Four position shifter, made with SLA, which won the technical competition at AMUG 2013.
End-use parts, manufacturing aids, prototypes, presentation models, test and evaluation models, new concept models, interiors,” lists Carl Dekker, the Owner, Chief Sanitation Engineer, and doer of whatever needs to be done, at Met-L-Flo, as per his LinkedIn profile. Nearly 30 years ago, when 3D printing was brought into the firm, those applications were to-dos. Today, they are have-dones. With a couple of new hardware additions, and some ongoing work on the certification side, you can expect Met-L-Flo to keep-doing.
Met-L-Flo serves an array of companies in the aerospace and defense fields, exactly who and exactly what for, must remain undisclosed. What isn’t undisclosed is Met-L-Flo’s reward for continuing to adopt 3D printing technologies. The company started out in 1969 as a consultancy for the metal forging industry, but when Dekker introduced 3D printing in 1991, the consultancy business became a separate entity, and Met-L-Flo began providing a rapid prototyping service.
“Met-L-Flo started from a need to facilitate rapid prototyping when stereolithography began,” Dekker tells TCT. “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we acknowledged the potential of rapid prototyping to become a viable manufacturing technology and began the process of reinventing our organisation to also grow manufacturing applications. In the mid-2000s, we actively targeted the aerospace and defense markets.”
In line with the 3D printing industry, its service has evolved. Rapid prototyping is still part of the business, but gradually the company has aligned with industry players to begin additively manufacturing (AM) end-use parts. Met-L-Flo is also making strides to overcome the hurdles of standardisation and certification.
“[Aerospace and defense companies] understand and expect quality, they respect their vendor relationships and have applications that benefit from low volume production capabilities,” stresses Dekker. “With our ITAR, ISO 9001:2015 and AS1900D certifications, we are structured to meet the needs of aerospace and defense clients.
“Many of [them] have standards of their own already in place. We hope that additional standards may lead to greater uniformity when manufacturing these parts. As these standards become commonplace in manufacturing, new markets will have opportunities to reliably and repeatedly produce products via additive manufacturing.”
Hans Solo Blaster, that Met-L-Flo production manager, Bill Braune, made in a day and a half as a gift for Carl to display at AMUG 2018.
That vision is a far cry from the first Met-L-Flo implementation of 3D printing for an end-use application that Dekker remembers. It was back in the ‘90s when he used the stereolithography (SLA) process to produce patterns, which were then finished, decorated and moulded, to manufacture end caps for cellular communication station testing devices for Northern Telecom of Canada. The 150 castings took almost a month back then. Now, they’d be done in a day.
Dekker assesses that AM is growing in parallel with the demand for successful applications, parts that are lightweighted, or cheaper, or made with fewer parts, or any of the other typical benefits you’ve heard about. On the flip side, Met-L-Flo is meeting that demand by developing standards, conducting R&D, and investing in the latest production AM platforms. It offers four of the seven AM processes as defined by ASTM – VAT photopolymerisation; Material Jetting; Material Extrusion; and Powder Bed Fusion – and has recently installed Carbon M2 and Roboze One +400 machines.
Roboze counts the likes of GE, Airbus and Bosch, to name a few as repeat customers. The extruder on its One +400 can reach over 400°C and print PEEK, TPE and Carbon PA. Carbon, meanwhile, is most famed for its implementation in the consumer goods and dental markets. But Met-L-Flo isn’t ruling out the M2’s use for aerospace and defense parts.
“We’re hoping to apply both Carbon and Roboze to aerospace markets if the materials properties are conducive to successful programs,” Dekker said. “We look at the material offerings of these technologies and see that they may enable our customers to produce more direct and indirect end-use applications of their products.”
