Eyeglass hinges additive manufacturing case study

Tom's extended demonstration that the most prominent commercial example a $420M-funded additive manufacturing company (Desktop Metal) can show after three years is an eyeglass hinge — a part already manufactured for under a penny by Leach & Garner's progressive-die fancy-wire process. Used as the central illustration of "solutions looking for problems."

Now let's go through what I skipped yesterday — a real-life example. This is a blog you can find on the web. There's a guy Don Nelson, who writes the Additive Report, a newsletter just about additive manufacturing. This is from about ten months ago. He's a science writer, and he learned that eyeglass hinges are a good additive manufacturing candidate. In a recent telephone interview with the CTO of an additive manufacturing company — [Tom holds up a quarter and an eyeglass hinge.] here's a quarter, and there's an eyeglass hinge made by powder bed fusion with a binder — and he says they can make forty-five thousand pre-assembled twelve by five by six millimeter eyewear hinges in a four-hour shift. Wow.

the technical-economic argument paired with the Desktop Metal vignette — additive manufacturing throughput vs. casting/Keurig-line throughput. Casting is 10⁵–10⁶× faster than vapor deposition by atom-flux calculation; the Keurig machine processes the same material in five minutes.

Additive manufacturing, which is what we're supposed to be talking about, is a viable technology. But you should know by now that it's only in the aerospace sector. You're not going to start building auto wheels. Next week — it's not in the 11 rule things from Digital Alloys, but Desktop Metals, there's an article that I will go through where they came up — have I told you about the eyeglass hinges? Two years and two hundred million dollars worth of research, and the best thing they can come up with is, if they can make forty-five thousand eyeglass hinges per hour.