Additive manufacturing cuts lead times

Global engineering technologies company, Renishaw, has supplied four RenAM 500Q metal additive manufacturing machines to Knust-Godwin, a precision machining company located in Katy, Texas. 

The high-productivity machine, designed for serialised industrial manufacturing, has enabled Knust-Godwin to drastically reduce lead times for its customers.

Knust-Godwin has been in business for over 50 years, having a long history of machining large, complex parts for oilfield instrumentation. 

The company first introduced additive manufacturing as a new technology to help improve the efficiency and productivity of tools in the oil and gas industry. 

The company chose to expand its additive manufacturing (AM) capacity to handle serial production, purchasing four RenAM 500Q machines.

AM technology brings a number of benefits to the oil and gas industry, for example by producing components for down hole measurement while drilling and logging while drilling, which offer more efficient flow. This increases efficiency of tool rates and leads to longer tool life. 

The company is also benefitting from less waste, shorter lead times and fewer post processing steps – products that typically took six to twelve steps to complete can now be completed in two.

“Additive manufacturing started as a prototyping technology, but it is now moving into serialised production,” explained Mike Corliss, VP of Technology at Knust-Godwin. “Because we are designing components specifically for AM, we have been able to reduce customers’ lead times. A project which previously required a 24 month wait from concept to commercialisation can now be reduced to eight months. The cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry means that providing parts quickly is extremely important.

“Knust-Godwin has not only benefitted from the huge productivity gains of the machines, but also from tremendous support from Renishaw,” continued Corliss. “We see AM playing a large role in our company’s future and we are expecting to see a 40% compound growth year on year in the oil and gas industry and 20% compound growth in aerospace. We are even looking at purchasing additional RenAM 500Q machines for different metal alloys.”

“The RenAM 500Q offers productivity and efficiency gains over traditional single laser machines,” added Robin Weston, Marketing Manager of Renishaw Additive Manufacturing. “The benefits offered by AM means that more and more industries are turning to the technology as a way of producing high-quality, efficient parts.”

The RenAM 500Q offers four lasers in the most commonly used platform size, increasing productivity by up to four times, with no compromise on quality.