit board, or
you'd have to tool up for an injection-molded part — which is really how we got
started. We had some lighting parts and accessories. We were doing some
onshoring, where we used to buy these from China, and we started to work with
more vendors here in Wisconsin to source a lot of our mechanical parts. We
wanted to tool up for an injection-molded part, and it was $12,000 for one
part. And we have a tendency to change designs as we learn more information. So
it's like, man, we're going to have to spend $12,000 for a piece of plastic,
and there's no way we're going to get it right the first time. And by the way,
to do that fixture, we'd need five different parts — $50,000–$60,000 to get in
the game and hope you did it right the first time. Not to mention it takes five
months to get the tool created, and then there's lead times and everything
else.

Adam: For us it was really — because
we were on a budget — we said, are there alternatives? We did the math, and
this worked out really well. We're a low- to medium-volume manufacturer, high
variability, so it works really well for us. What you're describing is it gets
rid of pain points. There are so many jobs that are always this close to being
right, but there are these little things — and that's where these printers seem
to shine. Again, not to mention the quick prototyping.

Tyler: Yeah. I don't know how many —
it'd be interesting if we kept a tally of how many individual variations of
stuff we've printed on these things. It's in the hundreds. I would guarantee
it.

Desktop CNC & Accessible Manufacturing

Adam: I think what's interesting is, a
lot of the products that people use go through some type of automated
manufacturing process. I've heard statistics — it's like 70% of products and
parts use some type of automation. And this type of automation technology has
been available to large companies for a long time, but I think what's cool is,
in the same way that personal computing went from only IBM and huge companies
having access to it, now that technology is becoming more distributed to small-
and medium-sized manufacturers. What other types of desktop CNC technology do
you see people using around here?

Tyler: I think you can do quite a bit
with some pretty flexible things. CNC tables, lasers, things like that. There's
some maker-level products that are pretty powerful and could probably do a
decent job of handling some low-volume stuff, definitely prototyping. There's —
I consider a lot of wire processing equipment kind of desktop-type stuff, that
really creates a lot of flexibility. I don't think wire processing equipment is
typically thought of as in the same realm, but it very much is. That's been
around for decades and decades.

Adam: To take a wire processing
machine and compare it to the parts on something like this — it's using a lot
of the same parts, a lot of stepper motors and small circuit boards and control
boards. Is that stuff typically programmed?

Tyler: Yeah. You're not dealing with
3D files. You're just defining lengths and wire gauges and things like that.
Again, same but different.

What's Stopping More Adoption?

Adam: What do you think is stopping
more people from seeing the use cases? Is it the disconnect between the
programmer/tinkerer folks and people that are used to working with mechanical
parts?

Tyler: I think it's probably twofold.
I think it comes off as daunting. And I think the initial learning curve is
relatively slow. But there's so much information to help significantly close
the time in which the learning curve is there. I helped QuickWire kind of
onboard their stuff, and it would have extended the timeline in which they
could have onboarded a long time — probably a few months of just trial and
error, which is kind of what we went through. But then the other portion is the
engineering skill set — understanding and quick turnaround of creating 3D
models and designing in a way that is designed for 3D printing. And then
probably just creativity beyond that.

Adam: And probably the culture of
making mistakes and continuing, just iterating constantly. In a lot of
engineering teams, it's “give me the hard requirement and let me execute on the
requirement,” where we try to keep a pretty tight feedback loop and just continue
to improve it at a rapid rate. I think just the mentality of a lot of small-
and medium-sized businesses — I don't even think a lot of them have 3D modeling
skill sets in-house. A lot of times that's just outsourced, because they just
don't need it. Which is interesting, because a lot of the small and medium
businesses — their value is the low-run customization. You think about a job
machine shop around here — Mercury Marine doesn't use the huge fabricators to
do small-run stuff. They use the smaller shops, where there's a lot of
information in the owner's or the machinist's heads. Those types of operations
are really the ones that probably need to embrace this more, because it can
supplement a lot of the value that they're creating for their customers.

Tyler: Yeah. That, or where they've
just found a niche. Settle into a niche that's enough to support a small-medium
business and just kind of run with it.

Historical Parallels: Studios, E-Commerce & Bitcoin

Adam: Do you think it's representative
of any trends that you've seen in the past? I know we've been involved with
music and web design. Back in the 90s, early 2000s — recording in a studio was
a couple hundred thousand dollars in equipment to record a song. Now you have a
MacBook computer, it's a $2,000 computer, and it comes with software. You look
at web design and what it used to take to build an e-commerce site or a website
— extremely difficult. And now — I see those same trends happening in manufacturing.
Where do you see that going?

Tyler: I think the web design thing is
a good example. Even just this table setup, the podcasting setup — that world
is a good example. It starts off as super hard, super technical. You could make
an argument that the Bitcoin world is in a similar type of process — incredibly
complicated, sounds impossible to get into. But then over time, there are tools
that just break down the barrier to entry, to make very complicated and
productive things more simple each day. There's a lot of that in our brains
right now in terms of the direction and the place that we're thinking when it
comes to making products, designing products, and engineering them. This is
just one example. A lot of this technology is just more accessible, and it's
skill sets that are flexible and able to attack a lot of this stuff. Computer
vision, things — I see a lot of that coming into the mix. Just communication in
general.

Adam: I think of — my grandpa was
hesitant to get a fax machine. Like it was this crazy technology. What's wrong
with mailing a quote to a customer? What do you mean we need a fax machine? And
I think — again, it's a tool that empowers small and medium businesses, because
it allows for customization and getting rid of pain points for customers. But
you have to know how to use it. You're getting into a price range that is more
palatable for more people, which I think is key. And also the drag-and-drop
tools — I look at Squarespace, build a website. If you build a website with a
million SKUs like we have, you're not going to be able to use Squarespace for
that. But if you have a website that has a couple products on it, you can build
a website relatively quickly.

Adam: I think it's the automation and
— it's really an interface problem. Computers used to have punch cards to
program a computer and a machine. Then there was a green screen. It's really
the UI becoming easier, where the machinist on the floor or the person running
the casting or the injection molding equipment — they have an interface that
allows them to not be a computer programmer, but use all the knowledge they've
accumulated over 20–30 years to empower them. I think it's the interface.
Anybody can use a phone, anybody can use an iPhone at this point. How do you
have the interface that easy for this type of manufacturing? It'll be
interesting to see when that happens.

Tyler: Yeah. I think the website thing
is a great example. When we built the first e-commerce site, it was nine months
of just painstaking development and trying to learn how to do something as
simple as take payment online. And I mean, I could stand an e-commerce site up
in 35 minutes right now — ready to take credit cards, pictures, product
options, all that stuff. That mentality exists in the manufacturing world, and
more is entering that world every single day. And it's turning into kind of a
sea that you've got to navigate and try to understand and figure out what is
attainable.

Adam: And there are cultural divides
between people with these skill sets.

Tyler: Yeah. If you talk 3D printing
in the industrial and manufacturing space, immediately it's $350,000 machines
and it's perfect finished quality and all that stuff. It's like, well, is that
actually what's needed? Or is it like, have you been told a million times that
that is what's needed and it's not attainable?

Adam: And that's where the creativity
comes in. The culture of experimentation.

Lighting Controls: The Same Progression

Adam: Well, what else is interesting
on topic?

Tyler: I think the same type of thing
is pushing through into the technology of the lighting space. We talk a lot
about — it's kind of related — but it's more on the control side of things. The
interface in which the products are interacted with on the customer side is the
same progression, the exact same thing. For products to interact with and be
aware of the space — that's nothing new. But the ease in which it happens and
the ease in which you can interact with them is where that same progression is
happening on the product side, as it is on the machines making the products.
It's literally just happening everywhere.

Adam: I think it's so easy for people
to get overwhelmed with technology, because there's a lot of companies and
products that have not done a good job of making it easy. You look at certain
vehicles that just try and pack as many sensors and screens and electronics
into the cars, and people get frustrated.

Tyler: That's the approach we've taken
on the controls team, which you also run — just make it as easy as possible.
Can your grandpa, can your grandma run this lighting system? If the answer is
no, well, there's more work to be done yet. Because they can run an iPad. If
they're going to run an iPad, they should be able to control lights.

Adam: There's probably certain — once
you get into the physical world, you're dealing with dangerous things. You're
dealing with temperature, fumes, noise. Anybody that's walked inside of a
manufacturing facility, it's a little bit different than just a screen. So
there's other controls and precautions that need to be taken with
manufacturing. But it's all stuff that'll get ironed out over time.

Wrap-Up

Adam: Well, cool. Unless anything else
you want to run through?

Tyler: Should be good. No, I don't
think so.

Adam: All right. Thank you.