Look alive, Australians! There’s a company in your country called Keech that wants to be the one-stop shop for all things engineering and manufacturing. And they intend to do this by expanding their 3D printing portfolio over the next few months. Though Keech is new to me, as a Yank, they’ve been around for 80 years and are looking to grow from a strictly traditional manufacturer to an additive manufacturer as well, with the company’s business manager, Doug Baird, saying, “Keech has got the oldest technology in the world – in melting metals – and we’re actually now looking at the newest technology in the world, 3D printing in metals.”
Last year, Keech changed the name of its patternmaking subsidiary from BPM 3D to Keech 3D, or K3D, to demonstrate the direction the company plans to take. With revenue of about $50 million per year and 7% of that going towards R&D, the company has been shifting from being an industrial foundry manufacturer to an engineering specialist by opening an Innovation and Quality Center in 2012, upgrading its foundries, and establishing a Chilean subsidiary. Then, in August 2013, Keech announced that it would take on AM.
The company has since complemented its line of Polyjet 3D printing machines with FDM 3D printers and an Mcor 3D paper printer. Next, Keech will be adding 3D metal printing to its portfolio. Inspired by trends documented in the Wohler’s Report, Baird explains that Keech will be using the technology towards end-use production, “We still have service offerings around prototyping, but we really want to concentrate on material that would be able to be used for end-use parts as opposed to prototyping.”
And, though the company will continue to utilize subtractive manufacturing, Baird believes that 3D printing will affect the way the company approaches design, adding, “It’s had a significant effect on the way designers can look at things. We have design engineers with us for our parent company and they’ll come downstairs and say to me ‘Doug, I’ve got an idea, here’s a CAD model’ and the very next day they’ll have that part in their hand and they’ll play with that and look at how it fits into the part they’re building. They might come back to me and say they’ve made a couple of tweaks and ask for another one. And the next day or later that day they’ll have that part in their hand. And that really speeds up the design process.”
Keech also hopes to use the technology, coupled with 3D scanning, to reverse-engineer old manufacturing patterns, with the business manager saying, “It might be 20 years old and there has never been a CAD model for it or even a drawing, it might’ve been [from] a customer’s drawing. So we can scan that, turn it into a CAD model and then 3D print that and have complete repeatability.”
Augmenting their traditional manufacturing operations with 3D printing, could make Keech a convenient all-in-one service house, according to Baird. “They can come to us with an idea or a model, we can prototype it for them, give them different iterations as they require, and we can hopefully take those parts to production as well; a full service offering.”
Altogether, the company is seeking to provide their services, not just to businesses in Australia, but around the world. Tasked with creating a model of a vehicle for a major defense contractor for an expo in France, Baird recounts the way they’ve been exposed to the international community, “We had them shipped over to Paris and the guys at [the defence company] used them in their show and all the reports back were that they wowed everyone and we’ve now got orders from France for more models directly from Bendigo. So I guess we’re not talking central Victoria – we’re talking globally… Already in the short time we’ve been in additive manufacturing, we’ve already sent parts to Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, China, and France.”
Baird believes that the company will play an important role in global AM, saying, “We would be expecting into next year that Keech 3D would be a major player in the additive manufacturing sector throughout the country. With an export market as well.” Whether or not he’s right is hard to say at the moment, but the business manager’s account of Keech’s strategy reveals the growing 3D printing market down under. We’ll have to see what our friends at the Inside 3D Printing event in Melbourne make of the country’s 3D printing scene!
Source: Manufacturers’ Monthly
