Since the birth of metal 3D printing, for a long time, many people have been discussing metal 3D printing In the future, it is not necessary to replace CNC processing, sheet metal manufacturing and other processes. In fact, this is almost unlikely, at least for a long time to come. Judging from the current development trend, metal 3D printing has been effectively combined with CNC processing and sheet metal manufacturing, which makes up for the shortcomings of these two processes in terms of molding limitations.

Sheet metal processing is widely used in electrical and electronics, automotive, telecommunications, medical and other industries. Sheet metal is the skeleton that supports and shapes a product, such as a car, computer or mobile phone. The design and manufacture of sheet metal is becoming a key stage in the development of new products, with a trend towards diversified, low-volume production. The EP-M260 Metal Metal 3D Printer can help simplify this process and reduce costs.

in the sheet metal manufacturing process, various molds are often used. taking automotive sheet metal parts as an example, punching dies, cutting dies, forming dies, separation dies, stamping dies, bending punches and other molds will be used. manufacturing molds is expensive and time-consuming. therefore, it is not suitable for the production of small batches of sheet metal parts.

therefore, when manufacturing sheet metal parts in small batches, many sheet metal factories use a combination of laser cutting and cnc bending technology. this process requires no mold, is economical, has a short cycle time, and is suitable for the rapid production of plates with simple structures. but there is nothing that can be done about some special shaped sheet metal pieces.

At this time, metal 3D printing is needed. A domestic car seat manufacturing company, at that time, they needed to make a set of newly designed seat samples within a week, but the supporting mold was still in production. In addition, this set of seats consists of 78 pieces and is 1.5 to 2.5 mm thick. Most parts have ribs and bulges. Therefore, CNC machining is also not suitable. So they adopted a metal 3D printing process

in another use case, a machine builder wanted to produce a muffler consisting of four parts with a uniform thickness of 0.73 mm in the housing and 0.6 mm in the middle structural area.

The metal plate structure of these four parts is complex and cannot be manufactured by cutting and bending. Due to its thin wall thickness, it cannot be manufactured by milling. So there are only two options, one is stamping, the other is metal 3D printing.

Stamping has the advantages of high precision and high degree of realization of design functions, but the mold production cycle is long and the cost is high. Metal metal 3D printing can be delivered in only 3 days, and it can also fully realize the design function.

Today, as products become more and more diverse, the demand for diversity and small batches in the processing of parts is increasing. Therefore, many manufacturers generally believe that the integrated production mode of sheet metal manufacturing, CNC machining and metal 3D printing will be one of the mainstream models of future manufacturing.