When it comes to additive manufacturing (AM) insight, you can't really beat sticking a group of genuine users together in a room and prompting open and honest discussion on the industry's most pertinent topics.
That's what we've been doing for the last four years with our TCT UK User Group, in which we've set aside an entire day to facilitate conversation and knowledge transfer on everything from supply chain readiness to material data. For this year's edition, we did things a little differently. Alongside the final edition of TCT 3Sixty as we know it, we decided to open the conversation up to all attendees at the UK's longest-running 3D printing event by inviting four users from some of the UK's biggest manufacturers to share how they're putting AM to work and overcoming its biggest barriers.
We gathered Luke Fox, Additive Manufacturing Technical Specialist at JLR; Ben O’Brien, Digital Manufacturing Engineer – Additive Lead at Rolls-Royce; Justin Summerhayes, Additive Manufacturing Engineer at Nestlé; and Sofia Barker, AM intern at GKN Aerospace onto a panel to find out about their toughest AM lessons, universal AM truths they wish more people knew about, and at what point AM stopped feeling like a ‘nice to have’ for their organisation and started feeling like a core capability.
Here are some key takeaways from that conversation.
