Stuart Banyard, Head of Advanced Manufacturing at KWSP.
High performance engineering and additive manufacturing specialist, KW Special Projects (KWSP), has invested over £100,000 in new state-of-the-art equipment that will increase the UK company’s 3D printing capabilities.
The investment comes as part of Brackley-based company’s ambitious five-year growth plan to accelerate its complete design and manufacturing solutions.
The new kit includes a Stratasys Fortus 400 MC FDM machine, which will allow KWSP to rapidly manufacture soluble mandrels, low volume end user parts, prototypes, jigs or fixtures and one-off or low volume tools in a wide range of materials. The company also continues to offer a variety of post processing options and in house developed solutions.
“The opportunities and benefits this increase in capability will offer our customers are substantial,” Stuart Banyard, Head of Advanced Manufacturing at KWSP, commented. “With a background in motorsport and high performance engineering, we have extensive relevant experience, which enables our clients to gain the optimum benefits of all aspects of digital fabrication, including additive manufacturing and scanning.”
KWSP has also invested in a Creaform HandySCAN 300 scanner and Geomagic Control 3D Software. This equipment will allow the company to provide additional inspection and quality control of manufactured parts as well as providing the ability to digitally scan, measure and re-engineer products.
The equipment has already been put to great use, with KWSP completing the entire design process on a recent project, from the original scanning of a legacy part with no CAD data through to design and manufacture of a prototype, optimisation of design, final manufacture and scanning for inspection. The process was able to mitigate errors, improve accuracy and reduce lead times.
Located adjacent to F1 team Mercedes AMG Petronas’s facilities, KWSP is at the heart of the UK’s “Motorsport Valley” and is just one of more than 1000 companies in Northamptonshire that form the “High Performance Technologies Cluster.
Stuart, added: “We’re looking forward to putting our increased capabilities and capacity to good use in the very near future, building up a quicker response time and rapid results for clients across a wide range of industry sectors.”
