The businesspeople of big city corporates and the students at public universities often start their day in the same way, passing through a revolving door, a polite hello to those in reception, touching an ID card to an electronic reader and walking on through the glass wing barriers marked by the Fastlane Turnstiles brand to the rest of their day.
How the branding of Fastlane made it onto the glass walls that help the likes of Facebook, Dell, Google, Manchester University and 7 World Trade Center keep their buildings secure has typically been no easy process. It was done by hand and by sight and if the positioning of the logo wasn’t done correctly it would have to be removed and re-positioned on the glass wing. This was a difficult task to carry out repeatedly, time-consuming and occasionally stressful, and then 3D printing came along.
The manufacturer of pedestrian entrance control systems first adopted the technology in 2018, after meeting UK reseller CREAT3D at an additive manufacturing trade show, in the form of a Mark Two machine. This platform, developed by Markforged, reinforces its Onyx material with carbon fibre, fibreglass and Kevlar, and was acquired by Fastlane to streamline its R&D efforts, designing parts at lower costs in less time.
Working with CREAT3D, some initial sample parts – one, to check the form of an R&D component, and the other, to assess the function of a manufactured component – were printed, with Fastlane said to have been impressed with the strength properties, surface finish and temperature resistance.
The engineering department's functions of R&D, production support & continuous improvements have all been greatly supported by 3D printing.
After these initial parts, Fastlane installed the Mark Two in its engineering department, where it was immediately leveraged to print R&D components that typically would have been outsourced and produced in metal. Printing these kinds of parts was removing two weeks of lead time out of the design process and soon Fastlane’s production and assembly team were also looking to exploit the machine’s capabilities. From here, Fastlane’s application of 3D printing has snowballed, per CREAT3D’s Sabina Gonzalez-George and Simon Chandler.
Often cited as additive manufacturing’s ‘low-hanging fruit’, production aids not only represented a quick win for Fastlane, with cost and time reductions achieved against traditionally manufactured jigs and fixtures but, by 3D printing a jig with a ‘locating edge’ to fit the exact geometry of the glass door, also solved the problem of positioning the company’s logo on those glass wing barriers.
“The glass barriers were CNC cut, so we knew the barriers were fairly accurate to the [design] drawing; we modelled the jig using the flat and curved edges of the glass as datums in Autodesk Investor and were able to print it fairly quickly, which allowed production to attach the logo easily,” explained Fastlane Technical Manager Mike Lau. “[Additionally], the jig would be a fairly complicated and expensive part to make using traditional methods, with a lot of setup and machining out of costly material, so, as a one-off, 3D printing makes sense as the cost and time are only at a fraction of what traditional methods would normally be.”
1 of 2
Part: Rotary R&D component
Cost: £10
Time: 4 hours
2 of 2
Part: Bespoke finger vein housing
Cost: £10
Time: 12 hours
This is the kind of tool Fastlane would have typically outsourced to be machined out of aluminium steel at a cost of around 150 GBP and delivered after two weeks. With 3D printing, Fastlane produced the part in six hours, a reduction of 96%, at a cost of under 7 GBP; a reduction of 95.5%; and has recorded right-first-time application with 100% accuracy of its branding on the glass wings.
“With 3D printing, we can now usually produce a jig in less than a day, which has greatly reduced delays to production,” said Lau. “Also, as it was previously very expensive and time-consuming, we would limit the amount of jigs we had but now, with the ease of 3D printing, we’ve been able to create more types of jigs to help production.”
The company’s application of 3D printing for jigs and fixtures is now ‘extensive’, according to Lau, with R&D parts also representing a large number of internal print jobs. Fastlane has also identified several end-use production components that can be produced on the Mark Two, albeit at low volumes, with further work to be carried out to ascertain whether parts needed at larger volumes can be 3D printed.
Whichever category of parts ends up requiring the greater application of the technology, Fastlane’s use of 3D printing is now broad across the business, and the benefits of the technology extend to each of its customers too.
“The engineering department's functions of R&D, production support, custom projects and continuous improvements have all been greatly supported by having the 3D printing capability. Production has benefitted by having 3D printed parts that have greatly improved ease and time to assemble. Customers have seen benefits as we are more agile in being able to integrate third-party equipment to our products,” finished Lau. “The impact has been massive.”
