Driving Prices Down with the Markforged Industrial Strength 3D Printer

Turret Lathe Specialists accelerated their lead time for large volume productions without reducing their ability to help customers with rapid prototyping or short volume runs.

Investigate

Daniel Shepherd, Quality Manager at manufacturing company Turret Lathe Specialists Inc., has been searching for ways to keep job lead times short.

Iterate

After discovering Markforged, Shepherd realized how a desktop 3D printer capable of printing metal-strength parts could cut down on time and costs while simplifying production runs.

Improve

Using the Markforged 3D Printer to make prototypes and templates just as strong as their metal counterparts, Shepherd cut the manufacturing price of an engine manifold from $2000 down to $117.

The Need for Speed

For over 40 years, Turret Lathe Specialists, Inc has been churning out customer parts, be they one-off prototypes or larger production runs by leveraging their wide range of capabilities from high quality manual machining to CNC precision operations. Juggling orders and batch lead times, Quality Manager Daniel Shepherd is always under pressure to design and implement more efficient solutions: The capabilities we have with the conventional milling and turning we can offer allow us to do short production runs. Because that’s something we excel at, our customers started giving us some of their one to two piece rapid prototyping jobs. The company needed to and a way to fulfill these orders without burdening their larger production runs.

Shepard and his boss discussed how 3D printing could complement the machine shop and speed up their production runs. ‘What we needed in a printer was something that fit on a desk, that didn’t cost as much as a huge industrial machine, and that turned out precision parts.

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From the time of the first phone call, the first emails, to the time when the printer showed up and started turning out parts, the experience couldn’t have been easier, and still here a year later, still printing out perfect parts every day.

-Daniel Shepherd, Quality Manager at Turret Lathe Specialists Inc.

Comparing the Numbers
Markforged Part:
$63.85 (material), 60 hours
Machine Shop – Aluminum
$3,101.91 and 72-120 Hours + Shipping Time
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