“Additive is a niche,” Dunne says, pointing to his booth where the company is highlighting technology that supports investment casting molds – test molds for the foundry industry. “Investment casting is a niche within a niche. That’s where we play. That’s where the magic is: low-volume, high complexity. That’s where you see us.”

As for the difference in sound quality, the Cactus Cowboy says it’s a toss up. In other corners of the internet, there is a raging debate. Of course there is.

However, cost and speed have always been the challenges. At the IMTS – The International Manufacturing Technology Show, several additive companies say they still can’t compete on speed or cost in a lot of situations, but where the technology makes sense, it makes a lot of sense.

Back in the day, the recording industry shifted from pressing vinyl to injection molding polystyrene, especially for 45 rpm records. The Cactus Cowboy explains why and how to tell if your vintage vinyl really isn’t.

“I say, ‘Really? I’ll start a stopwatch, and call me in 30 seconds,’” Dunne says. With dies made, it takes 30 seconds, but it takes months to get those. The difference between those two is where additive makes the most sense, he says.

So, you’ve got a nice collection of vintage vinyl salvaged from your misspent youth, but are those records really made of vinyl? Some of them might be polystyrene (PS). How can you tell, and does it matter? The Cactus Cowboy has the answers.

Bio: Robert Schoenberger has been writing about manufacturing technology in one form or another since the late 1990s. He began his career in newspapers in South Texas and has worked for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi; The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky; and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland where he spent more than six years as the automotive reporter. In 2014, he launched Today's Motor Vehicles (now EV Manufacturing & Design), a magazine focusing on design and manufacturing topics within the automotive and commercial truck worlds. He joined IndustryWeek in late 2021.

CHICAGO, Illinois—There’s never been a question that additive manufacturing is cool. The ability to 3D print complex parts from plastic or metal powders offers massive improvements in the geometries that manufacturers can produce and in some cases eliminates expensive tooling.

A big selling point for additive is the lack of tooling. Products tend to go straight from a digital file into a physical product. Higher production volumes tend to demand custom tooling for plastic injection molding or stamping dies.

A few booths down at Desktop Metal, Justin Nardone, founder and CEO of subsidiary Figur shows off his system that effectively uses giant ball-point pens to created stamped metal parts. Well, that’s a simplification. A stylus presses rolling balls onto a flat metal surface, bending metal into complex shapes by applying force to that rolling ball.

It’s fairly easy to tell the difference between a PVC and PS record. For one thing, the label is pressed into the PVC during the stamping process, whereas it is glued onto molded PS records. The appearance of the grooves is also a giveaway. And then there’s the tap test. Curious? You’ll have to watch the video for the lowdown on that.

The big selling point: lack of hard tooling for stamping dies. Transfer presses can stamp complex shapes into metal sheets several hundred times per minute, but again, you need the dies in place for that. Want a handful of parts tomorrow? An additive system like Figur might make sense.

Editor in chief of PlasticsToday since 2015, Norbert Sparrow has more than 30 years of editorial experience in business-to-business media. He studied journalism at the Centre Universitaire d'Etudes du Journalisme in Strasbourg, France, where he earned a master's degree.

Hard tooling like that supports fast, cheap production, but it’s fixed. Any change to the product will require new dies, and that can take months to produce. As Dunne puts it, when he tells someone that his new additive technology takes about two hours to produce a unique part, the response is generally, “I can do that in injection molding in 30 seconds.”

In a short video that clocks in under six minutes on his Youtube channel, the Cactus Cowboy explains that back in its heyday the recording industry shifted from pressing PVC “pucks” between two stamps, heating the material, and trimming flash from the edges to injection molding polystyrene. The reason, as you can imagine, was speed and efficiency, especially beneficial when it came to cranking out 45s.