A Conversation on Formnext: Trends in 2021, and Formnext USA: AM Radio #8

The world’s largest trade show devoted to additive manufacturing (AM) returned to an in-person format in 2021. Held in Frankfurt, Germany, Formnext 2021 filled three halls of the Messe Frankfurt convention center with 3D printing equipment as well as materials, software displays, postprocessing equipment and more. In this episode, Peter Zelinski and I talk about the trends we found across the show, as well as the news regarding Formnext USA — a new event coming to Chicago in 2025. We are joined by Rick Kline, president of Gardner Business Media — our publisher as well as part of the strategic partnership bringing this event to North America (which also includes Mesago Messe Frankfurt and AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology). 

Transcript

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Welcome to AM Radio, the show where we tune into what’s really going on in additive manufacturing. And let me tell you, there is a lot to share. I’m Stephanie Hendrixson, and in this episode, I'm recapping Formnext 2021 with my cohost Pete Zelinski. We also have a conversation with Gardner Business Media President Rick Kline regarding the very exciting news that Formnext will soon be coming to North America. That’s all coming up on AM Radio.

Peter Zelinski 

This episode of the AM Radio podcast is brought to you by PTXPO, the show for North American plastics professionals. Join Additive Manufacturing Media and sister brand Plastics Technology for the first ever edition of this event in May of 2021. Find more information at PlasticsTechnologyExpo.com.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Welcome to AM Radio. I’m Stephanie Hendrixson. Here in the studio with Pete Zelinski.

Peter Zelinski

Hi, Stephanie.

Stephanie Hendrixson

Hi Pete. We are recording this the week after Formnext 2021, the world’s biggest additive manufacturing tradeshow happens in Frankfurt, Germany. We’ve got a bunch of trends to talk about from the show, as well as the news that Formnext is going to be coming to the US... but maybe just to kick us off, like do you have some general impressions of the show that you want to share, Pete?

Peter Zelinski 

We got to go, right? Like throughout the year, it wasn’t altogether clear that we were going to be going. We went. It was amazing because we’re watching sort of the world come out the other side of the pandemic, although the, the pandemic certainly not over yet. And yet, of the industrial events we’ve been to this year, Formnext seem to be like the most successful at getting back to something that looks like normal. It was a smaller footprint show than Formnext 2019. But not by all that much. And the attendance was strong, you and I each encountered a lot. It was a great show, great showcase for all that is continuing to happen in additive manufacturing.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Absolutely. So you mentioned the smaller footprint, and it was still a very big show. So the last Formnext in 2019, it was two different halls, and they each had two floors. So it was Hall 11 and Hall 12. This year, we were only down one of those floors — it was still a three-floor show. The aisles were wider, some of the booths felt a little bit bigger. But it was still a great cross section of the entire additive manufacturing industry, still a major, major show to the point that actually when we sat down to sort of sketch out what this episode might look like, we had sort of a funny experience.

Peter Zelinski 

We sat down to talk about what we’re going to talk about, right what trends we saw at Formnext. And we discovered, we almost had two entirely different experiences of the show. Right? We, yeah, we each made a list of, of trends and developments we, we think we encountered there and with very little overlap in that list. And as I reflect on that, I think it speaks to something really important and really profound about additive, what it’s all about — that there’s not an additive manufacturing industry. It’s not just one thing, just one sector. It is this wave of technologies and wave of disruptions that wants to affect many different manufacturing sectors and many different established manufacturing technologies. So it’s actually no surprise, it’s completely fitting for a show as big and important. As for next, we found different things.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

It’s just really funny how two people with, like, vaguely the same mission at this show come out with totally different experiences and notes and ideas from it. So I’m excited to talk about that today.

Peter Zelinski

Where do you want to start?

Stephanie Hendrixson

So I think we should start with a place where we did kind of agree and did sort of have a similar experience. And I think that would be the digital nature of additive manufacturing. I’ll just give one example. To start off here, there was a day where I met with both PostProcess Technologies and AddUp in the same day. PostProcess is a company that provides these automated solutions for cleaning parts for removing supports for finishing. And AddUp is a supplier of metal additive manufacturing equipment. And these two companies actually have a partnership, they are working together. And one of the the reasons they’re doing that is because postprocessing is sort of this like no man’s land in terms of digital right now. Additive is a really digital process in terms of the design in terms of the way that the printers operate. But then you sort of, like, lose that traceability, like the digital thread sort of breaks down at postprocessing. And so part of this partnership is going to be to sort of figure out how to automate to track to keep an eye on your parts all the way from design through the time that they’re finished.

Peter Zelinski 

That’s fascinating. You, so additive is this inherently digital process, but if you get to post processing, that’s the place where additive manufacturing embraces conventional manufacturing processes. A lot of postprocessing, it’s grinding, it’s milling surfaces flat, it’s polishing, it’s surface treatment. It’s stuff that we already know how to do. And sort of the digital nature of the process potentially could be lost. But you’re saying no, we’re finding ways for that digital thread to continue.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Right. So if we get away from the conventional, more manual means of postprocessing, and we can keep track of those parts throughout that step, what could actually happened, this is something that I talked to Jeff Mize, who’s the CEO at PostProcess Technologies about, you could actually end up in sort of a feedback loop where you can use the postprocessing and the knowledge you’re getting out of that step digitally as feedback to design better parts. So we talk all the time about design for additive manufacturing, DFAM, and we’re talking more and more about designing for the final use of the product to make sure that it’s performing the way that we need it to. But we’re not really taking into consideration the postprocessing so much. And if we can digitize that entire chain, from design, through postprocessing, we can use that information to design things that are going to be easier and more efficient to clean to finish in the future.

Peter Zelinski 

We’re used to looking at manufacturing processes and seeing the machines that do them. But there’s a lot more going on here than just the machines when the heart of your process is 3D printing. And I kept encountering this again and again. So Markforged, major maker of industrial 3D printing technology, had a big exhibit at Formnext. They were showing their FX 20 machine, which is a big machine. It’s bigger than we associate with Markforged, where you kind of think of sort of desktop size printers with them. But it’s a big machine that I think they said it’s like five times the build volume of their more conventional, their established equipment. And it also runs hotter. So it can work with higher temperature materials like alterum. So the equipment is on display. But the thing is that the equipment is maybe like just half the story, because the software tools are proving more and more and more powerful for realizing the promise of what additive manufacturing really can be and really can do. And with Markforged, they told me about, I made an example of that related to their Eiger software, which is among other things, kind of for fleet management, kind of has an application for distributed manufacturing. A customer had a Markforged 3D printer and using it as a tooling resource in one particular manufacturing facility. But this was a big company with 33 identical facilities and wanted to replicate that success. Other types of equipment you’d need, you’d need staffing at every one of those plants overseeing the equipment, but not with additive manufacturing. It was possible with this software with Eiger to actually replicate the same system 33 times and and be able to distribute files and, and processes and solutions, plant the, plant to plant as they’re needed. A similar story, Arburg. Arburg is a maker of conventional manufacturing equipment, injection molding machines, but also a maker of 3D printing equipment, their free former platform, again. The machines that were present said something significant and were just half the story. They were showing a machine operating at higher temperatures to work with pique, for example, high temperature material, so that was for medical applications. But there’s also this software resource that they’re advancing for that they call it ProcessLog. And it has to do with monitoring machines gathering information gathering process, in part information, all to make traceability, a natural, organic, built in part of the manufacturing process in a way that it can’t be with any other manufacturing capability. So again, the digital resources and the digital power are really coming into their own. These aren’t machine tools, 3D printers — they’re, they’re these data sources. And they’re controlling the part at every voxel. And they’re nodes on a network. And the data and network possibilities of additive are really proving to be in a big way what this capability is all about.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Absolutely. So I want to kind of jump on something you said in talking about Markforged and this idea of distributed manufacturing. And I’ll share just one more example on this, quote unquote, digital thread that we’re on, and then we’ll move on. But one of the the most interesting conversations that I had at the show was I had a chance to speak with Henrike Wonneberger, who is one of the co-founders and the chief operating officer at Replique, and this is sort of this spin out from the BASF incubator. So BASF is a materials provider. But they’ve launched this digital platform that is basically set up to do distributed manufacturing. They have a network of, like, 40 something different additive manufacturing companies around the world. And they are working with OEMs and other companies to digitize different parts and products. The idea being that if there’s a supply chain breakdown, if you need a spare part on short notice, if you need bridge production, like you can use this platform to order the things that you need. There’ll be manufactured wherever the closest manufacturer is and shipped out to you. They’ve had to work through all these issues about data security, and how do you protect the files? And how do you keep people’s IP private and all of those things, but because of the the digital nature of additive, you can do things like this, and you can build more flexible supply chains and and all of these things because it is so digital.

Peter Zelinski

Okay. That's where we agree. Should we scatter now?

Stephanie Hendrixson

I think so. I think we’re going to diverge a little bit here. So what’s a trend that you noticed that we didn’t necessarily agree on?

Peter Zelinski 

Right? Right. And it’s not that we disagree, it’s just that we saw different things? Absolutely. Okay. So here’s something I saw, like I’m watching this advance of additive manufacturing, for composites for when I say composites, I mean, reinforced polymer, for example, carbon fiber reinforcement of polymer as a way to create very strong, lightweight polymer parts. And this is nothing new. But I’m watching this transition from 3D printing for polymer composites, from it being what has been an interesting possibility for polymer to now becoming the focus and the purpose of many systems we’re seeing so composites by themselves as an engineering material, as a manufacturing material. Of course, that’s been around for, for decades. And, and and in large part, it’s done through layup on tooling. And that shapes and defines and limits the kind of parts that make sense for composites, and 3D printing changes all that. Composites without tooling, different kinds of components, now become practical for this material. And specifically, additive becomes this enabler for composites for small lightweight parts, composites for kind of little hardware that otherwise could only in a practical sense be made out of metal. Now made through polymer reinforced by fiber and an increasing number of cases, it’s continuous fiber, so that even the geometry of the reinforcement is precisely controlled. So always I saw that at the show, you know, we, the way we do the show, we land and we go right over there. And one of the first things I saw in the first Hall, we walked into big CEAD, robot, demonstrating continuous fiber, 3D printing, and again, robots as a as a 3D printing, deposition, resource, and even robots doing composites, not new, but it’s sort of set the tone then for this, this thing that I think I was continuing to notice. Another example, Anisoprint — they were showing what looked like, from a distance, a CNC machining center, but what it is, is this precise, production capable, large industrial machine for making lightweight, strong polymer composite hardware in a production mode, in an industrial mode. And again, this isn’t just a polymer additive machine. This is a composites additive machine, a new thing I think I’m seeing taking shape. And a trend I’m watching at this Formnext was the arrival of this third category, the, the maturation of this third category of what we do with 3D printing, like we use it for metal, we use it for polymer. And now I think you’d have to say we use it for composite, and it’s an altogether separate and distinct thing.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

That’s a great point. I mean, I think up until recently, it’s more the case that we see the continuous fiber being used on platforms that also do other things. And what you’re describing is sort of a trend more towards like specialized machines, where their purpose is to do continuous fiber reinforced 3D printing as a replacement for those layup processes and smaller components that might be made other ways right now. Yeah.

Peter Zelinski 

And this equipment is dedicated to that purpose because the purpose is so important and so promising. Okay, that’s um, I saw. What did you see that I didn’t?

Stephanie Hendrixson 

I had a lot of conversations about how the pandemic influenced the way that suppliers are operating or the way that they are interacting with their customers. So I mentioned Replique earlier, and this digital inventory idea is a really great solution for potentially fragile disrupted supply chains. And Henrike really kind of reinforced that and said, “We have these supply chains that are so optimized, but they’re optimized to the point that they’re all very vulnerable. And if some part of it breaks down, the whole thing does.” And so the potential to use 3D printing, as a way of manufacturing on demand, and more locally is a potential way of solving that problem. And so I had a kind of a parallel conversation with Guayante Sanmartin, who is the newish, global head and general manager of HP’s Multi Jet Fusion business. And she also kind of echoed the same thing. She said, you know, you need a plan B for almost everything and pointed to the pandemic as sort of this booster for 3D printing, because we started to see the, where those vulnerabilities are in the supply chain. And people started to really notice that 3D printing could maybe fill those gaps. And then maybe my favorite instance of this was in conversation with Yoav Zeif, who’s the CEO Stratasys. He pointed out this dichotomy between the way that sales conversations used to go, like, two years ago where equipment supplier, like Stratasys, would be dealing with engineers and talking with engineers about their technology. And now those sales conversations are usually with business leaders, executive teams who have seen the potential that 3D printing has to shore up their supply chains. And so like there’s been a real shift in who we’re talking to, how we’re talking about this technology and where the interest is.

Peter Zelinski 

That is amazing. You’re describing kind of this, like what might be a pivotal paradigm shift, this shift from regarding additive manufacturing as a manufacturing opportunity or a manufacturing solution to now recognizing a system problem and seeing additive as a system solution.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Yeah, absolutely. There were some other ways that the pandemic played into this. So I’ve been talking mostly about how the company’s relationship with its customers has changed, or its potential customers has changed. There were also like some real advances in the technology that came about. So one of my meetings was with Dror Danai who is the chief business officer at XJet. And so he said, you know, this was actually an opportunity for us to go back in the lab and, like, fix some of the things about our system that we knew were issues and just hadn’t had time for before. And so they did a lot of work to make the NanoParticle Jetting process more reliable. This is a printing process that deposits, like, a slurry of a ceramic or a metal material and then dries it and then you, you clean it, and you put it through a furnace to solidify it. And so they were able to just make that process more reliable. They introduced more materials than they had in 2019. And they also developed a cleaning station. So postprocessing coming up, again, a SMART station, the Support Material Automated Removal Technology. And so this is sort of like a vibrating water bath that takes the support material off prior to the sintering step. And so this is a solution that they might have got to it eventually, but they got too much faster because business slowed down in other ways.

Peter Zelinski 

XJet had a big exhibit at Formnext and, and I wonder if like that can sort of feeds into that all this renewed confidence they got from these engineering challenges. They have the opportunity to address — like, all these companies were there with this renewed kind of vigor and commitment and sense of potential because of all the stuff they secretly had the chance to work on through the pandemic.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

That could be the case. Alright, so we’ve already covered a lot of ground just here in the first half of the show. We will be back right after this message with a lot more about Formnext 2021 and getting into Formnext USA.

Peter Zelinski 

This episode of the AM Radio podcast is brought to you by PTXPO, a new event for professionals in the plastics industry, designed for the entire North American plastics market. This tradeshow will feature equipment, machinery, materials and technology solutions throughout pavilion exhibit halls. Check out the exhibits attend educational sessions with manufacturing experts and make new connections in the industry. If your business is involved in plastics processing, moldmaking or additive manufacturing, this is the event for you join Additive Manufacturing and sister brands Plastics Technology and Moldmaking Technology for the first ever PTXPO. The inaugural event takes place March 29 through 31^st, 2022, at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. Find more information about attending exhibiting or sponsoring this event at PlasticsTechnologyExpo.com.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

And we’re back. So to kick off the second half of this episode, I want to get back to talking about things that we both noticed and saw in some form. So one of the trends that I noticed was this movement towards suppliers who are also part producers. So just one example, I mentioned AddUp earlier in the show, and AddUp sells laser powder bed fusion equipment, they sell DED equipment, and I thought of them as an equipment supplier prior to this show, but talking to Julien Marcilly, who is the deputy CEO, I learned that actually AddUp wants to make parts just as much as it wants to sell machines. So we, Gardner Business Media, Additive Manufacturing Media, we are based in Cincinnati, Ohio. AddUp has a facility here in our city. And I learned that part of what’s happening at that facility is not just selling equipment — they’re actually putting a whole bunch of their machines into that building in order to also make parts, wants to sell the capital equipment, but they also recognize that some manufacturers that’s not going to be a good fit. Some people are just going to want to buy parts as they need parts. And they want to fill that need too.

Peter Zelinski 

Isn’t it great going to Frankfurt, Germany, to discover what’s happening in your hometown?

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Oh, it’s amazing.

Peter Zelinski 

And yeah, the thing is the distinction between technology supplier and technology provider apart provider that there is some some nuance and fuzziness between those and that they flow together. Like yeah, I saw that too. The example I guess that comes right to my mind — Sandvik, which is a, which is a material supplier in the additive space, metal powder. Sandvik and BeamIt exhibited together, and their booth was basically like 50/50 share and their names were equally prominent. Sandvik bought a stake in BeamIt not too long ago. And we got to have a conversation about that very thing about about the thinking and purpose of that. BeamIt is an additive manufacturing part provider, manufacturer, whereas Sandvik is, as I say, the supplier of the powder, but, but Sandvik recognizes that if it can invest in BeamIt and help it to advance and help it realize the potential that’s out there, then it will through that investment be growing additive adoption. And that clearly grows the market for additive manufacturing powder. The challenge right now with providing manufacturing services in additive manufacturing is having the financial resources to wait out what can be long and uncertain development times into very new types of parts and products to wait that out. And then to be ready potentially to scale really fast in response to the opportunities that come. Sandvik, a big well-established company serving many conventional manufacturing spaces, can provide that kind of financial fuel into manufacturer like BeamIt, and that sort of provides the, the win-win that helps them participate in growing the very market they expect to serve.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

So that’s interesting. I didn’t realize the, the relationship there between Sandvik and BeamIt. I think the last big topic that we’ll cover in this conversation is something that, Pete, you sort of noticed and articulated this trend before I did. But then when I sort of thought about it, I found examples too. And that’s consumer products.

Peter Zelinski 

Yeah, I’m coming to believe that the very biggest impact area for industrial 3D printing is apt to be consumer products. I think that just the entire world of what is available to us as consumers, and what we can expect to buy, what kinds of products are available to us, it’s just going to change profoundly. And I’m referring to more sophisticated products that are very accessible for niches needs and interests. And I’m, I am referring to, we’re going to advance in the area of expecting customization in the things we buy. This is all coming and it’s going to be huge. And we’re already seeing it. All throughout Formnext were these consumer products enabled by, made by additive manufacturing. And in many cases, they’re potentially easy to discount because they’re expensive at this point. And they’re being made in low quantities at this point. And they’re serving very particular markets at this point. But what is the trend with consumer goods? What do we always see with consumer goods? It is the things that wealthy consumers have access to right now. That is the stuff everybody’s going to be buying 10 years down the road. So we got a glimpse of a very different consumer marketplace that’s coming 10 years from now, thanks to additive manufacturing. We talked about it a little, and you spotted some examples that like I saw. So audio systems, like there’s now various examples of audio efficient sound speakers being realized through, through what had it, it makes possible. Tailored footwear keeps on advancing — there are more accessible, a broader range of options here. And in the future, we’re just going to take it for granted always. Shoes fit, right? And then just greater and greater design possibilities from lattice, lattices, you know, like, products we use. In many cases, they need to be soft in some places, hard in some places. And we, we sort of crudely use foams and paddings. For things like this, we’ll be able to tune in exactly the field and resiliency, exactly what we need. There’s just greater functionality and comfort coming to the stuff we have in our homes and having our garages.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Yeah, so I think what I would add to that is, I guess I saw fewer examples of mass customization and more examples of just like off the shelf consumer products. So one would be the the Syng speaker that was on display, and the GKN booth made by Forecast 3D with Multi Jet Fusion. And the interesting thing to me was that, like, there’s this 3D printed halo on the inside, that’s the key to the whole thing, like it’s this triphonic speaker. So the sound is coming out of three different places. And the only way that you can achieve that in one piece is to 3D print it, but we stood there and talked about it for a little bit. And that 3D printed Halo had to be finished in such a particular way because it had to look the same as the injection molded parts that were sort of on either side of it. I think maybe the the consumer product experience that I had at the show was sort of that additive doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it doesn’t work completely alone. One of the other things that I saw at the show was in the Stratasys booth. They had these molds for making ECCO shoes. They just sort of recently announced this partnership with that brand. And so they’re able to 3D print these molds on the Origin One printers using the Henkel material. And these are not, you know, super durable molds that can be used forever. But they can be used to make hundreds and 1000s of shoes. And so we might get different special edition shoes or like short runs of more custom items. There might just be more choices overall because 3D printing makes the tooling more accessible, which brings more variety into the product. So before we head into our very last segment, just really quick, we’ve covered so much, but we have not been able to cover everything. Pete, if you could add one more trend in just a sentence or two, what would you point to?

Peter Zelinski 

Sure, comes right to mind because we’ve hinted at it a little bit: higher temperature polymer 3D printer more options in higher temperature machines, that is going to lead to an expanded range of engineered polymers that we can work with and additive manufacturing. How about you? What is your, like, one or two sentence take of a thing we don't have time to talk about?

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Oh my gosh, absolutely multimaterial 3D printing. I saw so many cool combinations of ceramics and metals and different types of metals you know, copper and stainless steel and Inconel and other things. And I wish we had a lot more time to talk about that.

Peter Zelinski 

So we have one more big piece of news that came out at Formnext. Do you want to tee that up?

Stephanie Hendrixson 

Yeah. So for the first time ever, we are going to sort of bring a guest on to this show, AM Radio. This is somebody who we work with, someone we know pretty well and somebody who is very familiar with the details of Formnext USA.

Peter Zelinski 

Right, Formnext USA — that’s the big news, is that Formnext is coming to America. Formnext USA will be held for the first time in 2025. And it’ll be the result of this partnership between Mesago Messe Frankfurt, which puts on the Formnext show, AMT — The Association For Manufacturing Technology, which puts on the International Manufacturing Technology Show and Gardner Business Media, which is the company that Stephanie and I work for. So we’re gonna have a conversation now with Gardner Business Media’s president, our boss, Rick Kline. Pete Zelinski, I’m here with Stephanie Hendrixson. Hi, Steph.

Stephanie Hendrixson

Hello.

Peter Zelinski

And we’re joined by Rick Kline. Hello, Rick.

Rick Kline

Hi, Pete. Hi, Stephanie. How are you guys doing today?

Peter Zelinski 

We’re great. So Rick Kline is president of Gardner Business Media, the company we work for, along with AMT — The Association For Manufacturing Technology and Mesago Messe Frankfurt, Gardner Business Media is going to be bringing Formnext to the United States. That’ll happen in 2025. So we have Rick with us to talk about that. Rick, just to start, what will Formnext USA, what will it offer to the North American manufacturing marketplace?

Rick Kline

Well, I think what we’re hoping is that we’re going to be able to deliver on the promise that Formnext in Germany set out to do seven years ago, and that is to bring all of the important global additive technologies and all of the developments in that space, really for the industrial additive market to the U.S.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

So Rick, one of the questions that I’m sure you’ve heard a lot at the show is, “Why is this not happening until 2025? Why is that the timeline?”

Rick Kline

Well, there are a number of reasons why we are putting off the launch of the large Formnext USA event until 2025. First, we want to give the market some time to prepare because exhibiting at a large show like Formnext is very expensive and require some planning and some timing. Plus, we feel like we can take a measured approach, kind of a step by step approach, to introduce the Formnext brand to the U.S. market really outside of the current additive space.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

There is this table of U.S. events that are going to build up over time until the official launch of Formnext USA. And we’ll link to that timetable within the episode description. But on that schedule, Formnext is going to become more and more a part of our own additive manufacturing events and part of the International Manufacturing Technology Show which AMT leads. Can you talk a little bit about the timetable and what’s coming before 2025?

Rick Kline

Sure. So at IMTS 2022, Formnext, will be bringing their AM4U construct to the show. It’ll be on the show floor at IMTS, along with the Additive Manufacturing Pavilion, and then our Additive Manufacturing brand will be bringing our conference alongside of IMTS. And it will be actually located directly across the hall in the West Hall of McCormick Place from the Additive Pavilion. And then following on that, we’ll be having in 2023, our Additive Manufacturing Conference will be returning to Austin where we had a very successful event in 2019. We’re really excited to go back to Austin there since 2019. There’s been so much investment in additive space and in manufacturing in general in Austin. We really think that’s going to be a great future home for this Formnext Forum event, which is what’s going to be happening in 2024. Also, the AM4U space will be returning to IMTS and the colocated pavilion for additive along with our additive conference again, and then finally, in 2025 will launch the full-blown Formnext event in McCormick in Chicago. It will be Formnext USA, and we’ll run that event every other year, alternating with the Formnext Forum in Austin and the even numbered years and then an odd number of years Formnext USA.

Peter Zelinski 

So Rick, Gardner Business Media stepping up to something huge here. We’re carrying forward the U.S. version of this event that’s been been very successful in Europe, and establishing, like, a foundational recurring tradeshow that can support marketing additive manufacturing technology to this growing share of manufacturers who are going to need this as adoption advances. It’s a big long term thing. And I guess all that’s a setup to ask you to just talk about the three organizations involved in this. Why are they the right organizations to do this to sustain this over time?

Rick Kline

So when, when Formnext launched seven years ago, I actually. we had a number of conversations with Mesago people about kind of their arc in terms of building Formnext in Germany. Nobody gave them really much of a chance, and seven years is not really that long of a time frame. And they have built that event to be really the foremost event globally for additive industrial additive. And then you look at AMT, AMT produces, I believe, the second largest tradeshow in the U.S. and the even numbered years, and it certainly is the largest manufacturing event in the U.S. in those even numbered years. And they bring in generally around or over 100,000, durable goods manufacturing professionals that some of them are familiar and some of them may be adopting additive in their facilities right now. But all of them need to be looking at this technology and seeing where it might be able to take them. And then of course, Gardner, what we bring to the table is we certainly we’ve got our Additive Manufacturing brand that already has a wonderful reputation globally for producing high quality content and add to that our reach with Modern Machine Shop magazine. Probably the most well known metalworking publication in the world, Plastics Technology magazine, Moldmaking Technology brand and then also CompositesWorld. These are major end markets that all are right now considering and pretty soon, if not already, you will be widely adopting industrial additive techniques into their suite of manufacturing processes.

Peter Zelinski 

You just mentioned a range of brands and markets that Gardner Business Media serves manufacturing sectors, marketplaces, and there are opportunities in all of these spaces. Gardner across its many audiences, you have to make choices about about what opportunities we commit to. So why choose this? What’s the importance, in your view, of Formnext USA?

Rick Kline

So I think that additive technologies are going to become more and more critical to durable goods manufacturing. And as time goes on here, there needs to be a dedicated event that is looking at the industrial application of these technologies. There are other events out there that look at various different applications of 3D printing. But in terms of industrial additive, there needs to be an event that looks full circle at what’s required to start employing these technologies. Within your manufacturing environment, there’s software concerns, there are certainly materials issues. And then there are an abundance of different processes that over the long term, it’s hard to say right now which ones are going to win and which ones are going to lose. But people need to be able to have a venue where they can go to really discover what’s out there, and what’s going to work for them. And I think that 10, 15, 20 years from now, industrial additive processes are going to be commonplace in virtually every manufacturing environment you could imagine.

Peter Zelinski 

Rick, thanks for talking to us. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure.

Stephanie Hendrixson 

All right, so this episode was just one piece of our Formnext coverage. We also have a longer trends article that you can find on our website, Additive Manufacturing Media, as well as an episode of The Cool Parts Show that highlights eight of the coolest things that we saw on the show floor. You can find links to all of that in the show description. If you liked the show, please subscribe. Leave us a review and share this with a colleague and inventor or someone you know who should understand additive. Thanks for listening.

Peter Zelinski 

This episode of AM Radio was recorded with help from Austin Grogan and Kade Nicholson. The show was edited by Alex Lytle, Stephanie Hendrixson and Troy Brewer. Our artwork is by Kate Bilberry. AM Radio and Additive Manufacturing Media are products of Gardner Business Media located in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m Pete Zelinski. Thanks for listening.