Aitrtech
Published

Proto Labs Opens New Additive Manufacturing Facility

The new site houses 70 industrial 3D printing machines to provide AM services via e-commerce.

Share

Proto Labs recently opened a new 77,000-square-foot additive manufacturing facility in Cary, North Carolina. The company held an open house last week to debut the facility—an appropriate event for a new industrial site. In a way, however, an open house is out of step with the nature of the company’s business and the way this facility will be used. The typical Proto Labs customer will never see the company’s manufacturing resources here and might not even talk to an employee.

“We are a digital manufacturer,” company President and CEO Victoria Holt explained in her presentation to guests. She used the term “e-commerce” as well. As contrasted with other companies providing manufacturing services, fully 100 percent of Proto Labs’ business comes through the online front door enabling customers to upload CAD models and initiate the manufacturing they need. This model has been proven in the company’s CNC machining services, and is now being applied to additive manufacturing as well. (Another type of manufacturing the company also performs in this way is plastics molding.)

While the company’s contract machining work is performed in Minnesota, the additive operation is located in North Carolina because the core of this division came from the company’s 2014 acquisition of 3D printing service provider FineLine Prototyping. (A later acquisition brought AM capacity in Europe as well.) The basic approach to delivering parts within short lead times is similar within each of the separate process areas. That is, on-site staff members perform some manual steps to prepare jobs for production (repairing incomplete models, for example), while software developed by the company automates various steps involved in initiating that production, including scheduling. At the Cary facility, this scheduling includes not only finding open capacity on an appropriate 3D printer for a given job, but also in many cases finding open real estate within a particular build in the same material as that job, so the new part can be nested into a build already scheduled for maximum efficiency. 

3D printing analyst and consultant Terry Wohlers spoke at the event, discussing the state of additive manufacturing market growth and recent AM-related developments to an audience that included many who were evaluating using additive manufacturing for the first time. Commenting on the size and organization of the Proto Labs facility and the number of industrial 3D printers here, he said, “I can't name another company worldwide that that has what they have here today.”

The largest share of the site’s 70 additive machines consists of machines making parts through stereolithography, the process with which FineLine began and in which the company specialized. The new site also has 10 selective laser sintering (SLS) machines from 3D Systems for making rugged polymer parts, as well as 13 powder-bed metal additive manufacturing machines from Concept Laser—eight in the small M1 size and five in the larger M2 size. In both the SLS and metal additive manufacturing areas, the available open floor space and utility service leave significant room for additional growth. At one point in her talk, Holt suggested 140 machines was a reasonable expectation for the eventual scale of this site. Already there are plans to add to the number of metal machines.

The World According To
Acquire
UPM Additive Solutions
Airtech
The Cool Parts Show
AM Radio
North America’s Premier Molding and Moldmaking Event

Related Content

Casting

How Machining Makes AM Successful for Innovative 3D Manufacturing

Connections between metal 3D printing and CNC machining serve the Indiana manufacturer in many ways. One connection is customer conversations that resemble a machining job shop. Here is a look at a small company that has advanced quickly to become a thriving additive manufacturing part producer.

Read More
WAAM

Video: 5" Diameter Navy Artillery Rounds Made Through Robot Directed Energy Deposition (DED) Instead of Forging

Big Metal Additive conceives additive manufacturing production factory making hundreds of Navy projectile housings per day.

Read More
LFAM

How Norsk Titanium Is Scaling Up AM Production — and Employment — in New York State

New opportunities for part production via the company’s forging-like additive process are coming from the aerospace industry as well as a different sector, the semiconductor industry.

Read More
Materials

Additive Manufacturing Is Subtractive, Too: How CNC Machining Integrates With AM (Includes Video)

For Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing, succeeding with laser powder bed fusion as a production process means developing a machine shop that is responsive to, and moves at the pacing of, metal 3D printing.

Read More

Read Next

Basics

3MF File Format for Additive Manufacturing: More Than Geometry

The file format offers a less data-intensive way of recording part geometry, as well as details about build preparation, material, process and more.

Read More
Postprocessing

Postprocessing Steps and Costs for Metal 3D Printing

When your metal part is done 3D printing, you just pull it out of the machine and start using it, right? Not exactly. 

Read More
Production

How Avid Product Development Creates Efficiencies in High-Mix, Low-Volume Additive Manufacturing

Contract manufacturer Avid Product Development (a Lubrizol company) has developed strategies to streamline part production through 3D printing so its engineering team can focus on development, design, assembly and other services. 

Read More
Airtech International Inc.