Tecalum Industrial, Spain-based producer of aluminium products, has observed significant return-on-investment (ROI) by integrating Additive Manufacturing in-house.
Indeed, parts they produce for the industrial sector, sometimes need to be designed from scratch, based on each customer’s requirements. Those parts include for instance custom-made jigs and fixtures for every mould.
Before the integration of 3D Printing to their production workflow, the company called for the services of an external supplier to produce tooling. Over time, they realized that this process took time and remained expensive.
Three years ago, the media hype around 3D Printing convinced the Spain-based company to invest in BCN3D 3D printing technology, a choice they never regretted. Indeed, as per the company’s words, during the first year, they registered the cost per piece of every tooling, jig, and fixture 3D printed and compared it with what the cost would have been if they kept on working with the external vendor. Results revealed they had been saving about 25.000€.
Apart from time and cost-savings, Tecalum benefits from maximizing efficiency by leveraging AM. “As the extrusion of aluminium takes place in Canada at their sister company, Pexal Tecalum Canada, the engineers working at the Girona facility have usually around three weeks to custom-make the necessary tooling until the extrusion molds arrive. Before implementing 3D printing, they had to get the pieces right at the first time, as the external vendor took approximately the same amount of time to produce the first batch of tools. However, with the Sigmax, they are able to iterate repeatedly in order to achieve the best possible design, while still keeping the costs lower than the external vendor”, explains Marc Linares, the company’s Production Management Deputy.
As far as materials are concerned, the Tecalum team continues to utilize PLA as it meets the mechanical requirements of their components. Over time, they will certainly envision to print with other materials including ABS or carbon fiber in order to explore the capabilities of other materials.
Today, the company additively manufactures a number of tools for assembling and transporting pieces of aluminium.
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