From the course: 3D Printing: Short-Run Production

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Reducing part count and lightweighting

Reducing part count and lightweighting

From the course: 3D Printing: Short-Run Production

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Reducing part count and lightweighting

- [Female Voice] When you create a part with subtractive technologies, such as milling it out from a block of aluminum, your part geometry is limited to shapes that can be created that way. For example, it's difficult to impossible to machine structures that are even partially inside a hollow volume, even if you have a very sophisticated CNC machine. Here, you can see some video from Gabriel Corbett's Rapid Prototyping for Product Design course showing what that looks like. Often, this means that products have to be assemblies of large numbers of smaller parts. Each part is then milled or cast or created with some other technology. Then these parts need to be assembled, which can mean yet more parts, such as screws and other fasteners. However, in some cases, a 3D print can combine many of these parts into fewer, more complex ones, saving both time and often weight. This automotive exhaust system example from 3D Systems…

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