06-22-2015, 12:17 PM
It's such a cool technology. Like any tool, once you have it, you find uses for it and shift your way of thinking a bit. For me as a designer, it's huge because instead of burdening the machine shop to make me a test fixture or piece of machinery I'm designing, to test - I can simply print the parts overnight, with no labour or intervention by anyone, and then verify my designs. For high volume parts (sometimes our machines have hundreds of similar parts), geometry and functional verification is huge and we've paid for the cost of our printers over and over in rework costs alone.