Jeremy Pullin,
Rapid Manufacturing Manager,
Renishaw PLC.
During TCT Live, I was lucky enough to be allowed to show a group of students around. Before the event, I was given a profile of each of them and one of the things that struck me was the fact that all of them wanted to have futures as designers in one area or another, but not one of them mentioned an interest in manufacturing. In many educational establishments, the students are no longer allowed to produce their own parts. They are trained in all sorts of aspects surrounding design and the product development process, but when their designs are ready to be made, production is either carried out by some technician somewhere or doesn't happen at all. So why don't they make stuff anymore?
When I was at school we used furnaces, turret mills, centre lathes, band saws, pillar drills etc. and I came through it unharmed. The claim and compensation culture that has gripped Britain is growing to the point where it will soon rival that of the US. This has had the effect that in many cases health and safety issues have gone from being mere concerns to creators of paranoia. One of the areas where this has impacted is in our educational institutions. Many of them will no longer allow students to operate anything more dangerous than a pencil, because they don't want to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit.
Students are being denied the joy of having something in their hands that they have produced for themselves. For many people in the past, this satisfaction was what got them hooked on engineering in the first place. The intrinsically safe nature (relatively speaking) of additive layer stuff (ALS) is able to bring the pleasure and learning opportunities of being able to make stuff back into education.
However, one big problem with using ALS in education is the running costs. An educational establishment can raid its funds to purchase a piece of hardware, which seems to do just want they want, and sure, it may fulfil their needs nicely for the first year or so. The problem comes further down the line. I have spoken to people from universities who have made impressive investments in processes only to have the machines sitting idle because they simply can't afford maintenance contracts, repairs or raw material prices.
There's no point just whinging about this situation without suggesting a few solutions. Firstly, the educational institutions themselves should stop making bad buying decisions and only invest in what they can afford to run. Universities such as Wolverhampton and DeMontford subsidise their running costs by acting as bureaus for others that don't have the technologies, which is a complete win-win situation for all concerned. Industrial companies with the kit can also offer the service to local schools or colleges for cut price or (as we do here at Renishaw from time to time) free.
The suppliers themselves should stop offering their kit at reduced costs to education and instead offer them savings (or freebies) on materials and servicing. This won't cost the suppliers any more, as they will lose the same amount of money compared with list price, but spread out the savings over the life of the kit instead. This may mean that educational institutions purchase lower specification equipment, but they will then be able to afford to use it.
Finally, a suggestion was made at the final panel session of the TCT Live Conference that materials such as used SLS powders should be passed for free onto 'second-tier' users, such as those in education, who are not worried about the degradation in surface finish. This not only makes economic sense, but will also keep the tree huggers happy as well, as it means the donors are reducing their landfill tax burden.
So, why should we worry so much about whether students get to make stuff or not? To answer this question, we have to look both to the past and to the future. In the past, we had design offices where men in suits would sit behind their drawing boards and come up with designs, before throwing them over a metaphorical wall to a group of blue-collar people who would then do whatever it took to produce them if at all possible. There was little or no communication or understanding of what problems occurred in production as a result of design features.
It is only by getting designers involved in the issues of production that they can fully understand the true implications of what they design. The vast majority of manufacturing costs (and so margins and sales prices) are locked into a product during its design. Manufacturability has now become an important responsibility for today's designers, which has only come about because of their greater understanding of what's involved in the processes used to manufacture what they design. If this understanding disappears due to people being educated in design alone, we will once again return to the days of designers spitting part designs out of their CAD systems that are to be made 'somehow or other'.
The final reason why this issue should concern us all lies in our futures. The exporting of manufactured goods remains a chief contributor to our country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product). If we do not make enough stuff to sell to the rest of the world, our country will go bankrupt — it's as simple as that.
To conclude, it would be a terrible mistake to create tomorrow's engineers with the ability to design, but without the ability to manufacture or at the very least the understanding of what is involved. ALS is not a complete answer to this problem, but is one health and safety acceptable route to at least get bits from the virtual world to the real world. We have to maintain our ability to produce saleable goods if we are to have a financially sustainable economy.
