MT Magazine March/April 2024

FEATURE STORY

MARCH/APRIL 2024

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if we’d like to take over,” Love says. So, the equipment moved east to Oak Ridge. Neff, in his role as market development for Cincinnati Inc. (CI), a company involved in sheet metal laser cutting systems and other tech, visited ORNL in 2013 and saw the machine. He talked to Love about commercializing the technology. The two organizations began working on developing the tech. Love and one of his colleagues visited CI and saw one of the company’s laser cutting gantry systems. Love says they determined that they could replace the laser with an extruder and turn the cutter into an additive machine. (And there were also some other non-trivial things, like developing a heated bed for the machine, developing the control strategy, determining process parameters, increasing the capability of the extrusion

etc. And in the 2014 trade show world, IMTS was leading the way in experiential exhibits. It was a real car that was assembled live at IMTS.” After his visit to ORNL, Rogers met with AMT staff members– President Doug Woods; then-Vice President of Exhibitions and Communications Peter Eelman (who is now AMT’s chief experience officer); and Gurney – and told them that he wanted to 3D print a car at IMTS 2014. Gurney says that they were all-in on the idea. It would help them with their mission of “educating people and showing them the awesomeness of manufacturing.” To be sure, the visitors at IMTS are well-versed in what manufacturing is all about, but in 2014, the idea of additive manufacturing was, for many of them, pretty much just that: an idea – if it was thought of at all for their shop floors. Rogers wasn’t pitching just building a car at IMTS – he was committed to a car that would drive out of the Emerging Technology Center. “There were a lot of people along the way who said to just have it roll. I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ We said we would print this thing and drive it off the show floor.” They got the green light from AMT. Achieving the Design Local Motors went to its community and launched the 3D Printed Car Design Challenge. It ran for six weeks. During that time, there were more than 200 entries from designers in more than 30 countries. The winner was Michele Anoé of Italy. He designed what he called “Strati,” or “layers” in Italian. Rogers notes two things about Anoé’s design: 1. By naming it Strati, it helped provide focus as to how it would be built: layers. 2. The winning design is reflective of the international nature of IMTS. “Michele said that only in America could you get an Italian to come to design a 3D printed car.” And one thing that Neff points out about the Strati design: “It doesn’t have any doors.” Doors are hard to print. (Doors are also hard to stamp, weld, and accurately fit on vehicles, even today.) The design was selected in June 2014, three months before the show. To put that into context regarding the monumental task the team was taking on, Love says that in 2014, a large, commercially available printer had a deposition rate of about five cubic inches per hour and a built volume of less than 20 cubic feet. “It would have taken over a year to print the Strati using conventional 3D printing,” Love points out. “However, even going at 10 pounds per hour – about 250 cubic inches per hour – wasn’t fast enough. Our models showed that this was about four times too slow.” So, they needed to find a means to deposit the material more Achieving the Process The Strati weighs some 1,400 pounds.

system ...) That CI machine became the unit deployed in Chicago for the Strati. (It also became the basis of a product line that CI had for some years.) And then there was another important encounter. “I ran into a guy at a conference in Boston, Rick Neff, who said that I needed to meet Lonnie Love,” Rogers recalls. Neff could see that what Love and his colleagues were doing at ORNL was aligned with Local Motors’ different approach to vehicle manufacturing. Love says, “Jay Rogers visited, saw the technology, and asked if I thought we could print a car.” The key elements were coming into alignment. AMT Involvement At IMTS 2012, the Local Motors booth in the Emerging Technology Center raised eyebrows. It built a car there on the show floor: the Rally Fighter. While the Rally Fighter wasn’t 3D printed, this was the first time that AMT featured an attraction that was built in real time on the show floor. As Gurney remembers: “This generated a new energy for the show ... People came back each day to see the progress of the project. What's new, what’s different, what were the challenges, The original gantry printer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Through a series of meetings, the idea was born to create a gantry-style extruder that would be capable of printing an object the size of a car with carbon fiber-reinforced ABS plastic. (Image courtesy of Rick Neff)