Formlabs Fuse 1 3D printers.
Vital Auto - a customer of one of Formlabs’ fastest growing UK resellers, SolidPrint 3D - is in the heart of the UK’s auto industry and uses 3D printing to design and create their various concept car prototypes, rapidly working through iterations using tools such as a large fleet of Form 3L and Fuse 1 printers.
The industrial design studio was founded in 2015 by three friends who set up the company in a garage and now withhold large expertise in the industry of automotive design, producing work for various large manufactures including Volvo, Nissan, Lotus and McLaren.
Companies rely on Vital Auto to help turn their ideas into physical forms when they don’t have the time themselves. Depending on the client, projects can start anywhere from just a basic sketch of an idea to an already existed vehicle, developing cars from a blank sheet and designing all the mainframes, exterior/interior components, opens/closings and interactive elements.
For each idea, the size of the team can vary from five to 30 people and completion of the projects can last between three months to a year.
In this time, a typical show car goes through up to a dozen core design iterations and from those, more iterations can be made until the design meets the expectations of the client.
Anthony Barnicott, Design Engineer in charge of additive manufacturing at Vital Auto, said: “Most of our customers will come to us with a new idea, an innovative idea, and something that's never been done before so the challenges for us are new every single day and they're endless.”
Currently, Anthony Barnicott runs a whole 3D printing department, including 14 large-format FDM printers, three Formlabs 3L large-format SLA printers, and five Formlabs Fuse 1 SLS printers.
He added: “We've used 3D printing from day one and we wanted to introduce it to our manufacturing processes, not only to reduce costs, but to give the customer more diversity with their designs and their ideas.
“In terms of capacity, all those printers have run 100%, 24/7, pretty much since day one. We use these printers for all areas of our concepts and designs. Typically, we would use the Fuse 1s for our production-based parts and we would use our Form 3Ls for our concept-based parts.”
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Air Vent produced with the Form 3L using Formlabs' Flexible 80A material.
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Door seal produced with the Form 3L with Formlabs' White material.
Despite traditional show cars being produced by just milling clay, Vital Auto also uses three and five Axis CNC milling, hand forming, hand clay modelling and GPR composites, however these processes are often not ideal for producing custom parts required for one-off components.
When creating complex car designs, the team will use the Form 3L printer to successfully create the designs which require more detail and materials, typically in a 24-hour period.
They have used these printers to create components including air vents, switch packs and door seals and now have three different machines to produce three different parts at the same time, sometimes using different materials, passing off the cost savings to the customer or offering more value by providing multiple design options for the same price.
They also use the Fuse 1 when manufacturing mechanical parts for their designs such as door hinges, door internals and structural applications. This allows them to use the parts made straight off the printer with minimal finishing.
Anthony explained how this was their first venture into SLS technology, using them to produce components that usually would have been processed by CNC machining which would take longer.
The use of 3D printing by Vital Auto doesn’t only help the team to produce better products faster but it also attracts new business for them, after finding some customers would stop using them as they wanted access to the most updated technology and their components to be made with the best materials.
Shay Moradi, Vital's VP of Innovation & Experiential Technology, said: “There are certain things that you just can't class as emerging technologies anymore and 3D printing is one of those things. It's advanced to a point where everything that we produce is good enough for use in the final presentation stage with all the layers of making that we apply on top of that. 3D printing has gone from almost a novelty to becoming an absolutely inseparable part of what we do.”
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