Forerunner 3D Supports Automation with 3D Printed EOAT

Paul DeWys, founder and sales engineer at Forerunner 3D Printing LLC (Coopersville, Michigan) says he started his first company — an engineering design service called DeWys Engineering LLC — in his dorm room at Ferris State University in 2010 after working for a number of tool and die shops during summers before graduation. The design company grew over the next 6 years and developed a specialty in automation equipment, particularly additively manufactured components for injection molding operations — an area DeWys had found wanting when he worked in that segment.

“I grew up working in a lot of manufacturing facilities and automation was always something that interested me — especially robots,” DeWys explains. “Because of that, when I began staking my business position in the engineering world, I decided to focus on automation and tooling.” He notes that there are few places in industry where robots will be removed and replaced with humans over the next decade, as there are too few workers to meet current demand with the massive wave of baby boomer retirements. The only way for manufacturers to meet that demand, let alone grow, will be to add more automation. “We saw that the manufacturing industry was in desperate need of a 3D printing company that also was an expert in shopfloor manufacturing equipment, and we also saw that no one in the additive world was paying any attention to the manufacturing segment,” he adds.

Early on, DeWys Engineering designed additively manufactured end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) and fixtures, then sent them to a local service bureau to be produced. In 2016, DeWys had the opportunity to buy out his 3D printing vendor and bring AM in-house. That led to the creation of a separate custom printing division called Forerunner 3D, which produces parts designed by DeWys Engineering or by customers themselves.

In the intervening years, Forerunner has added a number of different polymer AM technologies to its offering, including Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) from HP Inc., Polyjet polymer jetting printers and fused deposition modeling/FDM (also called fused filament fabrication/FFF) from Stratasys, selective laser sintering (SLS) from EOS GmbH and stereolithography (SLA) from 3D Systems Inc..

This gives the company considerable flexibility in the types of parts it produces, including a broad range of EOATs, part pickers/grabbers, sandblasting masks, Pogo pin nests, vacuum forming tools, and even metal foundry pattern tools and machine assembly components for automation cells.

Currently, 95% of the company’s printed EOAT are produced on MJF printers in polyamide 12 (PA12). For especially large parts, the company often adds brass heat-set inserts for threaded connections, which are installed as a post-print secondary operation. Rather than develop monolithic designs, most EOAT are produced as multicomponent builds to provide adjustability and are subsequently snap-fit together or are mechanically joined or adhesively bonded. Many part pickers are overprinted with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) elastomeric grips in secondary operations to protect the integrity of aesthetic parts with sensitive finishes. It’s also common to produce hybrid EOAT featuring tubular components or jig plates in 80/20 aluminum that are connected to a printed vacuum gripper nest with integral vacuum channels (printed much like conformal cooling channels are in metal AM mold inserts). Typical customers are injection molders and moldmaking shops, although DeWys and Forerunner also work with machine builders and robot integrators.

DeWys acknowledges that getting manufacturers to try AM technology requires education and patience, and says he conducts a lot of “lunch-and-learns” to educate companies on what DeWys and Forerunner can do, the lessons they’ve learned and how the company can make automation components faster, lighter and at lower cost than companies can produce themselves or buy from conventional manufacturers.

“Circa 2016 to 2019, we’d try to get manufacturers interested in adding a few cobots [collaborative robots] and they’d tell us that they didn’t need automation because Bob the Box Stacker had worked for them for 40 years,” DeWys adds. “Now fast forward to the pandemic and its crazy labor shortages and our phones were ringing off the hook for a solid year. All of a sudden, Bob the Box Stacker was gone and there was nobody they could hire to stack boxes anymore. In the past 2 years, we’ve been absolutely inundated with automation jobs.”

What advice does he have for those considering additively produced automation components? “AM is just one more tool in your toolbox and I’m not here to put your CNC department out of business — what I offer is a supplement to your CNC department that will enable you to produce things you couldn’t make otherwise,” DeWys says. “Also, don’t feel like you have to print your entire EOAT. Make the structure out of 80/20 and then you have the design freedom and rapid turnaround that only additive can provide. The hybrid approach is not only lighter and less costly, but it’s adjustable in a way that metal alone is not.”