How Giant Metal 3D Printers Are Reshaping Manufacturing
Lincoln Electric is pushing the boundaries of large-scale metal additive manufacturing, using robotic wire arc welding systems to produce massive industrial components in a fraction of the time required by traditional casting. The technology recently helped deliver a 12-foot, 6,000-pound replacement part for the Soo Locks in just 12 weeks—down from an estimated 72-week lead time. By combining advanced robotics, AI, and metal 3D printing, manufacturers are opening new possibilities for faster production, supply-chain resilience, and critical infrastructure repair.
Transcript
00:00:02 Lincoln Electric was founded by John Lincoln back in 1895. That's 130 years ago this year. Originally, this company was founded as a motor company. Eventually, that technology evolved into electric generators and producing electric arc welders. As far as Cleveland is concerned, a lot of the skyline downtown was built with Lincoln Electric arc welders, Lincoln Electric technology. Arc welding, it's the process where we take a lot of electricity
00:00:33 and pump it through a small wire, similar to an old incandescent light bulb, to the point where that wire gets so hot that it then melts. Over the last 100 years, we've continued to push the envelope and introduce new things like 3D printing with wire arc additive manufacturing. in 3D printing, from a very fundamental stance, you've got a material, you've got some method to deposit the material, and then you've got a motion system to put it where you want it to go, and then you've got software and feedback controls to get it there how you want it. In this case, we've taken arc welding that we've used for decades. But now applying it with this application of 3D printing.
00:01:14 And the Oak Ridge National Lab was able to show us and help really explore the application space and show what is possible. We start from stainless steel, nickel base, copper base, aluminum, titanium, practically anything that you ever heard of being welded has the potential to be 3D printing. You can have the complexity of geometries that are practically impossible to achieve any other way. You can mix many materials and you can make it, you can make it fast. There are a lot of applications in both energy and national security
00:01:45 where we need to make very, very large components. That takes a lot of time and essentially that becomes a security risk. If we can't replace a hydro impeller in a dam that goes bad, if we can't replace or make nuclear reactor components and we have to source everything abroad, then we have a big, big challenge as a country. One great example we have of the large scale metal additive parts is with Soo locks up in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, and those are managed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. You know, $1 trillion of GDP goes through the Great Lakes,
00:02:21 and so that's a strategic, very important location for the United States. They had a mechanical arm. It was 60 years old. They found cracks. So they wanted to get something as fast as they can to replace this mechanical arm. They looked at castings, which would be the traditional way of manufacturing this. And it was a 72 week lead time to get the casting. We printed it in two pieces and it was a 12ft long, 6,000 pound part. The whole thing was delivered in 12 weeks. So compared to 72 weeks, you can see the substantial savings on time to get this in place for critical applications such as the Soo Locks.
00:03:00 What we really sell is speed. Once you look at that and you see you're limited with a single deposition head to something 10, 15 pounds an hour, it makes a lot of sense to explore multiple heads. The system behind me, that's the MedUSA system. It represents a new generation of manufacturing system. The arms are doing, different tasks depending on what the system decides. One of the arms is depositing. One of them is cleaning. One of them is grinding or doing other processes.
00:03:27 We can use things like artificial intelligence to be able to optimize the way that those robots lay down material in order to both accelerate the process, but also make sure that we ensure good material properties and performance, especially when we're going to put them into very demanding applications. There is a lot more growth ahead of us. It's part of the story of advanced robotics, automation and AI, and being able to utilize these technologies. And this helps address some of those issues in manufacturing in the US. And the Oak Ridge National Lab was able to show us and help us
00:04:03 to demonstrate the technology and then further develop the technology. So, we were able to work with the many scientists and engineers at the lab to help really explore the application space and show what is possible.