Fail Fast & Fail Better

Aug. 8, 2023
The design process has been the stopgap in moving from an idea to a tool to a finished part. Let’s look at how additive manufacturing has allowed the entire workflow to pick up speed while allowing design creativity to flow.

Glen Mason, manager of advanced innovation and industrialization at DeMarini, a division of Wilson Sporting Goods, and Lasse Staal, business development director of Nexa3D, spoke with Sharon Spielman, technical editor of Machine Design, about additive manufacturing for the sporting goods space. 

In this second of a five-part series, we learn that the experts have been the bottleneck in the process all along. Mason says, it is the experts who have been vetting what ideas go forward and what ideas dont.

“The cost is generally high for tooling, right? If I have to spend six to eight weeks and $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 just to test an idea, all the maybe,’ undeveloped ideas or ideas that don’t have a lot of legacy of data to support them, they just never see the light of day,” Mason says. “So, when I can bring that cost down by a factor of 10 and I can bring the time down by a factor of 10...there’s really not an obstacle to test these ideas...I can now have version one, version two, version three. 

READ MORE: ASME Honors Additive Manufacturing Innovation

He says that by jumping over those design steps, not only has the process sped up significantly but the mold build was faster, and the entire workflow got faster. “What I’ve done is, I've sort of liberated these early design phases so that more of those ideas can see the light of day because they arent waiting,” he says.

Staal agrees. “I think everybody’s realizing...that while additive manufacturing is a great technology, the experience that Glen has had with this gap between the prototyping and the production is a real one. It’s one that’s holding back a lot of creativity, a lot of ideas,” he says. We wanted to try to see if we could bridge that gap. 

The collaboration between Nexa3D and Addifab was to “be able to do bigger stuff faster,” Staal says.When we started the Wilson Sporting Goods case, we had actually just onboarded the large form of Nexa3D NICS in XY for 120, which was the key enabler in making those large molds. So, had you asked us about two years ago, could we do this? No, we couldn’t.

Also in This Series

About the Author

Sharon Spielman | Technical Editor, Machine Design

As Machine Design’s technical editor, Sharon Spielman produces content for the brand’s focus audience—design and multidisciplinary engineers. Her beat includes 3D printing/CAD; mechanical and motion systems, with an emphasis on pneumatics and linear motion; automation; robotics; and CNC machining.

Spielman has more than three decades of experience as a writer and editor for a range of B2B brands, including those that cover machine design; electrical design and manufacturing; interconnection technology; food and beverage manufacturing; process heating and cooling; finishing; and package converting.

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: @sharonspielman

X: @MachineDesign

Facebook: Machine Design

YouTube: @MachineDesign-EBM

Sponsored Recommendations

Drive systems for urban air mobility

March 18, 2025
The shift of some of our transport traffic from the road to the air through urban air mobility is one of the most exciting future fields in the aerospace industry.

Blazing the trail for flying robots

March 18, 2025
Eight Bachelor students built a flying manipulator that can hover in any orientation and grasp objects. The drone is even more maneuverable than a quadrocopter and was designed...

Reachy 2: The Open-Source Humanoid Robot Redefining Human-Machine Interaction

March 18, 2025
Reachy 2 was designed to adapt to a wide variety of uses thanks to its modular architecture.

maxon IDX: The plug-and-play solution

March 18, 2025
IDX drives combine power with small space requirements - a brushless BLDC motor combined with an EPOS4 positioning controller and a gearhead inside a high-quality industrial housing...

Voice your opinion!

To join the conversation, and become an exclusive member of Machine Design, create an account today!