No. 11 Toyota Camry driven by Elliot Sadler
Stratasys has joined forces with Joe Gibbs Racing and put its stamp on a NASCAR Nationwide Car in the U.S. Cellular 250 at Iowa Speedway.
The world leader in 3D printing and additive manufacturing has been working with JGR for over a decade providing the program with FDM technology solutions in prototyping and production and made its debut at the NASCAR Nationwide Series last week sponsoring the No. 11 Toyota Camry driven by Elliot Sadler.
Mark Bringle, technical sponsorship and marketing director at JGR, said: “We started out making a few prototype pieces for motor development. Today, Stratasys supports many projects and several departments. It is an accurate statement that the use of Stratasys technology has sped up the development process, totally changing the way we go about manufacturing.”
JGR has utilised Stratasys Fortus 400mc 3D Production System to print parts for testing and racing and recently expanded their 3D printing practice by adding the Objet500 Connex3 Color Multi-material 3D Printer. This means that the company now has the ability to test various materials in a variety of colours when developing parts for cars.
Stratsys vice president of sales in North America, Eric Bert, said: “The automotive industry has been quick to adopt cutting-edge additive manufacturing. JGR uses 3D printing to advanced applications including compressed engineering development cycles, critical component design optimisation, jigs and fixture creation, and end use part production.”
Additive manufacturing in the automotive industry has delivered huge advantages particularly in reducing costs when producing prototypes and offers improvements in quality and design efficiency. The ability to design and test using 3D prototypes means that manufactures adopting the process will have optimised results in end use parts for their cars and an increased competitive advantage.
