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New Production Method: Digital Sheet Forming
Form sheet metal without presses, tools and dies
Forming sheet metal is expensive. It requires expensive stamping tools and dies be made, and you need a massive press to load them into. The press takes up a lot of space, as do the tools and dies, which can only make their one shape.
Production technology company Desktop Metal has upended sheet metal forming with their Figur G15 machine.
This uses the company's Digital Sheet Forming technology, which uses a ballpoint to press into the metal, deforming it at the point of contact.
The ball essentially draws the shape of your part, layer by layer.
You go straight from CAD to shaping your part; there is no wait for the tooling to be produced.
This technology completely obviates the need for presses, tools and dies. Those objects will still have their place in mass production—sheet metal forming is a $300 billion market—but for more nimble operations that don't need to produce hundreds of thousands of units, the Figur G15 will allow them to save millions of dollars.
Here's the impressive machine in action:
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Comments
Cool stuff though!
Incremental sheet forming (ISF) is hardly a new technology. It was first patented in 1967
It's an interesting article, but I'm not entirely convinced by the title. I gave a series of talks in 2009 on rapid prototyping where I discussed additive, subtractive, and forming technologies. In the latter, I presented examples of this particular technology. Therefore, I agree with Billy Mack: it's nothing new
Another company looking to reduce lead time on sheet metal parts and assemblies is
30 min build time is rough compared to the current 30 seconds..... cycle time will add a ton of cost.
For parts like these, think 3 seconds for stamping if that. Like all additive processes, incredibly wasteful and slow.
This process is not additive, though it does share a suitability for prototype and low production run parts.
The YT channel "Smarter Every Day" did an in-depth video on this manufacturing process. Worth watching to learn more details: https://youtu.be/dCXu8Ju_fdY
I saw some physical parts - very impressive.
Here is a better link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNQ40MYwZqw
Not a new technology. Maybe new to Desktop Metal. Ford was doing this over a decade ago.