Podcast: Additive succeeds when 'no one cares the part they're holding is 3D printed'

[Scott Achelpohl] Where of the five we mentioned, aerospace, defense, automotive, health care, and semiconductors, is additive showing the most promise? Does any vertical stand out right now?

[Ben Wynne] If you look at these five and all these other things that we've seen in the kind of hype or media kind of the last couple of decades around additive, is that additive is not one thing. It has its own Gartner hype cycle. It's many dots from bioprinting to things that we're familiar with, printing at home, etc., which was completely foreign in the early 2000s.

I think if you look at—let's go through the industries one by one. So, if you look at Your first one is aerospace. I think what we're seeing is we're seeing war is changing. You look at things like the war in Ukraine and how much UAVs and drones are changing the theater of war, how quickly that technology is evolving as both the weapons and the countermeasures to those weapons are created.

There's a massive need for speed and iteration as both sides are kind of trying to find a new way of doing things to kind of improve their outcomes. I think if you compare that with the kind of legacy way that defense programs are run or spare parts and part production is done.

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[SA] Does Intrepid utilize such software on behalf of its customers to predict the efficacy of a part before it gets installed to, say, a guided missile? Again, does Intrepid utilize such software on behalf of its customers?

[BW] If you take additive out of the equation and look at conventional manufacturing, these are the staples of quality systems, yield optimization, highly regulated spaces like medical and aerospace, they already have to do as much as they can to understand how these parts will function when they're produced.

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I think the elephant in the room with additive is that you buy one printer, classically, you buy one printer, you can get it dialed in to make the part that you want, you now want to increase your capacity. You spend the money, you buy a second printer, and more often than not, that second printer does not make the same part as the first part that you created. So in my experience working with aerospace and defense companies in the past, you have maybe in excess of 100 or 200 industrial 3D printing machines.