Markforged
Canvas Category Machinery : Additive Manufacturing : 3D Printer
Markforged was founded in 2013 on the belief that additive manufacturing can transform how entire industries operate. Our platform, The Digital Forge, continues to make that possible. The Digital Forge is the intuitive Additive Manufacturing platform for modern manufacturers—bringing the power and speed of agile software development to industrial manufacturing. Composed of software, printers, and materials working seamlessly on a unified platform, it’s purpose-built to integrate into your existing manufacturing ecosystem. Digital Forge adopters reap immediate benefits through massive time and money savings on parts. The Digital Forge platform is designed to eliminate barriers between design and functional part. Through increased adoption, the platform drives competitive advantages by making your entire operation more agile and efficient.
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Markforged Introduces The World’s First Metal & Advanced Composite Industrial 3D Printer
Markforged (NYSE: MKFG), the company strengthening manufacturing resiliency by enabling industrial production at the point of need, announced the FX10 Metal Kit, a print engine that brings metal printing capability to the FX10. With this kit, the FX10 becomes the world’s first industrial 3D printer that can print both metal filaments and composites with continuous fiber reinforcement.
The FX10 Metal Kit consists of a swappable print engine that includes a metal-specific print head, material feed tubes, routing back, and dual pre-extruders. An FX10 can be swapped between metal and composite as many times as needed, and the swap takes about 15 minutes.
3D Printing Car Parts for General Motors with Azoth 3D
Vestas and Markforged
The Vestas team began researching alternative ways to improve their overall manufacturing process. Using Markforged’s cloud-based, AI-powered Digital Forge additive manufacturing platform, the company successfully launched its direct digital manufacturing (DDM) program in 2021. The program frees up manufacturing processes from relying on outside suppliers, and provides a knowledge base for collaboration.
The DDM program already includes 2000+ Vestas parts stored in a Markforged Eiger™ cloud-based digital repository. This allows employees at any Vestas location — with little to no additive manufacturing expertise — to quickly search for and print any number of fiber-reinforced composite parts on their local X7™ and composite parts on their Onyx One™ 3D printers.
According to Jeremy Haight, Principal Engineer — Additive Manufacturing & Advanced Concepts at Vestas, “Our approach is end-to-end. We provide the physical article in near real-time to a variety of places. It’s the closest thing to teleportation I think you can get.” Thanks to the repository, the Vestas team knows they will get consistent, up-to-spec parts at a moments notice, anywhere in the world, without the need for specialists at their global facilities. This has dramatically reduced shipping and freight costs, and manufacturing lead times.
Unlocking Efficiency: End-of-Arm Tooling (EOAT) and 3D Printing in Industrial Automation
EOAT design must take into account factors like the size and weight of the objects to be handled, the required precision, the production environment, and safety considerations. The goal is to optimize the robot’s performance and efficiency for a specific task.
EOAT strength is critical for the robot to perform its job while avoiding equipment damage. Maintaining strength while lightweighting can optimize robot performance in several ways. A lighter tool can help a robot perform tasks faster, more precisely, and with less energy consumption— ultimately leading to greater productivity and cost savings. Lighter tooling can also enable manufacturers to use smaller, cheaper robots.
How BMF GmbH uses Digital Source
BMF GmbH invented a device to automate media blasting of small parts, traditionally a manual operation. Typically, a worker would direct a high-pressure air nozzle containing the blasting medium at a part to smooth its surface. This process was time-consuming and error-prone. BMF founder Ronny Bernstein had a better idea.
When BMF first began producing Twisters in 2014, all of the parts were CNC machined. But in 2018, founder Ronny Bernstein purchased a Markforged Mark Two printer and began experimenting with 3D printing its components using Onyx. The results were so successful that BMF converted its Twister part production to this rugged material.
According to BMF development engineer Thomas Mueller, downtime can be very expensive for BMF’s customers. He explains why: Each workholding fixture may hold 10 parts, and the rotating blasting cabinet platform can hold 10 fixtures at a time. Twister’s cycle times are typically just a few minutes, meaning that each day a Twister machine isn’t running, as many as 50,000 parts per day are not sandblasted and other secondary processes may be idled in customer facilities, too, he estimates.
Using Co-Part Assemblies and Continuous Fibers to Print Stronger Parts
When it comes to the strength of parts, choosing the right 3D printers and materials makes all the difference. While many 3D printers can print common plastics such as PLA, ABS, and Nylon, the resulting parts are not suitable for many industrial uses that demand qualities such as strength, stiffness, heat and chemical resistance, plus durability.
While a number of 3D printers can print in stronger carbon fiber, Markforged 3D printers in particular can achieve even greater strength improvements. Markforged composite printers combine a base material discontinuously reinforced with carbon fiber (Onyx) with reinforcing continuous fibers laid through the part.
Continuous Fiber Reinforcement (CFR) is a proprietary process that allows Markforged printers to produce impressively strong composite parts. Reinforcing fiber materials include Carbon Fiber, Fiberglass, HSHT (High-Strength High-Temperature) Fiberglass, and Kevlar®.
When designing co-parts, you also need to make a trade off between print time, support material usage, and some other factors. The best strategy that I’ve found is to arrange the co-parts such that applied load attempts to pull one part through the other.
Machinist 3D Prints Money-Saving Fixtures Using Markforged University
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Lights-out Manufacturing with Athena 3D
How Markforged Continuous Fiber Reinforcement Works
300 Small Manufacturers In Michigan Got Free 3D Printers. What They Did With Them Might Surprise You.
Called Project DIAMOnD for Distributed, Independent, Agile, Manufacturing On-Demand, it is poised to become the world’s largest emergency-response network for 3D printing physical objects on demand. Locally, over the past two years, the program has helped small manufacturers realize cost savings and flexibility they didn’t know was possible with 3D printing. They’ve printed parts to keep their lines operational and versatile in the face of disruption and uncovered new business opportunities.
The Factory of the Future: Markforged and Guhring
Explained: Why Markforged has moved to acquire Digital Metal & Teton Simulation
It has been two years since Markforged began to push its Digital Forge platform to the manufacturing public. A cloud-based network that would bring together its software, materials and hardware capabilities, Digital Forge was described by Markforged founder Greg Mark as a platform that would enable manufacturers to fabricate metal and composite parts orders of magnitude cheaper than they’ve traditionally been made – on demand and at the point of need.
First with the takeover of Teton Simulation, and now with the impending acquisition of Digital Metal from Höganäs AB. In isolation, the purchases of a metal 3D printing technology that can give the company access to ‘higher throughput production of metal parts’ and a software technology that is a ‘usable, approachable FEA simulation software for FFF (Fused Filament Fabrication) 3D printing with the best results’ were no brainer moves. But together, they fill pieces of the jigsaw that conveys Markforged’s overarching ambition.