Manufacturing guy-at-large.

Fresh AM titanium/carbon fiber bike frame designs

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This has been a long time coming.

For what it's worth, I had the idea before either Triple Bottom Line or Bastion launched - but I'm fully aware that that doesn't buy me shit. At its core: build titanium 3D printed bike frame components, and use carbon fiber tubing for areas that are too big to practically print. This avoids the crazy crowded build chamber (and inefficient glue joints) that Renishaw/Empire's bike required, and utilizes AM for what it's good at - making customizable, low-mass parts that fit easily on a build plate.

I thought about this for a *long* time, but only this week spent some time modeling my design spaces in Inventor and poking at the lattice generation process in nTopology Element. This is still far from manufacturable, but it was great to spend a day working through how to design and customize each design space in a way that was repeatable and simple. 

In short, the frame would have four (or possibly three, if I integrate the brake bridge into the seat lug) printed titanium components; the rest is carbon fiber tubing. I'll likely also add a printed seatmast topper (probably with integrated saddle rails).

I spent a *tiny* amount of time setting up lattices for each printed component in nTopology Element today. This is extremely preliminary, but I really like the look and think that the basic idea - that the printed components are optimized for lattice shape and thickness, but in general never reach 100% density - is a good one.

You can *bet* that I'll be working on this more in the next week. Stay tuned :)

Failure to iterate

Added on by Spencer Wright.

For context, read Ben Einstein's very smart post, "The Real Reason Why Quirky Failed."

Quirky had two classes of customer.

As Ben describes, Quirky sold pieces of hardware to one class of customer. I was one of them - I bought a few of their products (and generally disliked them) a few years back. And as Ben accurately noted, those products were often poorly supported and maintained. Which sucked for those customers.

But Quirky also sold a second product, in the form of product execution services & royalties. The customers of this product were people with ideas, and those customers "paid" Quirky by giving them the right to develop, manufacture, and distribute those ideas. 

I believe that Quirky's key failing was that that second product never got market fit. In other words: As a person with an idea for a hardware product, it just never made sense to give up the rights to that idea in exchange for product execution services & royalties.

I bring a few pieces of supporting evidence for this claim:

  • First, anecdotally: While Quirky was in business, I had a few (passable) ideas for products that I didn't have the bandwidth to execute - and I didn't give them to Quirky. And when I had a pretty good idea for a product, I didn't even consider Quirky as an option - opting instead for Kickstarter, which provided me with *much* more value in return.
  • Second: As evidenced by the fact that Quirky halved their royalty structure in early 2015, we know that they struggled to figure out how the economics of that product really worked.
  • Third, compare the paths of Quirky and Kickstarter. Both of their business models necessarily requires people to have ideas, and to give up some part of those ideas in exchange for help getting them off the ground. But while top tier Kickstarter creators (see Pebble, 99 Percent Invisible, countless others) have in many cases made their second and third campaigns *way* bigger than their first, Quirky creators never had that kind of follow-on success - or never attempted it in the first place.

I believe that this - exchanging ideas for execution and royalties - was Quirky's primary product. They were, to be sure, very proud of that fact: Kaufman repeatedly said things like "The mission of what we do is to make invention accessible to people all around the world." Nothing about the best coffee maker, or air conditioner, or flashlight: Quirky's primary product was invention services, and they would live or die based on the extent to which they convinced people to give them good ideas. But they failed to iterate on this product, and it never attained product-market-fit. And so no matter how successful their [insert consumer product here] was, that disconnect would ultimately have killed them regardless.

A bet

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I *really* like bets. Not that I'm a gambler; I just like the idea that strong feelings be backed up by dollars on the table (note: this is related to my distrust of focus groups & user feedback in general). One of my favorite recent bets is Felix Salmon vs. Ben Horowitz on Bitcoin, and I'm always on the lookout for things I feel strongly enough to place a stake on.

Well last week, that chance arose. I was having coffee with Andre Wegner, and (as is our wont) we got to talking about the prospects for simulation of physical systems. I've been playing more and more with design optimization (and therefore FEA) software, and have increasingly felt that design automation is impractical, and will develop slowly (if at all). Andre is a technological optimist; he believes that an increasingly large amount of our design, testing, and optimization will be done virtually.

A concrete example arose: Andre believes that the field of computational fluid dynamics will progress quickly enough to make wind tunnels obsolete within our lifetime. I believe it won't.

So, the bet: 

If, in ten years (2025.09.18), wind tunnels are "still a thing," Andre owes me dinner. If they aren't, I owe him dinner.

I'm looking forward to this.

New EBM prints from Addaero

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Yesterday I went up to visit Rich, Dave, and Cesar at Addaero, and came home with a few new EBM prints. These are an iteration on the parts they printed me a few months back, and should be easier to post-process (and are lighter to boot :). 

I'm working on getting a better understanding of the differences in manufacturing process chain in DMLS and EBM (a life-cycle assessment of sorts), and one big difference ultimately will be surface finish treatments. As a result, I'll be sending these parts off to a few special places to get some very special surface treatments applied to them - and then will send them to EFBE for testing. It's likely that different treatments will result in different mechanical properties, and they'll definitely result in different cost structures as well. Stay tuned for updates :)

Feedback

Added on by Spencer Wright.

There are a lot of reasons to run a Kickstarter campaign. It can provide a relatively low-risk way to get market validation; it can be a non-dilutive way to cover startup costs; it can be a good way to quickly reach a large number of customers.

But notes like this - man, they're hard to beat:

Engineering

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Over the past month I've mentioned my college major more and more in conversations about why I'm drawn to metal additive manufacturing. "Aside from trying to develop solutions for physical problems, I'm not an engineer," I'll say. "I studied Linguistics in college." I'm probably not the best judge of my intentions here, but I suspect I use this fact partly to highlight the authenticity of my enthusiasm (I've clearly selected this out as a topic of interest), and partly to set myself up as a Man From Mars. But in doing so, I end up downplaying what is an interesting thread in my career path - the desire to organize and understand data in ways that make it easier to do stuff.

I ended up in my first ling class - Syntax 1 - on a whim. I had a rather insufferable tendency to take random classes in college, most of which I'd skate through with curiosity but not a ton of drive. But Syntax was different. Where the philosophy classes I had taken were mostly concerned with arguing over opinions, and everything else seemed focused on teaching me facts, Syntax was about reasoning, pattern matching, and experiment design. Better yet, the data set at hand is literally infinite, and is accessible just by thinking up new sentences and comparing them with gibberish. I would spend hours doing this in my head: figuring out what the key variables to test a theory were, and then thinking up sentences that tested them. It was very compelling work.

Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with building things in the physical world. I was heavily involved in running a small bike shop during college, and took welding classes on the weekends. And when the opportunity arose to take time off school to run a small construction project for my parents, I jumped at it. Executing physical things - making the world more suitable for someone's needs - became a big part of my life, and when I finished my major I took on another, much larger, construction project.

Throughout my career (first in construction, then in manufacturing and product development), I've grappled with the uncertainty that the physical world brings. In linguistics (much like computer science) there's a high correlation between theory and practice. That's not to say that those fields are any easier to navigate - each presents more than its share of big challenges. But in the physical world there is a fundamental conflict between the accuracy and the resolution of what we can measure, and our ability to synthesize models for how things work is constrained by this. And even if we could overcome these fundamental uncertainties, a lot of the time you just get soot on the imaging system, and the whole experiment is rendered useless.

Somewhat separately, I've grappled with the toolchain used to coordinate physical projects. My first real experience with this was finding a decent plumber, but the same sense has followed me through manufacturing procurement, new product development, and small parts storage systems. The structures of the manufacturing and construction industries are idiosyncratic and not at all self-similar. Moreover, they turn over less quickly than those in linguistics (the study of language, not the language itself) and software development, where entire new paradigms can be developed and implemented in a matter of months. 

Today, additive manufacturing is right in the overlap in the Venn diagram of "subject to physical uncertainty" and "has a really disjointed toolchain." And the more I learn about the technology and the industry, the more it seems like the ideal place to witness - and have a meaningful impact in shaping - a new era for how human systems affect the physical world.

Of course it is key that people want the (purported) benefits that I hope metal AM will bring in this next few years. The work at hand, then, is to find applications where the value of AM is great enough to be commercially viable now - and then adjust their systems of production to fit the need. In other words: First, find what the pain points are in bringing 3D printed consumer products to market. Then, identify and organize the data flow in order to avoid & solve those pain points.

Of course, additive is just one of many sub-industries that I'd look forward to seeing the streamlined, integrated versions of. I still want a better way of finding a plumber, and I still want better ways of communicating what I want to him, and I still want more effective and efficient systems for him to organize his small parts inventory. Some of my favorite people are out there working on those problems right now, and I take every opportunity I can to help them along in some way. Because I see in them the same desire that I have: to organize data about the physical world in ways that make it easier for us to do good things there.

Hence, my desire to better understand physical urban infrastructure; my desire to help both Amazon and McMaster-Carr think about the way they're approaching the digitization of industrial supply; my frustration when today's procurement platforms simply digitize an opaque process without rethinking the role they play in product development; my tendency to draw parallels between "soft" robotics (think Baxter) and the supplier validation process. In all of these cases, I see - and am excited for - a significant shift in the way that information is used to understand and improve the physical world.

In my work in metal AM to date, I have tried to uncover the existing theories - rules of thumb, essentially - that most reliably produce parts today. I'm looking forward to continuing on that path, and to working with and around the engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs at the boundaries of theory and the physical world today.

My new (old) Wilton Bullet vise

Added on by Spencer Wright.

As some of you may know, I like doing workshop-ish projects from time to time. This used to be more of a thing for me (my career went from construction to bicycle frame fabrication to running a prototyping shop), but today it's limited by practical constraints - primarily the fact that I live in Brooklyn and don't have a shop of my own.

But my desk retains a lot of its workshop origins, and I keep both tools and pieces of hardware that I'm developing nearby at all times. It's a bit ad hoc, but recently I've put a bit more thought into what I want in my home office - and some basic tools are definitely a part of that.

So a few months ago, I bought a granite surface plate to use for inspection (and, as you'll note from some of my blog posts, photography). I also cleared a bit of space on my desk for a few small tool chests (these need to be replaced with something more substantial), and recently I bought myself a special treat: A 3" Wilton Bullet vise.

I've coveted Wilton vises for years. They're known for being sturdy and well built, and they have the benefit (especially in my current situation, where space is a premium) of being small and having gentle edges. I must have learned about Bullet vises after I purchased my first real vise - a 6.5" Yost model that, according to my email history, I bought in 2006 - and for a long time I regarded them enviously. 

Now that I'm setting up my own (tiny) work space, I'll be putting this guy on a yet-to-be-built (and yet-to-be-designed) desk in my apartment. I got it on ebay for $188, and spent some time this weekend (in my old shop in Southampton, which now lacks machine tools but is still mostly functional) taking it apart, cleaning it with Simple Green and a scrub brush, giving it a light coat of oil, and reassembling it.

The vise does have one defect: The cast iron swivel base is cracked, and needs to be repaired. I may end up doing this myself (my brazing setup is in pieces, but won't take *too* long to put back together), but given the other things on my plate right now I'd just as well get someone in NYC to help me out. If you or someone you know has experience brazing cast iron, drop me a line and I'll bring over beer and trade stories.

I'm excited for this. These vises are so cute and so functional - and it'll be great to be able to do a little more (light) work at home.

Photos & notes from a visit to the Shenzhen electronics malls

Added on by Spencer Wright.

When Zach and I were in the Pearl River Delta for The Public Radio in late July, we took a few trips to the infamous Shenzhen electronics malls. A few notes:

  • This is an ecosystem. Calling them "malls" kind of misses the point. Western style malls are just the end of the supply chain; the Shenzhen electronics malls are almost a full supply chain unto themselves.
  • I don't know how many independent businesses actually work in these places, but it seems like it must be in the high four figures at least. Many of them (especially on the lower floors) don't seem to be any bigger than a chair and a tiny countertop; others are weird outposts owned (apparently) by major international brands.
  • Everywhere in the malls, work is being done. I can't stress this enough - people are doing real, tangible work. This is perhaps the most striking part about them, and it contrasts directly with what we're used to in the US (where teenagers at Abercrombies mostly sit around, stock shelves, and run credit cards). You don't even have to look that hard - at the mobile phone mall on the south side of Shennan Middle Road, there are people at almost every shop who are literally putting phones together in plain view. Similarly, at Huaqiangbei you can see people (for instance) making wire assemblies at their tiny counters. The fact that you're buying services is totally apparent here.
  • *Nobody* was phased by our presence. There were very few white people in sight (especially on the upper floors, and at more obscure malls), but (aside from small children) nobody really cared that we were there at all.

As a final note, a rather remarkable thing happened since we returned from China. My old MacBook Pro had a hardware failure, and the problem appeared to be the hard drive cable (apparently they tend to go bad on my particular model). I ordered a new one on Amazon, and when a week went by (I hadn't really looked at the shipping time estimate), I checked to see its status. Well it turns out that the cable was sent to me directly from Shenzhen. I have no way of knowing, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it came from one of these malls.

Goals

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I've been thinking of the things I want to focus on in metal additive manufacturing, and came up with these two goals:

  1. Reduce the time & effort that independent designers spend developing & validating metal AM parts.
  2. Reduce the time & effort that service providers spend getting their shops capable of reliably making their customers' parts at a profit.

The reason I *don't* mention OEMs here is because I assume that if 1. and 2. are achieved, then the OEMs will be just fine, as they'll have a healthy supply of both engineering talent and manufacturing capabilities available to them. That's not to say that I don't want to help OEMs too, but in my opinion you can have a bigger long term impact (and help save yourself from the client-driven feature creep common in industrial solutions) if you keep small shops' needs in mind.

I have some initial thoughts on how I'd begin to address these, but I'm still in the process of developing them. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to chat about them - drop me a line!

Supply chain complexity : process reliability

Added on by Spencer Wright.

A serious question - please post comments if you have thoughts!

Does the ratio of service providers to OEMs in an industry correlate indirectly with the defect rates in its critical components?

In other words, as the manufacturing processes required to produce a product become more reliable, is production shifted away from OEMs?

You won't be surprised that my question relates to metal AM - and the degree to which OEMs can generally outspend (in both R&D and acquisitions) the smaller job shops. When a critical process in the industry is unreliable, OEMs can invest the capital expenses to either solve the problem (through R&D and often resulting in trade secrets) or acquire companies who have. But as the process matures, smaller service providers can be more competitive, as their overhead is (citation needed) in many cases lower.

As a result: Until the process (for example, metal powder bed fusion) is fully industrialized and reliable, it's very difficult for small shops to enter the market. But once the technology is well understood, mom & pop shops are able to flourish. 

A concrete example: Today, OEMs like GE, Airbus, and Philips dominate the metal additive industry, and the proprietary R&D they do makes insourcing components more cost competitive than buying them from service providers. If you start a job shop today, it might be 12-18 months before it reliably creates revenue. But if & when additive becomes a more predictable process, the time to revenue (and profit) will be shortened, and OEMs will find it increasingly attractive to outsource their parts.

^ This is a half baked theory - I'd love to hear your perspective!

Edit:

  1. This question prompted a good discussion on twitter!
  2. Another note to the example above: Arcam EBM is (and I don't mean this as a criticism) less fully industrialized than laser metal powder bed fusion. 
    There are (by my count) 23 firms in the US who own Arcam machines; three are job shops, one is owned by Arcam, and the rest are OEMs or research institutes. On the other hand, there are many dozens (by my count at least 70) of service providers who have laser based machines. If the ratio of OEMs to job shops were consistent across the technologies, you'd expect there to be over 500 firms in the US running laser machines in house - which sounds *much* too high to me.

Who are you?

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I'm trying to get a better handle on my blog's audience, and how on earth they ended up here. If you don't mind, would you please tell me a little bit about yourself?

Notes on Magics

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This month I'm doing a deep evaluation of Materialise Magics 19 and SG+, and trying to understand both the major features of the software and the philosophical perspective that Materialise views additive manufacturing through. I'll post more thoughts on the overall process chain later, but for now I wanted to work through some of the observations I've had in my first encounters with Magics.

For background: The cost of this software is in the neighborhood of $20,000. It's generally NOT purchased by people who don't themselves own industrial (i.e. $250k+) 3D printers. But I feel very strongly that without some knowledge of how it works, independent designers will be doomed to creating inefficient, difficult to manufacture designs. So, I signed myself up for a 30 day demo and got working :)

Note: Throughout this post, I'll be showing screenshots of my titanium seatpost part. I've already had one of these parts EBM printed by Addaero, and expect to have versions of it printed in both EBM and laser metal powder bed fusion (which I'll refer to as "DMLS" throughout this post) in the near future. In order to simplify the descriptions below, here's a key to the part's features:

My part's nomenclature.

Overview

I believe Magics to be a classic example of a piece of industrial software whose development has been driven by customers who are large, powerful, and often have divergent interests. 

In many ways its functionality probably benefits as a result. Materialise has close relationships with a number of industrial 3D printing machine manufacturers (notably Renishaw, SLM, and EOS, all of whom have agreements in place to allow Materialise access to their machines' build parameters, and develop build processors to work natively on those machines). They also collaborate closely with many of the large manufacturers (both OEMs and service bureaus) who build 3D print parts on the machines that Magics supports. Through these relationships (and through their own internal parts business), Materialise can get an up close view of what their biggest users need out of the software, and prioritize their efforts accordingly.

On the other hand, by relying heavily on key accounts to drive the product's development, Materialise gives up much in the way of product vision - accepting, instead, a steady stream of feature creep. Every additional feature (while I'm sure they're all valuable) makes the entire application more difficult and clunky to use, and it often feels like Materialise has given two different customers two distinct ways of doing the same thing - simply because each one demanded that the workflow fit their way of working. This kind of path is ubiquitous around the world of industrial software, and Materialise is, to be fair, ultimately at the whim of its (enormous) industrial stakeholders. But as someone coming in from the outside, the result feels schizophrenic.

The core issue is that independent designers like myself are seen as customers, while Magics' development is driven by client relationships. Again, this isn't Materialise's fault, and nor is it ipso facto bad. But I don't believe that the incentive structures that drive Magics' development are optimal for the industrialization of additive manufacturing, either. I'll explore this topic more in a later post; for now, just ponder this. In the meantime, here are my initial observations of how this big, important, and powerful piece of software works.

One important note: Materialise is a member of the 3MF consortium, which is working to create a file format which apparently contains "the complete model information" within "a single archive." My hope is that 3MF allows for more of the process chain to be accessible from a single interface, and that Materialise is a key part of that development. I'm looking forward to learning more about 3MF in the near future; stay tuned for more.

UI

Magics has two or three ways to do basically everything. At the top of the window is a drop down menu bar. It changes depending on context, but generally has a lot of functionality; in the default view, it has eleven menus - a mix of standard stuff (File/Edit etc) and context dependent stuff (Fixing/Scenes etc).

Directly below that is a tool bar, which mostly contains standard tools (undo/redo, Print 2D, Zoom/Pan/Rotate, etc). As far as I can tell, every command in the tool bar is also accessible via the menu bar AND via keystrokes & mouse gestures.

To the right of the tool bar is a series of tabs, which toggle the appearance of another tool bar below. These are a bit more context dependent, and as far as I can tell the correspond 1:1 with what's shown in the "Tools" drop down menu above. Most of these functions, though, *can't* be accessed by keystrokes or mouse gestures.

Overall, Magics' multiple, competing UIs are not unlike most of what's out there in industrial & B2B software today. Most companies (including Materialise) tend to bill this as a feature: the user can interact with the software in a wide variety of ways (keystrokes, mouse gestures, drop down menus, or toolbars), so almost anyone will be able to get comfortable with the interface quickly.

Personally, I prefer opinionated UIs in industrial/B2B software. The best one I'm aware of is McMaster-Carr's, which is built specifically for MRO professionals and makes everyone else adjust their mindset to that of someone looking for replacement parts. I'm not an MRO professional, but once you figure out how they work, the experience is wonderful. 

Magics doesn't act this way, though. The UI doesn't guide me at all; it simply offers a multitude of options, and lets me decide which one I prefer.

Orientation

Magics' "Orientation Optimizer" is very straightforward, and seems in some cases like it'd be useful. I used it only briefly, but to be honest I had already decided more or less the orientation I wanted the part to be printed in. As it happens, the Orientation Optimizer confirmed my plan, but I take that confirmation to be a bit of a false positive. As I discuss below (and have written about extensively in the past), setting an orientation angle really requires an understanding of the part's design intent and manufacturing life cycle, and Magics lacks these. As a result, it can only optimize for the factors that it understands: in this case, some combination of Z-height, XY projection, Support Surface, and Max XY Section. I chose the middle two of these, and Magics gave me exactly what I already knew I wanted.

The orientation that Magics suggested for my part

This tool is probably more useful in high mix environments (service bureaus), but most of the people in the industry I've spoken to say that when they use it, it's just as a starting point; the final orientation is almost always set by a human being.

Support generation

Generating support structures in Magics is really straightforward; it's possible (though almost definitely not ideal) to simply choose a machine, plop a part on the build plate, and hit "generate support." Magics has some understanding of the technology you're using (in my case, either EBM or DMLS), and it creates support geometries that are (reasonably well) tuned for the process. 

But before you even get that far, Magics has a nice feature that allows you to preview which surfaces will need to be supported - the "Supported area preview." Presumably this would be used while the operator is setting the part's orientation in the build chamber. It allows you to view downfacing edges as shaded, and it shades them on a color gradient depending on what you want to see. Here I'm looking at the underside of the part, and varying the angle that Magics highlights:

On my part and in this orientation, there are two large areas that need support structures (inside the saddle clamp cylinder, and from the shoulder straps down to the build platform). But if you look closely, you can see that there are also a series of tiny areas with downward facing surfaces:

  • At the v-necks, there's an surface below 30˚ whose area is .91mm^2. If you change the selection angle to 50˚, the area grows to 2.58mm^2.
  • At the window tips, there are surfaces with 30˚ whose areas are about (they vary slightly from window to window) .22mm^2. If you change the selection angle to 50˚, the areas grow to about .73mm^2.

For comparison, the cross sectional area of a "medium" grain of sand (as described by ISO 14688) is about .4mm^2. Which is to say that these are relatively small surfaces. My hope is that even though they face downwards, they won't require support structures at all.

When you enter the support generation module and hit "generate support," Magics simply looks at the faces that face downward, chooses a support type that's appropriate for the surface size & shape, and projects that support directly downward. Here are the automatically generated supports for both my part in EBM and DMLS:

Throughout Magics' UI, there are "tool pages" on the right of the window that offer a variety of context dependent functions. When you're in the support generation module, there's a section of "Support Pages" there that let you analyze and modify the support structures in your build. Looking at the support pages in the pictures above, you'll notice that I've got the "Support List" page open, and that there are 12 supports listed in that view. For each of these, a variety of data is displayed: ID; type of support; some basic geometrical data, and an "On Part" column. You'll also notice that the supports that are "On Part" are keyed red in the list. This is a very useful piece of information: those supports, when they were projected downwards, ended up falling onto the part itself. The result is that when the part is printed, those supports will tend to be more difficult to remove. In the case of the MLab build above, supports 3 and 4 run the full inner diameter of the saddle clamp cylinder. In the Arcam A2X build, supports 3 and 4 are in the same situation - but a whole series of point supports (7-12) are also partly trapped in the part's windows.

In my experience, this is *not* desirable. Especially with EBM, supports that fall onto the part itself are a real pain in the ass to chip out (for a bit of context, see the photos I took of the first parts I had EBM printed). In addition, they tend to make the surface they're hitting rough, and as a result the part often requires more post processing.

In order to avoid this, I need to modify the support parameters. By going into the "Advanced" section of the Support Parameters Pages and checking off "Angled supports," I can pull the two big Block supports (ID 3 and 4) away from the part:

(I'm working on similar edits to the EBM build, but want to get a little clarification from Arcam on those point supports first.)

I can do a variety of other things to these supports, including "Rescale platform projection," which essentially flares the support in/out as it goes down to the platform. There are also a slew of parameters (hatching, hatching teeth, teeth synchronization, perforations, etc) which seem mostly designed to make the supports easier to remove from the part. All of these can be preset in the Machine Properties screen (which, frustratingly, isn't accessible when you're in Support Generation mode) or adjusted on a support-by-support basis from the "advanced" tool pages.

To be sure, I'm only scratching the surface on Magics' support generation features here. Magics will let you play with a *ton* of support parameters. I get the impression that there's a lot of nuance here, and that there are many parameters that you'd only play with in edge case builds. Regardless, the number of possibilities generated by varying just a few of the options is staggering; in order to know how they affect part quality, you'd need to run thousands upon thousands of test builds.

Eventually, it's very likely that Magics (or whatever replaces it) will have thermal & residual stress simulations built right into the software. Today, however, machine operators have remarkably little info about the finished part before they actually print it. Except...

Build time estimation

This is a key part of the additive design-for-manufacturing process. Knowing how long a part will take to print is a *huge* factor in what it costs, and is critical in comparing two build configurations for the same part.

Magics has a build time estimator, but it's not plug-and-play. Instead of shipping pre-loaded with estimates of how long a given machine will take to build a part, Magics requires the user to run "Learning Platforms" - and you need to own your own machine to do that. And, of course, I don't own a metal powder bed fusion machine.

I was *really* excited to get a build time estimation, but no dice.

The reason for this is that in order to estimate build time, you need to know how both the slicer and scanning strategy work - as well as mechanical factors like scanning speed and recoating time. And while certain machine manufacturers (see below) share this information with Materialise, for many it simply isn't worth it. They see those process parameters as valuable, and don't see the benefit of sharing that data with a third party software developer. Moreover, most of them can provide very accurate build time estimations in their own software, and the manufacturing engineers that use the machines take it as given that they need to use that at some point in the process anyway.

This strikes me as a big failing. Magics needs a way of sharing data about their builds: a public repository of machine parameters and build times. Without that - or without, on the other hand, convincing the machine manufacturers to share that data themselves - Magics is left with a huge disconnect between the build setup and the end product. This undercuts Magics' claim to be "The link between your CAD file and the printed part." If it lacks basic data on build speed for the most common machines in the industry, what exactly is it linking to?

So: As of the time I'm writing this, I've got emails out to a handful of the biggest metal powder bed fusion machine manufacturers in the industry, asking for Magics learning platforms. If anyone out there can share that data with me, please send me a note!

Build Processors

My demo doesn't include these, but they're worth touching on. For a few big machine manufacturers (Renishaw, SLM, and EOS), Materialise has developed build processors that are tuned to those machines' capabilities and specifications. Presumably, these companies provide Materialise with in-depth data about how their machines work, some of which is either patented or proprietary. Materialise then builds software modules that, through a few intermediate steps (the most notable of which are slicing and subdividing/hatching), produce a job file that can go directly to a machine.

Materialise bills the build processors as reducing complexity in the manufacturing life cycle, and allowing both Materialise and the machine manufacturers "to focus on their core competencies." Having not played with them myself, I can't really comment. I hope to learn more soon.

A few things Magics *can't* do

To reiterate: It's my impression that Materialise built Magics to fill a really big hole in the existing work chain, and the bottom line is that that work chain is something that no single party (let alone Materialise) created. It's also, in my opinion, *not* the right work chain for the future of additive manufacturing, and Magics' role in it highlights a lot of the problems in the industry today. Here are a few things that I noticed that Magics can't, for various obscure and not-so-obscure reasons (many of which are decidedly *not* Materialise's fault), do.

Understand the underlying design

This is something I've touched on in previous posts, but it struck me again when I was in the "supported area preview" screen. It's *very* likely that I could, with a relatively small amount of work, edit the underlying geometry in order to reduce the number of supports needed significantly. But I'm not aware of a way of showing downfacing regions in solid modeling software (Solidworks/Inventor, etc), and it's rather cumbersome to bounce back and forth between Magics and Inventor to try to optimize the design for additive. 

All across the industry today, I hear people talk about design software that understands the intent of the designer, and responds to accommodate it. This may be feasible in the near future, but the bottom line is that Magics (as it stands now) is *not* part of that process chain. Once a designer transitions from parametric modeling to surface tessellations, all of the geometry data is lost. If manufacturability feedback (like the supported area preview screen) is provided in software that reads surface tessellations (as Magics does), then going back to edit the underlying parametric model is *always* going to be cumbersome - and necessary.

Understand/display surface quality issues due to orientation

In all additive processes that I'm aware of, surface finish will vary significantly depending on the orientation of a surface relative to the build direction. Given the layer thickness of the printed part, this is relatively straightforward to simulate - not to a high degree of precision, but with a good amount of accuracy, at least. Magics doesn't do this, and it leaves me feeling like I'm missing a key piece of information about the printed part. Sure, I can imagine what the part will look like if I just think about it for a minute, but it does strike me that having some indication of areas with high stepover (which will occur wherever a surface is oriented close to the XY plane) would be really helpful - and not particularly hard to implement (caveat: everything I said above about feature creep, etc).

Understand the place of additive in the process chain

This may seem like I'm splitting hairs, but I think it's worth reiterating: Magics bills itself as "The link between your CAD file and the printed part." It is NOT concerned with the end product, which in almost all cases will have additional (subtractive) processes performed on it.

Why does this matter? When I had this part EBM printed recently, both the saddle clamp cylinder and the seatpost cylinder came out undersized. I know now that one of two things needs to happen there: either I need to compensate for the printing process in the underlying model (by making the designed dimension larger than I actually want it to be), or I need to remove material from the as-printed part (by machining, grinding, or similar).

Magics doesn't know any of this. If it did, it might be able to give me intelligent advice on what surfaces to take extra care with - and which I should ignore, as they'll be machined away in the end regardless.

In the end, Magics is a piece of CAM software - but it only deals with one step in the production chain. Changing this is a monstrous, complex task, but it's one whose impact will be hugely positive.

So

Magics is pretty cool - it does a *ton* of really useful stuff. You'll note, also, that I'm basically not interested at all in its "fix" feature, which (I'm told) is used a lot with models that come out of Rhino.

But it's also representative of a lot of what's going on in industrial additive manufacturing today. This isn't Materialise's fault; it's just the way things evolved, and is the result of (I'm sure) a lot of collaboration, competition, and plain old hustling (all of which I fully support) in the industry over the past few decades.

Regardless, Magics is a place where you can see a lot of the implicit assumptions that industrial additive manufacturing has been built upon. More on this soon.

Errol Morris on asking questions

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I've been thinking a lot recently of a passage from Chuck Klosterman's book Eating the Dinosaur. In it he talks to the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, and the topic is about the act of being interviewed by people. This is a bit of a long passage, but I think it's a fascinating topic - and a relevant one to me, as I've learned *so* much over the past few years by simply asking people if I could ask them questions, and then going ahead and doing so.

For the past five years, I've spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people. I am not complaining about this, nor am I proud of it - it's just the way things worked out, mostly by chance. But the experience has been confusing. Though I always understand why people ask me the same collection of questions, I never know why I answer them. Frankly, I don't know why anyone answers anything. The obvious explanation is that the interviewee is hoping to promote a product or a concept (or the "concept of themselves," which is its own kind of product), but that's reductive and often untrue; once a media entity makes the decision to conduct and produce an interview with a particular somebody, the piece is going to exist regardless of how the subject responds to the queries. The interviewee can say anything, even if those sentiments contradict reality. They can deliver nothing but cliches, but the story will still run. On three occasions I've consciously (and blatantly) attempted to say boring things during an interview in the hope of killing the eventual article. It only worked once. But this type of behavior is rare. Most of the time, I pretend to be interesting. I try to frame my response in the context in which the question was asked, and I try to say things I haven't said before. But I have no clue as to why I do this (or why anyone else does, either). 
During the summer of 2008, I was interviewed by a Norwegian magazine writer named Erik Moller Solheim. He was good at his job. He knew a lot of trivia about Finland's military history. We ate fried pork knees and drank Ur-Krostitzer beer. But in the middle of our playful conversation, I was suddenly paralyzed by an unspoken riddle I could not answer: Why was I responding to this man's questions? My books are not translated into Norwegian. If the journalist sent me a copy of his finished article, I could not read a word of it. I don't even know what the publication's name (Dagens Naeringslif) is supposed to mean. I will likely never go to Norway, and even if I did, the fact that I was interviewed for this publication would have no impact on my time there. No one would care. The fjords would be underwhelmed.
As such, I considered the possible motives for my actions:
  1. I felt I had something important to say. Except I did not. No element of our interaction felt important to me. If anything, I felt unqualified to talk about the things the reporter was asking me. I don't have that much of an opinion about why certain Black Metal bands burn down churches.
  2. It's my job. Except that it wasn't. I wasn't promoting anything. In fact, the interaction could have been detrimental to my career, were I to have inadvertently said something insulting about the kind of Norway. Technically, there was more downside than upside.
  3. I have an unconscious, unresolved craving for attention. Except this feels inaccurate. It was probably true twenty years ago, but those desires have waned. Besides, who gives a fuck about being famous in a country I'll never visit? Why would that feel good to anyone? How would I even know it was happening?
  4. I had nothing better to do. This is accurate, but not satisfactory.
  5. I'm a nice person. Unlikely.
  6. When asked a direct question, it's human nature to respond. This, I suppose, is the most likely explanation. It's the crux of Frost/Nixon. But if this is true, why is it true? What is the psychological directive that makes an unanswered question discomfiting?
Why do people talk?
Why do people talk? Why do people answer the questions you ask them? Is there a unifying force that prompts people to respond?
Errol Morris: Probably not, except possibly that people feel this need to give an account of themselves. And not just to other people, but to themselves. Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Observer, and we were talking about whether or not people have privileged access to their own minds.
CK: Privileged access?
EM: My mind resides somewhere inside of myself. That being the case, one would assume I have privileged access to it. In theory, I should be able to ask myself questions and get different answers than I would from other people, such as you. But I'm not sure we truly have privileged access to our own minds. I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. I sometimes think of interviews as some oddball human relationship that's taking place in a laboratory setting. I often feel like a primatologist.
CK: Do you feel like you know the people that you interview? Because I never do. It seems like a totally fake relationship.
EM: I don't feel like I know myself, let alone the people I interview. I might actually know the people I interview better than I know myself. A friend of mine once said that you can never trust a person who doesn't talk much, because how else do you know what they're thinking? Just by the act of being willing to talk about oneself, the person is revealing something about who they are.
CK: But what is the talker's motive? Why did you decide to talk to the New York Observer? Why are you talking to me right now?
EM: Well, Okay. Let's use the example of Robert McNamara. Why does McNamara feel the need to talk to me - or anyone - at this point in his life? Because there's a very strong human desire to do so. It might be to get approval from someone, even if that person is just me. It might even be to get a sense of condemnation from people. Maybe it's just programmed into us as people. McNamara also had this weird "approach-avoidance" thing: He agreed to do the interview because he assumed I was part of the promotion of his [then new] book. I called him around the same time his book was coming out, and he thought it was just part of that whole deal. When he realized it was not, he became apprehensive and said he didn't think he was going to do it. But then he did, and it went on for well over a year. In fact, I continued to interview him for a long time after that movie was finished, just because I found it very interesting.
CK: But why did McNamara keep talking?
EM: He said he enjoyed talking to me. That was his explanation.

I think a lot of people don't realize the power of this. If you want answers, ask questions. People reply way more often than you'd expect.

Improved laser build

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Learning new software is fun. This is me after a few hours playing with Materialise Magics 19 and SG+.

I've made a few modifications to the standard build:

  • Changed the surface selection angle to 50°. This build is set up for laser metal powder bed fusion (aka DMLS), which will print angles a bit below that, and it's very possible that 50° isn't optimal.
  • Changed the upper supports so that they're angled. In my last post you'll notice that if these are vertical, they'll rest on the bottom face of the cylinder. While that may be fine structurally, it means that I'd have that much more to clean up, and I think I'd rather have the supports go all the way down to the build plate instead. It's *possible* that this will reduce the amount of post processing necessary on the part - you'd need to run multiple builds with different configurations to be sure.

It's worth noting that this part is too far off the build plate right now - I'm still trying to get used to Magics' UI, and figured it didn't matter for now. I should probably also orient the part at a slight angle from vertical (see my recent post, here, for more details on this); again, I'll play with that a bit more later.

Oh, and I probably want to add additional reinforcements to the short ID, to make sure that it prints round. I'm looking at a few methods of doing this, most of which would require some work back in solid CAD (Inventor), or *possibly* some volumetric mesh generation software (like nTopology). 

I'm definitely still getting used to Magics' philosophical perspective on the additive process chain, too. I have some thoughts on what this is, but will play around more before I share them :)

Stay tuned.

This week: Materialise Magics 19 and SG+

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Just a little teaser:

This week, in addition to the networking I'm doing (remember: I'm a free agent now, and directing my efforts toward finding the best path for myself in metal additive manufacturing), I'll be diving deep into Materialise Magics 19, the industry standard software for metal 3D printing build processing. I'm excited to learn more about its capabilities, and will share more later this week. I'll be spending most of my time working on orientations & support structures schemes for my titanium seatpost head, seen here in Magics' simulation of an EOS M280:

Magics bills itself as "The link between your CAD file and the printed part." It's used by OEMs and service bureaus alike to prepare design files to be printed - often times on the very machines that I've been building parts on (one, two) over the past year. In most cases, Magics imports an STL file. It then can be used for three big chunks of work:

  1. Fixing. In many cases the files that you import are broken in some way (edges not connected; faces oriented in the wrong direction), and can't be printed as is. Magics has a suite of tools that analyze and solve these problems.
  2. Editing. There are a variety of reasons why you'd want to edit a design before printing it, but probably the most common is that it won't fit in the build chamber of the machine it's being printed on. Magics offers tools that cut, hollow, thicken, perforate, extrude, label, boolean, and support parts and their features.
  3. Build prep. This is the part that I'm most interested in, as it directly affect the workflow that I've beed dealing with on my titanium parts. Here, the user selects the machine that the parts will be printed on. Then the parts are oriented physically within the build chamber, and an analysis is run to confirm that there are no part collisions that will affect the build.

Lastly - and of particular interest - is the SG+ module for support generation in metals. This would fall somewhere between (and across) numbers 3 and 4 above, and involves creating solid and mesh support structures that anchor the part to the build plate and provide thermal sinks to ensure a successful build. The SG+ module is a critical part of the metal 3D printing process chain today. It's used extensively across the industry, and engineers who are skilled at support generation are highly prized.

This week I'll be exploring these features (especially build prep and SG+) extensively; stay tuned for updates.

Brilliant's videos

Added on by Spencer Wright.

When I went to Taiwan last year with Brilliant Bicycle Co., I wrote a few posts that described the trip & what we saw there. But I never linked to Jacob Krupnick's videos of the trip, which do a much better job of relaying the mood & feel of the trip. So, here goes.

First, the tire factory (see my notes here):

Second, the cardboard box factory (see my notes here):

Third, the fork factory (see my notes here):

Fourth, the frame factory (see my notes here):

Fifth, the final assembly shop (see my notes here):

Sixth, the saddle shop (no notes from me, sorry):

Seventh, the paint shop (ditto):

Notes on Amazon Business and decisions in B2B ecommerce

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This week, while in Seattle, I had the pleasure of visiting Amazon and talking with some folks there about Amazon Business. To prep, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the B2B ecommerce world, and how the major players in it have approached & prioritized their efforts there. I've written about both Amazon and B2B ecommerce a bit before, but what's below clarifies my thoughts on their position in the ecosystem significantly.

To an outsider, Amazon has always struck me with two core messages:

  1. We are insanely customer focused.
  2. We have built a massively impressive logistical operation - the biggest of its kind, outside of China.

Also of note: Amazon has always seemed to target specific audiences in its external messaging. Most prominent to me are:

  • Consumers; people who would otherwise be shopping at Walmart or local retail stores. Basically everything on the website is directed towards this group.
  • Other retailers/competitors. This is a bit less immediately evident, but it’s my impression that Amazon’s willingness to talk openly about their fulfillment centers (one of which I toured last year) and the way they’re thinking about logistics & delivery (cf. drone delivery, rumors about a NYC store, etc) are intended specifically to scare off firms that might want to compete with Amazon’s retail business.
  • Google/Apple/Microsoft. This is specific to AWS, which has become increasingly in focus over the past year (but was always assumed to be huge).
  • Investors. The best example of this is the shareholder letter, which is always a good read. The core intent here seems (and I’ll admit that this is a half-baked theory at the moment) that investors should trust Amazon, because they’re a truly visionary company - like Apple and Google, NOT like some retailer that should be focusing on short term objectives.

What’s missing in the list above is business customers. I’ve bought plenty of business related stuff on Amazon, but it’s usually been from my personal account, and the shopping experience isn’t aware (or doesn’t care about) the context shift that I (presumably?) go through when I clock in and out. The “Recommendations for you” sections switch over, but it’s on a visit-by-visit basis. Amazon treats me as a person, and it simply recommends that I look at things that are similar to what I looked at recently. 

Now, I’m sure that plenty of businesses have Amazon accounts that are just for business purchases. I worked at one such business a few years ago, and again recently. In both of these cases, I got the impression that (and please, pardon the pseudo Christensen here) Amazon had trickled *up,* being used first at home (whether by the person in charge of purchasing, or someone who was bugging them to buy something) and then later at work. As a result, it always made sense that the Amazon product we used at work was the same as the one we were using at home. I was used to it, and it has gotten *so* easy to buy stuff for personal use there, and changing my mindset a bit to use Amazon for business stuff was really very easy.

The arrangement worked well. When I was running a prototyping shop, I made a *lot* of purchases from McMaster-Carr and MSC and Rutland. Those companies’ catalogs were tailored for the work we were doing, and they (especially McMaster) do *such* a good job of providing a consistent browsing, purchasing, and fulfillment experience, that once you get used to their system it’s hard to imagine life without it. But there were plenty of times where I used Amazon too, especially when it came to items that fell more on the “office supplies” end of the spectrum. Amazon’s search features are really good, and it’s great to have ratings sometimes as well. Amazon’s product discovery system is dramatically different from those of the industrial suppliers, and there are a lot of cases where I’ll hit the wall with one system and really just want a change of pace.

This is worth highlighting: 

  • McMaster-Carr’s search is very good, but their browse features are just *awesome.* This works because they’re basically a walled garden: McMaster curates their catalog well, and they do a really fantastic job collecting & displaying (consistent!) data about every product that they sell. 
  • Amazon is basically on the other side of the spectrum. Their catalog is enormous, but it’s full of stuff that comes from third parties, and is often really poorly documented. Plus there’s a lot of stuff that you can buy on Amazon that’s basically a joke (that 55 gallon drum of lube comes to mind). This is partly made up for by their review system, which is really helpful when you’re evaluating multiple products whose data doesn’t line up directly. But it also feels like a crapshoot sometimes, especially with decidedly consumer products (that three wolf shirt comes to mind). In the end, the Amazon shopping experience is definitely less consistent than McMaster’s - but then again, McMaster won’t sell you a 55 gallon drum of lube. (I’m being facetious, but the point is real. Amazon’s huge catalog is definitely a feature.)
  • The other industrial players are a mixed bag. None of them are as good about data keeping (or, consequently, browsing/filtering) as McMaster. None of their searches are as good as McMaster or Amazon, and none of their catalogs are as large, either. They make up for these shortcomings with depth: Uline does shipping, MSC and Rutland do tooling, etc. They have niches, and their capabilities within those niches make them incredibly valuable.

It’s also worth noting that these companies each take a different approach to knowing/caring who (or what type of entity) their customers are:

  • It’s implicit from McMaster’s site, but I’ve been told in person that they take it very seriously that they do *not* treat different customers differently whether they’re a business or an individual. The prices I see as some schmo on the street are the same prices I see if I’m an engineer at Lockheed Martin, and they don’t give quantity discounts either. They’ll even turn away large orders, and are in general happy to send customers to their suppliers if it’d make more sense to cut McMaster out of the transaction. 
  • A lot of the same could be said of Amazon, with the caveat that there’s a public perception that Amazon is constantly optimizing their pricing - definitely for time of year (supply and demand), but possibly also on a person-by-person basis. I have no way of knowing how much of this is true, and personally I wouldn’t find it offensive if it was. But it does strike me that Amazon takes the stance that “everyone sees the same site, but that ‘same site’ is one that’s constantly shifting depending on who you are and when you’re looking at it and what you looked at recently, and when we talk about the ‘same site’ we’re talking about something that might vary in layout, graphic design, product recommendations, pricing, and any other number of variables.”
  • Most of the industrial players, on the other hand, do kind of want to be selling to actual businesses. Some of them will go so far as requiring EINs or sales tax IDs (this is more common with suppliers that sell products at wholesale), but almost all of them will at least have the “business name” field be required.

If it’s not clear, I *like* these differences. I enjoy living in a world where companies put philosophical approaches to commerce up for debate, and let consumers decide which they prefer. The variety is good, and I find myself enjoying trying to use each to its most powerful effect. But the differences are worth noting, and it’s fun (and possibly useful) to project outward where each of these perspectives might lead in the future.