Metal 3D Printed Golf Putter - Project Recap
Dave and Tyler use their respective expertise in golf club design and additive manufacturing to create a unique golf putter. They'll discuss how SOLIDWORKS and 3D printing accelerated the design and manufacturing process, and lessons learned along the way. Learn more .
Transcript
00:00:00 welcome to today's project recap my name is David Kearsley and this is Tyler Reed all right so earlier this year we did a project Tyler where we uh collaborated on we did a live event in Chicago we did some uh brought together like three or four pieces of Technology we did a live event we thought we'd do a little project recap and bring everybody up to speed on what we had worked on so
00:00:22 Topgolf Chicago summertime that was an awesome event yeah we had a lot of people there it's a good event so uh thought what we do is kind of talk about what we the initial concept and then just work through all the all the phases that went into it right um you know we had this idea I my background is I spent the last 20 years in the golf industry designing
00:00:44 everything from putters to drivers to training AIDS you know kind of everything across the board and I still one of my great passions and something I still do right so one of the things I wanted to do was bring this in uh and start talking about the new technology and how we can improve product design right so with product design you know there's always a lot of
00:01:05 theories right like oh this works or this doesn't work but can I prove it and so that led us to some CAD models and that's where kind of we brought you in with the new technologies on the printing side like what is this what can we really do you know just because you know I just because I can make it on screen doesn't mean it's manufacturable
00:01:27 yeah I learned that that's very true about you yep and um we kind of learned that on this project actually right with some of the 3D printings like I had some design uh cues kind of or features built in there and then you were like hey we can't do that we have to move a different direction it kind of came out of a great project I think the the
00:01:47 the final product is awesome so and I know it's still evolving a little bit but we're getting there yeah it's an ongoing project we have a great base asset in your design which you have 20 years experience of knowing like the technical aspects of Designing golf equipment I have 10 years experience just printing knickknacks and toys so we make a good team together
00:02:11 but it's very much an ongoing project I think the goal is to build more of these Putters and give them out in future events I can't I can't stress enough like how fun that in-person event was but when we were talking and presenting in person it's very much like here's the software here's the hardware here's what we did but less of the why and so that's what
00:02:34 I'm hoping to get out of this session is just a discussion between you and I is like why did we do things um what were we trying to avoid what what did we step into without realizing it and how did we get you know past that yeah absolutely it's a fun project I know it like you said still ongoing and we got all these cool little gadgets here on the table but let's just jump
00:02:56 right in kind of the initial design phase I think we were looking at so again part of it is I want to know I want to use the software to move past design theories right we've had a lot of design theories okay in golf a lot of stuff is just kind of tried and true we know it's worked but what can I do with SolidWorks what can I do with my software to kind of
00:03:17 prove or disprove that theory okay so you're looking for a validation yeah absolutely and we were able to kind of do that with quite a few things so as far as the initial design phase and we're going to call some things up on the screen here there are some rules and regulations to golf uh can't have a it has to be a certain footprint size right the putter has to be wider
00:03:38 um as far as Heel To Toe the putter has to be wider this way than it is in the depth front to back okay so so you have like the rules of the sport that the players have to follow and then you have rules of the equipment that the designers have to follow absolutely of course which is kind of cool you know like I mean There are rules and regulations to just about everything so
00:03:57 you know how could we take this and also prove some other design theories that we're going to run into here in just a little bit okay so we got rules of golf these are kind of some of this image as you see here these are the model types that are currently on the market okay all different model types and they're looking at these different model types and the theory is hey I'm looking at
00:04:17 something that has a greater moment of inertia and so in golf when we talk about moment of inertia kind of thinking of it as like a barbell right if I if I hold the barbell it's really long and I put on my weight and I hold it right here right and I say Tyler go out and push over here this is kind of like the face and impact so if I go over and I push over here it's going to twist
00:04:36 pretty easy right yep but if I take leverage yeah so now if I put my arms and put the weight out here kind of in a brace and you push on that face it stays more stable okay so now I'm moving the weight to the perimeter stabilize that hit right because you're trying to reduce rotation and I'm trying to reduce rotation so that the ball stays truer on its roll okay to its path that makes
00:04:58 sense right so one of the things that we try and do is stabilize that hit because unfortunately unless you're a tiger you're not hitting it in the center the face every single time right it could be as much as a half inch off center and a half inch off center makes a huge difference so you know this is where we were going with it can we prove or disprove that so you have to design for
00:05:18 like worst case scenario you have to design for the well you have different customers based on the skill level of who you're designing for right that's pretty cool yeah when we kind of look at we'll look at a little bit more into that here in just a little bit we'll talk about kind of the design criteria okay you know you can almost look at it as like you know how marketing will do a
00:05:37 storyboard like these this person fits into this golf category and they wear this watch and they drive these cars yeah we kind of do that with golf equipment like okay what's the handicap what's the skill set and who are we trying to help okay you know and when I look at these designs uh these are almost all machine designs and most equipment is either machined or forged
00:05:58 or cast right now yes but we do see some manufacturers providing tour players with 3D printed parts right right that is correct so in the past two to three years you've seen 3D printed parts and some of them will say that they're fully 3D printed and they may be only one component yeah uh what we decided to do on this one when you and I were talking was like What if we 3D printed the whole
00:06:19 thing yeah and that's kind of a differentiator it's cool you know on the topic of 3D printing for the tour players like you could print different styles of Putters or wedges or irons per player per event per condition and I think that customization is like the Holy Grail of oh yeah golf equipment designer absolutely you know golfers are funny they're very brand egg
00:06:42 um focused you know some people like brand a versus brand B and they never really move off of it but if they find something unique that's different than everybody else they'll they like to have that in their back the potential for an edge yeah like oh look at this I've got a x number 100 putter versus your smaller value so I'm
00:07:03 gonna be better right so that does happen quite a bit cool so golfers are funny like that and I say golfers but I'm one of them so when we look at kind of these images here we see that these are the market trends these are kind of the modern designs and this was where we kind of started like Hey how do I take the rules of golf I kind of take these modern
00:07:21 shapes and how do I bring them into kind of what we see here this block image here okay so we took SolidWorks created our image and we just took a block all I wanted to do was take some design cues now what you see there is you kind of see the golf ball in the front the kind of that sketch and what we're trying to do as designers is and and some folks may not know this who play golf is we're
00:07:41 trying to always bring your eyes forward on the putter again that just allows you to look at the ball we don't want you really focusing on the putter if the if there's all this kind of crazy design criteria and shaping going on here like that like I would totally be looking it's not your design yeah okay but I would be looking at the back right and I wouldn't be focused on trying to hit the
00:08:03 ball yeah okay so I might be focused on the putter design itself and I'm looking back here and when I'm looking back here the putter could be going yeah any number if the putter looks too good it could be a distraction it could be when I look at this I see an F-22 like it has the lines of an F-22 yeah that's a good way to look at it very aerodynamic but again the note is that we're trying to
00:08:23 use the shape to kind of draw to the front of the ball yeah because we want the putter the putter to hit or the golfer to hit right through like a visual cue yeah that's cool and most people don't even know that's there but as Club designers we've been doing it for years yeah did you even know that and most people don't now they do right kind of let that
00:08:39 secret up subliminal design yeah um so then you know we kind of wanted to figure out a way because you're you're in one location here in Utah I'm in Austin Texas we had a team in Chicago uh and we had multiple locations and the question was how do we bring everybody together right so what we did is we actually used the 3D experience platform it's a online PLM tool that allowed us
00:09:01 to collaborate together we were able to look at our designs we were can I share back and forth you and I were able to look in uh some of these videos here you can see hey guess what this is working this isn't working hey here's our timeline I had revision control yeah everything was in place and it allowed us to really control this project which was really
00:09:21 cool and um you know we had the swim community here where you were like hey Dave I like the initial design but it's not working so we got to make some changes right that was an that was important for me to be able to communicate to you is early on in the design process that the the direction that you're heading is going to cause me more grief so then there could be a
00:09:42 discussion about the value of it and if you could take a different route or you know I'm gonna have to figure out a way to get past it because it's important to the design yeah because like I said earlier it's one thing I mean I can design anything on paper or anything on CAD but is it manufacturable you know that's the one thing as Engineers we always have to pay attention to right
00:10:01 and I'm thinking maybe a little like we're kind of got Unlimited Technology we can do whatever we want yeah but then you quickly learn there are some limitations right yeah and a lot of times it's best to have that conversation in person but I will say just being able to type a comment and uh kind of remove myself from that face-to-face interaction and maybe some
00:10:24 of the anxiety or pressure that that carries with it is kind of cool like just being able to comment like hey uh double check this because it's going to be an issue yeah made my life easier yeah and it's nice too because I might be working on the project and you might not be and you just get a little notification like hey I gotta go look at this Dave needs some help on this or in
00:10:44 your case you messaging me back and I'm like oh man we got some more work to do yeah so that was okay I mean you know again I got full revision control all our files were here the team could see it and it worked out really well I think so we had that block right and we started with just this shape that we kind of see on screen here now is what we did is we just
00:11:04 started with a giant mass and we wanted to use simulation could what in simulation what in SolidWorks what technology can we kind of use and disprove how do we make the design better okay right as Engineers that's one thing we're always trying to do build a better mousetrap can I make a better golf putter yeah right and so the topology
00:11:24 software really allowed us to do a couple things okay one we wanted to figure out where is mass really needed right again I can design anything but is it functional you know form fit function right in this case I needed to know am I doing I want to be very Purpose Driven as to what we're doing okay right so let's put Mass only exactly where we need it and let's improve the
00:11:49 performance with that so that's where we kind of took it from there and then we said okay I got this block and um you can see over here on the left side we we implemented several things we implemented like a center of gravity we had some protected regions on the bottom of the putter where we said hey we know we're going to put Mass okay and these are kind of some protected regions we
00:12:12 also wanted to protect the face uh or what we call distributed Mass areas and so we plug those in at the same time we wanted to use topology optimization and we said hey we have some Mass constraints this block as it is now with a stainless steel material is around 1100 grams standard Putters around 350 to 400 grams okay so we had a lot to get out of there yeah you got the the owner
00:12:37 of uh Putters so we got to really move weight but again where does that weight need to be so again that's where we kind of ran the the topology would it tell us what we needed okay the other thing there was sound really yeah sound is so critical to Golfers golfers equate sound to feel right if it sounds
00:13:02 like an old metal tin trash can even though it might perform great they're gonna not pick it up right with golfers and Putters if it's real clicky sounding they perceive the putter is to be hard and they're like oh I don't like the sound this is a hard face putter or it just smacks off right okay then there's the other end of the spectrum whereas if it's too soft a
00:13:27 face insert or something like that it'll sound mushy right okay I know that's a technical term right yeah yeah yeah but it sounds too soft or muted and the golfer goes it's too soft I don't like it I'm not getting enough energy into the ball right and you have the tools to take that into account well actually what we did on this is yeah so we plugged in a frequency that we wanted
00:13:48 the topology to uh hit we said hey we want to be around a thousand Hertz on this and that's you know again that's golfer to golfer again sound is feel a thousand might sound great to you it might sound a little clicky to somebody else so we actually programmed that in oh wow so when we program that in we let the software kind of run itself and we started to get up these um kind
00:14:11 of these final images here so what you see here is you kind of see the yellow is the topology part the sketch is kind of what we started with as far as a footprint yeah and so now as an engineer I go holy cow look at all this open area that I don't need Mass right right so now the question is okay what do I do with this and so part
00:14:35 of you looks at it and goes this is really overwhelming I don't really know what to do with it right so then we start to look at it and we start to do things um so this is what it would look like if we did a non-symmetrical design okay this one here I'm going to back up one this one here is when we put in a symmetrical constraint symmetrical again
00:14:55 what I do like an algebraic equation what I do the left side I want to do the right so we said hey use a symmetric constraint and make the mass distributedly even of that 350 grams I want it symmetrical with all the other parameters we plugged in place and this was kind of the shape that it came out to be which and I can see mass and frequency are your main design criteria
00:15:18 yeah okay and it just so happens to be that it's creating this horseshoe shape that you know puts you in that realm of you know the preferred moment of inertia yeah and is is that just a coincidence or is there something about the design constraints yeah so again um it kind of gets back to again so it's a
00:15:41 couple things there one we wanted to make sure that we could prove that theory of bracing it out on the perimeter and what we see from that you know this slide here is we can see that that's kind of true like you can see the weight is kind of out on the perimeter I'm stabilizing it yeah but it's kind of unique in the shape that it's that's true kind of made right so
00:15:59 now we're like man these two arms kind of going back to the the preserved regions where we're going to have mass look kind of interesting so um yeah it was kind of like okay we kind of thought that was true yeah now we know it is true and it foreshadows the shape that we ended up with yeah and so then now we have this shape right and this is what it would
00:16:19 look like symmetrical again this is what it looked like asymmetrical like if I wanted to use the same criteria but I said I don't care anything other than it doesn't have to be symmetrical you can see that all the mass is now down here yeah so what it's trying to do is it's trying to protect that putter face so when I hit it on the heel you know the putter is going to do this and now what
00:16:39 it's trying to do is it's trying to stabilize itself okay because the CG of the putter is always trying to rotate around the center axis of the shaft right and so now we're putting these two together and it's creating a more stable shape it's reducing that moment I guess why not put the shaft in the center of the putter you absolutely can but to be honest with you if when you look at
00:17:00 sales not that many Center shafted Putters actually sell so um and that led to something we did a couple years ago with Shivani is we started studying where the ideal location for the hosel should be oh that's right I remember that project yeah so we actually um did that and we found a location where it actually stabilized um the putter face on 10-foot putts so
00:17:24 cool yeah so that's where we utilize this location here so then we started getting into designing with intent right so as a golfer and as a you know a pro when I first got into golf the guy told me he did to be a good designer you need to be a good fitter and I never really understand that I'm gonna call up some criteria here and we're going to touch on a couple of these here but you can
00:17:48 kind of see all of these on board these are just a few kind of what we target right length you know what is the total length of the Putter and what is the total lot what is the Loft on the putter you know criteria like that but it what the initial phrase of you need to be a good fitter to be a good designers just because I designed it a certain way doesn't mean people are going to use it
00:18:09 a certain way right like it's amazing to design something in your head you're like I'm so excited yeah I know this is going to work and then you watch somebody and you go this totally didn't work yeah like I never intended for somebody to actually use it that way and that's that's a truth for every designer right in every industry yeah you you're always having to anticipate
00:18:30 what misuse looks like you know in assessing the risk of misuse and designing around misuse and if you can guide it towards like if your design takes into account the misuse and elevates the performance of a misuse that's that's a good design yeah and that's where the topology helped yeah and that's where we also ran things like kinematic motion study so now I can take
00:18:53 the putter in the software and I can say hey if I hit it off center X number of coordinating every quarter of an inch heel and oh where's it the most stable and as you know you got this criteria kind of we're looking at on screen but one of the things I look at is the 10 foot putt right the average golfer hits it about 40 to 45 feet from the pin on their
00:19:13 approach shots okay tour players are around 30. okay but Tyler let's just say you you shoot 102 every time you play right let's pretend Let's Pretend yeah right but you want to shoot in the 90s okay and you came to me say David I need to be fit for most people come and say David I want to be fit for a driver and I usually go let's take a look at your putter first because you're gonna have
00:19:36 eight to ten putts in that 10 foot window per round you miss all of them you shot 102. if I get you into the right Putter and I I've got a putter that's designed properly maybe you make five of those and you make 97. so now you're breaking a hundred that was always your goal or even maybe you're trying to go from 82 to 77 right so suddenly if I make five or six or seven
00:20:00 of these around my scores are getting better and better and you know if you do something you're successful with it com it breeds confidence and if you can put well you start to play other parts of your golf game well right so I've always focused as a designer like what is it doing at 10 feet okay um
00:20:17 golfers you know they do some crazy things so you know I always want to focus in at that 10 foot Mark so again look sound Loft lie all that gets factored in right so when we look at it I've got all this I've got the design I thought I was ready and I was like hey Tyler let's take a look at this initial design and I you know shared it with you on the platform now you've got it and
00:20:42 it's kind of like what can we do right and I guess we're we'll we kind of learned a bunch of stuff right like hey Dave that was kind of a good idea but it's not going to work yeah especially on the metal printings at right yeah and uh I learned a lot just sitting here even though we had already done most of this project and we already presented it uh just hearing you explain it face to
00:21:05 face was actually really helpful to me and I probably should have taken the time to answer ask more questions that's right go for it before we pass it on that outline of the you know design methodology was pretty enlightening I didn't I didn't know a lot about that yeah but it was eventually passed to me and my job was to take those designs and bring them into the physical world with
00:21:25 the help of mostly 3D printing we do a little bit of Machining here so that we could get something in our hands to test right and if it was good to go the first time around we would have given that away but we uh you know we didn't end up giving that one away for for reasons we'll say that so when it came to the 3D printing component of this I have a lot of tools here in the lab
00:21:45 here and I take advantage of all of those you know we have thermoplastic printers we have thermoset printers we have metal printers and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages so in a project like this it makes a lot of sense to incorporate different Technologies just because I'm taking advantage of all of those Technologies doesn't mean that someone would need one
00:22:06 of everything you can get by with you know a basic fdm thermal plastic printer can get you a long way it's not going to be printing and use metal Parts but it can get you uh further down the road so we have some polyjet machines here in the office polyjet machines are thermoset resin printers they work a lot like an inkjet printer at home and in fact you can load
00:22:31 up color resins and do full Color Prints so that's one thing I wanted to experiment with was make these distracting I didn't know that that was going to take away from the usability of the putter so I'm sorry for that but on the polyjet printer it's as simple as taking a image file like a JPEG file or a PNG file in SolidWorks laying it down in SolidWorks as an appearance so we use
00:22:57 custom appearances for this and we can create cool designs like this I think this is pretty cool that's pretty awesome um at the time we did this the James Webb Space Telescope had just launched so I did a few Putters with the images the first images from from jwst and we did all sorts of things one thing I didn't do was a big Arrow that's like
00:23:20 here's the ball although I could have probably benefited from that the nice thing about polyjet is the print times are fairly quick relatively speaking and we could fit dozens of these on a build and print those overnight yeah and just test a lot of designs all at the same time so when we're talking about design testing it was really important for us
00:23:44 to get parts in our hands so that we could start assembling them you know one thing that's really hard to anticipate when we're designing is anticipating how parts are going to go together and then if they need to be disassembled how are they going to go apart and can you do that over and over and over yeah um me as a designer I'm not good at that so I usually fall back on creating
00:24:05 prototypes trying to fit them together and see where see where they fit uh taking a Dremel tool and massaging the shape a little bit to get it to work and that's what we did here but I came at you with a few design changes so we took these registering bosses these four bosses and we tapered them that helped them kind of slide into place together we changed that whole front end we
00:24:29 shaved off that front end maybe like 20 thousands I think we took that off so it fit a little bit nicer I added a 3D stripe to it which I took some Design Liberty I don't know if that affected anything on your end and then I created some registration features so that we could print the decals separately and just slide that into place yeah that was a great idea
00:24:51 thanks oh actually here is the image of the the jwst image we've got a nice 90s pop uh one I had some fun with these yeah we printed these on the j850 here in Salt Lake City and also the j55 j55 is a pretty unusual machine if you haven't seen it in person the print volume is a donut shape so the platen spins at a constant uh RPM and then the printhead
00:25:21 moves down along the radius and it has a few removing components overall while it's printing so the part quality is just nuts yeah that was it for the polyjet polyjet is more of a fit and form and visual prototyping tool it can be used for tools and some of these other things but it's not its best fit so I was mostly focused on printing it in polyjet
00:25:48 rapidly so that we could assemble it figure out what design changes need to be made and then doing those and before we go over to the metal printing yeah we do have some design changes that were needed for the metal printing yeah so you fed me a model that looks like what you see here on the screen it had a lot of ribbing like truss structure and one question I had for you is what role does
00:26:11 that trust structure Play In Your Design because I felt like it was something I was going to want to change yeah when it comes to printing in general there are you know it's there's a need to create support structures like typically when we're printing if something's straight up great and then as you start to tilt down like towards the horizontal once it gets below a certain level it can't
00:26:36 self-support itself so we have to fill up that negative space with a sacrificial material support material you saw it in the images from the polyjet these things were totally coded yeah in a separate material that's the support material and a lot of us are used to seeing this with fdm and with our strategist machines that support material is water soluble so we
00:26:57 can basically design whatever we want because the support removal process is pretty simple we just dump it in a bath walk away and come back a couple hours later and support's gone but with metal it's not so easy yeah with metal the support structures are made of the same material same alloy as whatever metal we're printing in and so removing
00:27:17 that is not as simple as just dissolving it away you have to get in there mechanically and remove it either with pliers or machine tools or anything in between there so if you can design around kneading supports that's ideal and with these zero degree overhangs that were in the truss structure pretty much we had to eliminate those
00:27:36 so I went into Magics Magics is the tool that we use to slice these models and do all the support structure generation there's a module in there called structures and we can do lattice substitution there so basically I separated out some solid bodies in SolidWorks and I said turn these solid bodies into uh lattice structures by basically narrowing it down to a voxel
00:28:00 like a three-dimensional pixel and when we print or when we design anything solid that it's a box it's a cube but we can start to substitute that 100 dense cube with lattices that are maybe 40 dense 50 dense 60 dense and then build those up together that's called lattice substitution and that's what I did and we don't think it hurt the performance right no absolutely not and and so the
00:28:24 reason those you asked a good question earlier about why did I put those trusses in there one thing you don't want is Big open cavities those open cavities if we so you saw those structures in there one structural support was kind of part of it the other part was I didn't want a Sound Chamber where again sound or something resonating got in these pockets and
00:28:47 started to make a funky sound oh yeah so the the best way to do it was like hey can I structurally support it make that metal component stronger um and two can I eliminate any chance of a weird sound pocket being in it okay that makes sense you could have some fun with that yeah too so we eventually decided on printing
00:29:08 these upright and three at a time which is what you see here and uh this is this is actually the first print that we did with these parts it looked like on our current gen machine this was a 54 hour print you know we have a second gen machine due here in Salt Lake very soon and I ran the numbers and this would be a just a shy of 10 hour print
00:29:34 on that second gem machine wow so a second gem machine from exact metal much quicker that's the main differentiator build size and other things are pretty much the same much quicker and uh I was honestly to be able to create stainless steel parts of this level of complexity and basically just hit a button and walk away for in this case a couple days and come back and this is the quality of
00:29:56 parts that I had I was blown away yeah and how many different materials can you print on that printer currently uh that's a good question so we can print a half dozen to a dozen different materials right now with that particular printer you can bring your own powders if you're willing to do the parameter development so if you have the
00:30:20 background to like set up a doe and figure out what does my laser power have to be my scan rate uh scan hatch distance all that things you can any material that's weldable to itself Auto geniusly weldable is the term here can be printed in this style printer it's a powder bed Fusion printer you lay down a very thin layer of metal alloy and then that gets traced with a laser in this
00:30:44 case we're using a 200 watt laser fiber laser and it micro welds the path and it will do a full uh you know level and then it will go down in this case it goes down 30 microns and it does the process again so we build it up from the build plate up we always start with a fresh build plate or I'll say fresh yeah like this one's been well used but this one's ready to go okay so I can reuse
00:31:10 this tray or build plate over and over it yeah do you just break these off with a saw or like a chisel of some sort and then go over and polish this so you can reuse it again and again and again because it looks like it'd be expensive over we do a little bit of both okay so if I have a build like this let's say these are built really solidly to the build plate we have 316l stainless here
00:31:34 and we have A2 tool steel here in the build plate these get cut off with a bandsaw and that leaves some evidence of support structure when I print these I lift them up about three millimeters and that gives me enough space for the the curve of the blade so in order to reuse it I have to get rid of that remaining support I'll either use an angle grinder and a flap disc and just sand it off or
00:31:57 I'll check it up in the milling machine and I'll Mill it off if it's a large cross section and it's going to take me a little while with the flap disc I'll just machine it off okay but when I machine it I have to take 10 or 15 thousands off the whole plate whereas if I just use the flap disk I don't really lose any of the plate so I try to use the flap disc whenever possible and we
00:32:18 beat these things you know print down pretty bad but this is ready to use it doesn't it's very tolerant the machine is tolerant of any imperfections in this plate you can see bandsaw marks some fresh uh sanding marks this one's not been machine where a machine surface would look like this yeah at the bottom side so we do a combo of both
00:32:40 the next part that we printed was the face and with the face we can see a different support structure this one was made to be removed by hand orienting this part was a little bit tricky we had to have a discussion around what surfaces needed to be dimensionally accurate and hopefully remove support from those or eliminate even placing support in those
00:33:06 or alternatively only put support there knowing that will machine the support off and we'll get our dimensionally accurate tolerances so that's what we did in this case is we we oriented it so that support was only touching places where we knew we were going to machine away okay did you have to scale It Up by chance like I'm going to scale it up knowing
00:33:30 that I'm like um let's say I gave you the model did you have to scale it up to get to shape or how accurate did the that they come out to the original models yeah so in theory you wouldn't have to change the scaling Factor um that's done by the software itself it gives you access to change scaling so if you needed to you could do it and in
00:33:54 some technologies even one of our own like that's something that you maybe you're kind of in but for this specific technology in this specific implementation of it I didn't have to touch with scaling oh nice yep so powderbed Fusion is generally accurate to 0.2 percent so that's two thousandths inch per inch so on a part that's of this size it's about
00:34:16 three inches you're at about plus or minus six thousands is the expected tolerance so on this part we have support structure that is designed to be broken away and I've got some tools to show you how it's done so I can use Snips or pliers and just break it away let's see and that's easy not too bad
00:34:43 time consuming but yeah too bad yeah I mean it's not too bad and if I broke my snips foreign okay well we'll use pliers instead I wonder if those those Snips had fatigued from doing this a few times but so you just break it off and you're left with a relatively rough surface that's nice yeah yeah
00:35:11 so on we have another part here this one that's the surface that's left after removing the support by hand and then just hand filing that surface and then same with this one except we also hit this with a belt sander and then we wire brush the whole part that's why it's that shiny yeah metal verse this is the as printed yeah it looks finished yeah
00:35:38 but this one's been processed with only hand tools the one that we built originally we machined away and we've got some video of that we're going to show okay Machining that one away [Music] foreign so one of the challenging parts of the design were these screws yeah like their weights but they're also screws like
00:36:23 they're the main mechanism for holding the putter together right and this is a great case of hey this works great in my head and it works great on paper but is it manufacturable with the tools that we have with what we have yeah with the tools that we have and we could manufacture them but we had to make some changes right so in the image here you
00:36:43 can see that the final part is a machine screw with the Go Logo yeah and uh a hex feature to screw it in and the printed part I added material to the boss and uh to the upper side as well and the theory being that I need to be able to machine those threads I can't print those threads of that size I think those were quarter 20 yeah something like that I could print them
00:37:12 but they're just not going to be high quality threads so my preference was to machine them yeah and then I needed to give myself some material to hold in the Chuck so the good thing is is we printed a ton of those but even in that photo you can see this is a little rough for features of that size so once we tackled the face and the weights The Next Step was to go beyond
00:37:36 polyjet with this part here so we knew that we needed something more durable than these acrylic based resins that we have on the polyjet side and that's where we turn to our origin system origin is a DLP style printer so it does use a thermoset resin just like polyjet but the way it cures the resins is vastly different and we have access to more viscous resins in that platform and
00:38:06 it just so happens that viscous resins tend to have better mechanical properties so we can achieve a lot of the same uh surface quality dimensionality that we can with polyjet but we can do it at a more rapid pace and with more appropriate materials for like putting this in a putter in someone's hands going out on the course so we turn
00:38:32 to origin for that with origin we process these in both net Fab and grabcad print you do have to build in support structures and origin is a great technology for printing High volumes of this too which was something that we didn't really discuss we were mostly just focused on making one two maybe five or six in total but if we were going to ramp into like
00:38:57 some sort of low volume production origin could keep up with that okay quantity and Laser powder bed Fusion could as well probably not this specific machine but there are machines from other partners that we have like Velo that could print these parts at a production level okay about the same time so somewhere between the 10 to 20 hour window to like we were
00:39:22 talking on these three yeah probably faster probably faster so production powder bit Fusion printers like that tend to have larger build volumes so you your your highest efficiency normally is when you fill the build volume so larger build volume you're going to fill it up and then they add more lasers so you'll get two lasers up to eight lasers on some of these machines and firing them
00:39:45 very quickly and higher power lasers so we were on a 200 watt laser we can only laze so fast but if we have say one kilowatt of power typically we can take advantage of that and lays even faster so it would be I would anticipate your print time per part would go way down versus what we saw there yeah part of that is a lot of the print time is just
00:40:08 not late it's not lazing it's their recode time okay so maybe 50 of the time is the machine just recoding layers and so if you take that Ricoh time and know that it's set for the height of the print but you have now 20 Parts first three parts your efficiency is going to go way up so on the post-processing side we talked a little bit about what we needed to do
00:40:30 with these parts this is where we brought in the fdm printer to take advantage of what it's good at and that is creating robust cheap parts that are fairly chemical resistant and can withstand the forces and the chemicals that we needed to machine these components so in the first part our goal was to machine this surface so once I cut these
00:40:56 off that was a mating surface that bottom surface here so we had to cut those off and we used the soft jaw that you see up on the screen here to hold that in place for op one to just machine that surface op2 was Machining this surface here where all of the support material was and then it also gave us access to this top
00:41:17 surface so we could bore out this hole here which you wanted to a very tight tolerance do you remember what it was off the top it was a clearance of 2000 tooth out total tolerance and we hit it yep I hit it so honestly I don't know how this I don't know how this worked but it worked if you see the soft jaw design here it just squeezes this model between
00:41:40 these two soft jaws and if I try to do it which maybe I will even if you squeeze this off center just a little bit it just flies apart yeah it just flies apart but it actually worked you know it just happens to be that everything's nice and straight in the Machine Tool but as soon as I go to squeeze this it's going to fly apart yeah are you ready for it go
00:42:03 for it I had to do it I had to do it but it didn't happen so we were able to machine that roll the footage it worked and uh I have to give I have to give uh the designer credit because he trusted it great thing about these soft jaw tools is that we can cut right into them if we needed so panning or sweeping across that middle surface we could cut
00:42:26 right into the soft jaw no problem and we can iterate these quickly so if it didn't work you know probably no harm no foul yeah and then op3 was to cut that top surface which I thought it would be fun to cut a design in there um we didn't end up doing this for the first powder we printed but you came at me with a second design that had some
00:42:50 features yeah on the back side here and because of these extra features I oriented it differently and now on this one for sure once we cut this off we're gonna have to machine that top surface yeah because I actually added three millimeters of material to the top I just used um move face and it's all works and just pushed it up and we'll machine that away and we'll
00:43:14 take advantage of that third set of soft Jaws which so far we hadn't used before so I'm looking forward to that designing of these soft Jaws goes relatively quickly because you're just designing for intent we know with fdm printer we don't have to really take advantage of or we don't have to avoid putting support material in certain places we just design it intuitively it
00:43:37 designs quicker that way and the overall print time for all of those soft Jaws looks like was 13 hours on our f-370. so that's an overnight print yeah the turnaround time one of the guys on my team designed these in a day we printed them overnight so it was one day turnaround for all those soft Jaws oh see here you can see the setup yep yeah
00:44:00 it's nice to have Expendable tooling right uh sort of yeah on the soft jaw side on the soft jazz side but you said that right as the uh the probe came up and those probes are like notorious for being broken yeah that's not so and then here in op4 we were tackling the threading of these little Parts here so we Chuck these up in a three jaw Chuck and we cut the
00:44:28 boss down to size and then we came in and thread milled I switched it to quarter 28 on the threadmill okay we program these in SolidWorks cam okay with install Works output it to the tormach which we have that post processor on our web page if anyone's wants to use solver scam and tormach Milling or label machines you can just go download the
00:44:51 post processor from our website and get running with that right away okay so that's pretty much it for the printing right yeah that's it so then it was just a matter of putting all the pieces together right okay you sent me a bunch of parts yeah or enough to build one full putter right I think it was we were pushing on time on that yeah yeah yeah and we put it together
00:45:13 put the shaft put the grip on put it together took it to Chicago and uh we did our presentation right the cool part was you know we had never we wanted to validate did it work right yeah and we kind of validated it with looking at some of the simulation software we used all this technology to put this thing together but the key component to me was okay I mean it
00:45:38 actually shipped before I actually hit the first putt it was in Chicago before I ever hit the first one yeah and the funny part was I was like well I wonder what the sound is going to be like we plugged we plugged in that parameter yeah right yeah and then we also said what do we want to do at 10 feet the cool part was we had some golf balls with us we had a putting cup and you
00:45:56 know you're putting across carpeting right so it's going to play a little bit of Plinko as it comes across here and everybody that picked up the putter was starting to make putts yeah and it sounded great it did sound great you know and it was like all right everything worked that was a little fortuitous because we were working in parallel a little bit and that study
00:46:15 didn't take into account all of the material properties that I brought to it with the printing but we were pretty confident that the base parts that were probably going to carry the most mass and be most influential in the sound yep turned out to be true yep that's cool yep it worked great so now we're off to Gen 2 designs right where we've changed this so we can get a more sturdy
00:46:39 structure right and how do we get these parts to really go together fit together better and that's where we're at now so right Gen 2 and then also making the manufacturing of the weights a little bit easier right the colors pouring out of it oh yeah we got powder coming out of it yep cool all right well breathe slowly
00:47:00 [Laughter] that's fresh out of the printer this morning so that's uh that's kind of a wrap on this project recap um I don't know about you but I got a lot out of having this discussion yeah more than just going through making the content and delivering that first in-person event what do you think absolutely I mean it's fun because
00:47:20 sometimes you're at the live event and you're presenting in maybe it's less personal or something yeah but um this one you know is a little more personal we kind of did more a deeper dive yeah and I think we gave the audience a little bit of a peek more on the behind the scenes yeah of what's happening so I think we should do more of these like this project recap session is something
00:47:43 I'd like to do more of um if you guys are watching this let us know what you think we covered a lot of different tools today we covered SolidWorks SolidWorks simulation we covered 3D experience platform PLM cover topology optimization which was cool I learned more about resonant frequencies in SolidWorks uh we covered the whole arsenal of 3D
00:48:06 printing briefly fdm polyjet exact metal in a laser powder bed fusion and origin and we just kind of touched the surface on all that so if anything caught your eye on this headboard website and you can find more information and also our YouTube page where we have tons of video content like this and more things like this about basically everything we work with
00:48:30 so hey thank you for spending the time to explain like your expertise to me yeah and give me a chance to participate in this with you thank you as well always great yeah good to see you too foreign