Building Drones at Scale: SLS Production from Low-Volume to High-Rate Manufacturing

super cool yeah you know i think a lot of people think of drones as the current generation you know quadcopters and of course then going up group two group three etc but you The drone market is way more mature than a lot of people think.

Nevertheless, it's also immature in a lot of ways.

And you see a lot of new players pushing into that space.

So you mentioned Northwest UAV being really a production company.

How did become additive a key strategic component or at least big enough that it was worth spinning out a separate unit? What does additive really mean for the UAV markets or meant maybe back then and what does it mean today?

Sure.

So, I mean, the big thing that kind of keyed them into it, you know, weight is a huge issue on UAVs, right? So the lower weight you can get, you know, the more payload you can have, the more fuel you can carry, the longer your order time is.

So it's super important that you can keep your weight as low as possible.

And also when the market was just starting, you know, The buzzwords really around 3D printing back then was rapid prototyping, right? It wasn't, you know, not so much in just UAVs, but as a whole, it was rapid prototyping.

So they'd use it to kind of do a design validation, right? And then they'd, you know, a lot of companies would still be using machine shops, right, to make their parts, but they would use 3D printing as the rapid prototyping.

I mean, the tool costs to do a single part for a... bit form function check was crazy and still crazy expensive to do a one or two off.

Right.

So rapid prototyping, which is where, you know, the 3d printing really hit the, the market.

That was the buzzword behind it, you know, early on, you know, we, we started with that, not doing rapid prototype, but we started in kind of doing production and.

you know, in situ really knew and saw that the technology could reduce part count, lower weight, increase loiter time.

It really had all the, it checked all the check marks that you needed to kind of dominate that market early on.

And so you saw it, you can do the complex geometry, you can remove parts, part count from it with using the EOS SLS technology.

And it was just it was a perfect fit for him.

So the amount of components that were being 3D printed early on was really what drove Northwest UAV, Chris Harris and Heather Harris to start Northwest Rapid Manufacturing.

It just makes sense.

It was it was have it on site, do the vertically integrate the supply chain as much as possible.