Anyone who’s watched the 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day remembers the scene when the bad-guy, shape-shifting terminator rises and reshapes itself out of a puddle of liquid metal.
A similar real-life, but much more benign, scenario plays out daily in Streetsboro — using technology in fact inspired partly by the blockbuster sci-fi movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But there is no fiction in this bit of high-tech science.
The Technology House, or TTH, recently became host to some of the latest 3-D industrial printers. The Portage County manufacturing company’s 3-D printer collection off Aurora-Hudson Road now includes three groundbreaking Carbon M1 printers — and executives eventually want as many as 100 of the units from California-based Carbon. Carbon, created in 2014, is funded in part by Google Ventures.
TTH is among many other businesses in Northeast Ohio using 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. In most cases, 3-D printers make prototypes, not products sold to customers. But the growth of the ever-evolving technology in the region could turn manufacturing-heavy Northeast Ohio into a 3-D printing powerhouse, some experts say.
What’s unique about The Technology House is its collection of speedy, some say game-changing, Carbon printers, which it leases. The company’s niche is low-volume production and rapid prototyping for medical, automotive and other industries.
The objects built by the Carbon printers rise Terminator-like from a pool of liquid resin in a tray, albeit much more slowly than in the movie but fast enough and strong enough to be production parts, not just show-and-tell prototypes. The process is called continuous liquid interface production or CLIP and uses ultraviolet light and oxygen to cure resins. (And, yes, Carbon has used the Terminator 2 clip to promote itself.)
“The part builds continuously as it comes up,” said Chip Gear, TTH’s chief executive officer, as he demonstrated the technology. “This is a part for a BMW. ... This could be an actual production part. Right now it is what I would call a pre-production part. Everybody is evaluating what it is, how good it is.”
Great promise
Part building this way is not as fast as using traditional plastic mold injection, Gear said. But it also takes a long time, and at considerable expense — as much as $70,000 or more — to make a blow injection tool used to manufacture a specific part, he said. And that’s where he and others at The Technology House see great promise in the Carbon M1 printers. TTH was one of just five companies nationwide selected by Carbon to beta test the technology.
“We came out of beta in March,” Gear said.
The Carbon machines are faster than some other traditional manufacturing methods, Gear said.
“We have several companies in what I call pre-production,” Gear said. That means making anywhere from several hundred parts to a thousand to be tested and evaluated.
“This machine now, in my opinion, is ready to make a complex part,” Gear said.
TTH’s Carbon printers also can manufacture items in one piece that other traditional methods would require making two or more parts that then need to be assembled together. “With this machine, you can grow it in one,” Gear said.
Development study
Cleveland-based MAGNET — Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network — is formally looking at 3-D printing in Northeast Ohio.
“We’re doing a cluster development study,” said Dave Pierson, senior product development engineer at MAGNET. The goal is to assess the needs and capabilities of additive manufacturing in the region, he said. Work started in February and is expected to be completed this month, he said.
“Then we can kind of build an action plan,” Pierson said.
Pierson is an advocate for 3-D printing. His job involves such things as showing businesses how they can incorporate additive manufacturing.
“You can use additive in ways a lot of people don’t know,” he said. Sheet metal stamping firms, for example, may not realize that additive manufacturing can reduce the time it takes to make a part from as long as 10 weeks to a matter of hours, he said. That dramatic reduction in time in turn opens up new markets for stamping businesses, he said.
“I think of additive manufacturing as a type of process that will never replace standard manufacturing but will complement conventional manufacturing,” Pierson said.
While 3-D printing has been around for decades, it is only in the last five years that the technology and software has advanced enough for it to go mainstream, he said.
Speed makes the latest 3-D printers such as Carbon’s significant compared to previous generations of the technology, said Brett Conner, director of Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Initiatives and associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Youngstown State University. (The university is also home to America Makes: The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute.)
Rapid prototyping using older technology allows businesses to make demonstration products in hours versus traditional manufacturing methods that could take weeks, said Conner, also entrepreneur in residence for additive manufacturing at the Youngstown Business Incubator.
But the technology used by Carbon — and other refined processes being developed by others — cuts production time from hours to just minutes, he said.
Additive manufacturing is increasingly being used to make tools that in turn make products as well as directly making parts, Conner said.
“It’s a growing field. It’s still in the early stages,” he said.
Northeast Ohio has a chance to become a major 3-D printing hub, Conner said.
“You have a real cultural ecosystem that is developing here,” he said. “I think it’s unique. ... Manufacturing is in the blood here. They are jumping into [3-D printing] here in the region.”
Other companies
Among other companies using 3-D printers are Bridgestone Americas, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Tallmadge-based Wardjet.
“Our design engineers have used 3-D printing for many years in concept modeling and rapid prototyping,” said Goodyear spokesman Troy Scully. “As the accuracy of the technology has improved, we have been able to explore applications in tire mold production, allowing us to use more complex geometries and transition to production faster and more economically than traditional tooling.”
At Wardjet, which makes waterjet cutting machines, mechanical design engineer Nate Duxbury works with a 3-D printer.
“We use it for rapid prototyping of parts,” he said. (He also tinkers with one at home.)
Duxbury said a design can be emailed to him in the morning as a file made with standard software and then he can have that part printed out by the afternoon.
“The prototyping aspect is incredibly useful,” he said. “It lets you do geometry you couldn’t otherwise do.”
Legal implications
Non-manufacturers also look to the 3-D printing future.
The Cleveland offices of law firm Benesch recently added an additive manufacturing practice, headed by Mark Avsec, an intellectual property lawyer. Avsec noted that he also is a musician —and that part of his background got him thinking several years ago about the legal implications of 3-D printing.
Napster, the groundbreaking and now defunct peer-to-peer music file sharing service, disrupted the entire music industry by allowing individuals to swap songs for free over the internet, Avsec said.
And 3-D printing is much like that, he said; people can email software files holding product designs anywhere in the world a 3-D printer is located and have it make whatever is encoded in the software.
“I said ‘hell yes, this is just like the music industry. It will disrupt everything,’ ” Avsec said. “This really morphs technology, manufacturing and software.”
That entails numerous issues involving intellectual property rights, he said.
Additive manufacturing may disrupt the logistics industry, including FedEx and UPS, as people order software, and not products, to be fabricated in homes or neighborhood businesses, he said. Health care may be disrupted by, among other things, 3-D printed drugs, he said.
Replacement parts for all sorts of things could be printed locally, not shipped from a central manufacturing site or warehouse, Avsec said. Legally protected software isn’t even necessary for the technology to work – people now can scan a part and have a 3-D printer replicate it immediately, he said.
“It will affect all of our clients’ businesses,” Avsec said. “Learn from the music industry. Get out in front of it.”
‘Kind of like magic’
Back at TTH, Mark Horner, vice president of business development, said people can come to his firm with a software file and have a part printed out very quickly on one of the Carbon M1 machines.
“Kind of like magic,” he said.
“I knew it was what I was waiting for, for 18 years,” said Chip Gear, the CEO.
He said TTH has space in Streetsboro to house as many as 100 Carbon M1 printers — they are limited by how fast Carbon can make its machines. “We really want to be the first additive manufacturing factory,” Gear said.
Additive manufacturing is really in its first inning, he said.
“I truly see this as the next industrial revolution,” Gear said. “It changes everything.”
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him @JimMackinnonABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/JimMackinnonABJ