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Louisville Slugger Knocks it out of the Park Designing Bats with Formlabs 3D Printers https://ift.tt/k8aQuKy In 2022, historical bat brand Louisville Slugger revealed a new strategy to optimize its product, combining digital simulation for the design process and 3D motion capture technology for comprehensive baseball and softball hitting analysis. Now the brand – owned by sports giant Wilson – shares how designers and engineers at the Louisville Slugger Innovation Center in Roseville, California, use Formlabs’ industrial quality desktop Form 3+ printers to advance equipment design for some of its newest bats, like its one-piece-alloy BBCOR Atlas. By merging traditional manufacturing methods like CNC milling, lathes, and wood patterning with modern tools like 3D printing, Slugger makes its bat manufacturing process significantly faster. As a result, it can deliver innovative new equipment designed to improve athlete analytics without long wait times between outsourced iterations. For Slugger Innovation Center Senior Simulation and Design Engineer John Steel, the key to creating prototypes and manufacturing aids for prototype designs lies in 3D printing, particularly the Formlabs Form 3 stereolithography (SLA) 3D printer. According to Formlabs, Steel’s background influenced his choice to use 3D printing technology. One of Steel’s previous jobs taught him to combine large industrial SLA and SLS 3D prints with traditional wood patterning techniques. He then worked at a product design startup where he used two Form 1+ machines to iterate rapidly.
The speed of iteration allows the Slugger team to release new products regularly and keep up with the demand for bats suitable for all different levels of play. This is ideal for a market that keeps growing, mainly thanks to mass customization and personalization which has slowly been gaining importance in the baseball equipment market in the U.S. So even for a brand with such a storied history as Slugger, the competition is fierce, leaving Steel and the innovation team needs to be ahead of the curve constantly. Form 3 and continuous iteration help them get those ideas to the next stage faster.
Although prototyping is the core use for Form 3, Steel uses the machine for other applications, including creating silicone molds and manufacturing aids. A mechanical designer and hands-on prototype builder, Steel illustrates how Form 3 allows his team to leverage many materials available for other processes. For example, forming mold positives in silicone to back pour in urethane, silicone, or epoxy. The molds are used to create final-stage prototypes that include all the eventual types of material, like urethane or epoxy, that will be used in the final, traditional manufacturing process (as seen in the image below). Before, if the engineers wanted to get silicone parts made, they needed aluminum tooling. Now they can 3D print the positive geometry, then back pour in silicone, cut the silicone mold apart, and then use the resulting negative to create other types of parts, like functional prototypes, explains Formlabs. For the team, iterating the positive and practicing the silicone pour process can illuminate flaws in the design that would otherwise take weeks of waiting and testing to uncover when outsourcing.
Looking forward, Steel says he is working on expanding the number and range of ways to use 3D printing, including in manufacturing tools, which he deems even more valuable than creating parts.
Since the Hillerich family’s first bats in the 1880s to its latest aerospace-grade carbon fiber designs, their famed Louisville Sluggers have dominated as the stick of choice for the greatest players ever. Some of the biggest names in the sport have relied on the bat’s cutting-edge heritage, like Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Derek Jeter, and especially the first pro bat player ever to use Hillerich’s creation, Pete “The Louisville Slugger” Browning. With so much history, innovation, and dedication to sports, the brand is an ideal candidate for 3D printing. The technology is not only suited to sports in general but can enable the Slugger group to reduce time to market for new products, streamline its workflow, improve productivity, and help drive greater control over its manufacturing. The post Louisville Slugger Knocks it out of the Park Designing Bats with Formlabs 3D Printers appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing. Printing via 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing https://ift.tt/Uw0hP8t March 23, 2023 at 09:54AM
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