MT Magazine March/April 2022

TECHNOLOGY ISSUE

IMTS

22

NETWORK SERIES

AN

Buckle Up for Texas: Watch Season 2 of ‘Road Trippin’ with Steve’ on IMTS+ BY MICHELLE EDMONSON SENIOR DIRECTOR, EVENTS & CONTENT

What makes a great road trip? Fun fr iends, good snacks, excel lent destinations, and brief run-ins with cults. What? That last one might not be on everyone’s checklist, but Stephen

Steve loves to take viewers behind the scenes and delve into history. In Season One of “Road Trippin’,” he embarked on an East Coast manufacturing history tour that began in Windsor, Vermont, at the American PrecisionMuseum. The second season takes that same focus on history and turns it toward additive manufacturing. It will be released in spring 2022 on the new IMTS+ – a digital channel dedicated to all things manufacturing technology. A Custom History Tour There was no better place to start a tour of additive manufacturing history than at the University of Texas at Austin. The “Road Trippin’” crew had the pleasure of learning from Jared Allison, Ph.D., the operations manager at the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation. They also got to peek at some vintage videos of folks doing some 3D printing at the Center – in the ‘80s! From there, the crew headed to Essentium, a small startup that quickly became a heavy hitter in the industry by using a painstaking manufacturing process to create the highest-quality pellets and filaments for 3D printing.

LaMarca, AMT’s technology analyst, and his crew did it anyway while filming Season Two of “Road Trippin’ with Steve.” They recommend you focus on the snacks and additivemanufacturing. A Not-So-New Technology In the long-awaited second season of “Road Trippin’,” Steve and his team explored the history of additive manufacturing with stops throughout Texas. “When you talk to veterans in the industry, they will tell you they were invested in additive manufacturing as far back as the ‘80s, but so many people didn’t hear about it until 2010 or later. That is a 30-year gap,” Steve explained. “This season was incredible because it was like watching the Wikipedia page for additive manufacturing come to life! We explored the rich history of the technology and saw firsthand how things got started.”