The Long and Winding Road

I was blown away by the process of “growing” three-dimensional parts from a digital file instead of machining parts from blocks of metal. I still remember watching a small shaft, just a bit shorter than my hand, being created by laying down successive layers of material. Every wide-eyed executive I spoke with was excited about the “game changing” opportunities of tomorrow, using a radical technology that would totally “disrupt” the world of machining as we knew it back then.

It didn’t take long for all of us to discover how the limitations of the technology created a long and winding road to the brave new world of growing parts.

In the years that have passed since then, “rapid prototyping” evolved into “additive manufacturing” and all sorts of niche markets were carved out for growing 3D parts, some quite profitable . . . from stereolithography that grows polymer parts to different types of laser sintering that creates components out of plastics and metals. And though many of the different 3D technologies that appeared over that time once promised to disrupt markets ranging from injection molding to repair and maintenance, none of them ever really did change the game.

That long road has now wound into Sciaky, a service-disabled veteran-owner small business and subsidiary of Phillips Service Industries (PSI; Livonia, MI) that manufactures advanced welding systems for electron beam, advanced arc and resistance welding technologies and also provides a wide range of contract welding services to the aerospace, defense, automotive, medical and other manufacturing industries. And potentially, Sciaky could be the destination where the road ends and the game begins to change.

How appropriate that would be, given that this pioneer of electron beam systems has traveled its own long and winding road during a storied history that began in 1939 when the Sciaky brothers shipped their first resistance welder, then moved from France in the 1940s to escape the Nazis, eventually winding up in the U.S. where they built Sciaky Bros. into a premier manufacturer of welding systems. Their skilled welding expertise survived some difficult times in the 1980s under the ownership of Allegheny International and Ferranti Holdings, both of which bankrupted in the 1990s.

But under PSI, Sciaky has now grown into a $20 million business with 50 employees and returned to its rightful place in the world of advanced manufacturing, with state-of-the-art equipment that meets rigid military specifications to manufacture items such as airframes, landing gear, jet engines, guided missiles and vehicle parts. The company formally entered the brave new world in 2009 by launching its exclusive EBDM process that combines computer-aided design with additive manufacturing principles that utilize electron beam welding technology to create the only commercially available large scale, fully programmable means of achieving near net-shape parts.

EBDM can save manufacturers money and boost their productivity over traditional prototyping processes. But where this process could potentially change the game is in its ability to produce production parts out of exotic metals such as titanium, stainless steel, nickel and refractory alloys at a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing methods:

The process begins with a 3D CAD model of a part in a STP file that is used for deposition path planning to build the near-net shaped part in a layer upon layer method. The original part model is modified such that the final machining operations can net a finished part and is also evaluated for symmetry and other features that can be optimized in conjunction with the starting substrate plate. Once deposition is complete, the preform may be subjected to additional testing and heat treatments prior to final machining.