Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Jay Rogers with a First of its Kind 3d Printed Car”.
I’M annika zunus france makes digital fabrication editor and i’m here at makercomm with jay rogers who’s about to arrive in the strategy. 3D printed vehicle, created by local motors in collaboration with a designer from italy and jay, will tell us all about locomotors and their co-creation micro factory and collaboration process, hey so jay great to meet you nice to meet. You too, thank you for having me, oh fantastic. So you just got done with your talk at makercon.
That’S right! You talked about all kinds of co-creation processes that happen in your micro factories um, and there are two of them right now and more planned on the way. That’S correct tell me a little bit about that process, how it works, how designers share files sure so co-creation for us is really the process of exploring whether an idea should come to market or not and for us in making cars. That’S critically important, because vehicles are something that are going to carry people and goods around and need to keep you safe and get things to where they need to go on time.
And so it’s not just about crowdsourcing, because it’s not about all take and no give back, because these ideas need to be explored. So we also don’t think about it as just about files. We think about sharing ideas and some of those ideas. Files so often mean cad and cad is one part and an important part of designing a complex system like a car but they’re also spreadsheets, that need to be given they’re also sketches, they’re, also ideas and words that need to be sent back and forth. Even almost text based all that, makes up the totality of a project online and it is free to use our site either physically or virtually so online. You can start a project and start working with people, and then the most important thing is that our micro factories, it’s free for you to come in and start working on your ideas and the reason for that is simple.
I was inspired living and working in china that part of the reason why innovation happens more quickly is because people share tools a lot without any remuneration or cost, and not before you go into not when you’re in production, but before you go into production. So this is about making an innovation space physically at our micro factories. We call them our labs available for people to be able to begin co-creation in a physical way.
So you mentioned that you know. Individuals can use these micro factors for free, but this is not a tech shop. This is a place that people work together on vehicle innovation as opposed to furniture projects or something else that’s correct.
So look. We love all the entire open hardware movement and we love the maker movement and tech shop is a place where you can go and pay a monthly fee and work on anything. You want and keep it as secret or make it as public. As you want. Local motors is different than that: it is still a collaborative maker space, but it is one that free for people to be able to use, but they need to work on vehicle innovations and they need to openly share them. So there are different running rules for how you use a local motors micro factory versus a tech shop, and we love to be close in the same town, because, if you’re, somebody that doesn’t know you’re a vehicle innovator or wants to work on lots of other things.
You might start at a tech shop and then, when you’re ready to bring your product in a sense to the market or to the big leagues of car makers, then you may go to a local motors micro factory and start working on it. Fantastic. And these are two currently in the u.s, correct and you’re planning on opening more sid. That’S correct! We’Re going to open 50 over the next five years, so we’re in phoenix and las vegas. We will soon be open in knoxville and then we will be going to berlin and then crystal city virginia, and we will have a whole host of other ones that are going to open up in america and abroad. Fantastic, so tell me a little bit about the cars that you make you mentioned earlier that you know you have several vehicles in your line. Sure you have a multi-vehicle line. Yes, multi-types of vehicles as well, two types, not all cars.
I think that’s one of the things is that we’re so used to 100 years of history that if you’re a car company, you only make cars. In fact, there are only two car companies in the world right now that actually make vehicles that are cars and vehicles that are motorcycles, and so maybe three and so uh we’re not just used to multi-modality vehicle companies. But we are so we make cars, not a car company. We make motorcycles, we’re not a motorcycle company.
We make bicycles, we’re not a bicycle company, we’re a vehicle innovation company. So this isn’t your first vehicle. You have several in your line: multi different vehicle types and they’ve all been produced by subtractive, manufacturing and forming.
So this is your first additive vehicle. That’S correct so tell me a little bit about the other vehicles and then we’ll talk in detail about this additively produced vehicle great. So none of local motors would have been possible as a co-creative or micro manufacturing business if we didn’t have numerically controlled machines.
So, for the last six years we’ve been working on digitally producing vehicles, but you’re right we’ve been cutting them and forming them and putting them together. That way, this vehicle behind us is adding a new tool to our kit bag and that’s really exciting. It’S 3d printing added to 3d cutting added to 3d assembly and forming, and so the vehicles we’ve made before the rally fighter, which is a premium authentic, off-road vehicle. The racer, which is a motorcycle, which is a 1970s inspired, hardtail bobber and then the cruiser, which is a 1920s board, track inspired gasoline or electric cruising bicycle, and then you’ve got the verado and the verado.
Who knows even how to describe it other than it is a three-wheel electric drift trike that is tons of fun on your cul-de-sac and so uh? We love all of those products and they’ve all been digitally made just with cutting and forming, and today we add a new tool to the kit bag, which allows us to create the strategy. The strategy was designed in competition. There were 207 entries, the winning entry was by a young italian man named mikhaile anoe. He is a professional car designer and he designed the winning design and the strategy means layer in italian and he did it because when we share files we are all about when we share files out with the community, which is literally a set of design files and A set of cad files and a set of textual base instructions and images. We tell people what we’re looking for. In this case, we were looking for a radical reduction in parts and so michaela and 206 other entrants designed vehicle ideas for a radical reduction in parts to create the first digitally manufactured vehicle, adding in that new tool of additive to our kit bag, fantastic. So how many parts are in this vehicle? There are 49 parts best way that we can describe and, of course, we abstract at a layer. We have pellets that come together to make the machines.
We don’t count each individual pellet. We do count bolts and screws when we count that part count. We don’t count wires when we’re looking a wire harness is one part. So when we think of a sub-assembly, that’s delivered, or we think of something like that, that to us counts. As one part tell me a little bit about your digital manufacturing process and how that works for you, so digital manufacturing process starts out once the vehicle is ready for production. It first goes in an additive machine and that prints, in a sense, almost a free cast, which is an approximative surface, for what the vehicle would be and an approximative structure.
Then we come in and we do digital subtraction, which means we’ll bring in a high speed. Router and we will mill down the surface for where we need tolerances or where we want a certain look for aesthetics. And then after that, we’ll do emplacement. And this is really cool, because on a traditional automotive line, where you have a piece of sheet metal that has been numerically controlled cut, then you would know where you’re putting a bulkhead fitting or others, because you just see a hole and you put it in there.
A human can do it in fact, it’s almost silly for a robot to do it, because the hole is where it is, but in this material, since the surface is approximative, you do need robotic emplacement in certain places, because you need the computer to know exactly where That grommet goes or exactly where that additional piece of equipment is assembled, so we do robotic emplacement and then, after that, we do inspection, which means we need to make sure that, after all that work, the system that you’re looking at is an encoded piece of material. That would pass inspection, so those four stages of assembly subtract in subtraction and then emplacement and then inspection are the four stages of digital manufacturing. Great so tell me about materials now and how this car was produced. Okay, this car at its base level – if you want to think about the largest volume of material that’s used – is using a carbon fiber, reinforced thermoplastic and that thermoplastic is abs, plastic.
The plastic that’s most commonly found in lego and many of our other plastic devices, and so it is an inexpensive plastic. It is a well-designed plastic. It’S not the most high performance plastic in the world in terms of its properties, but it works when reinforced with 500. By 5 micron carbon fiber, little tiny, threads and so they’re put together in pellets or that material is combined into a pellet. And then those pellets are fed into a hopper and the material is then put through a process where it’s dried and then it is extruded and it is deposed in an fdm process, a fuse deposition, modeling process where you put down material in order to be able To get the near net shape of the vehicle, great, so you’re, printing, on a sheet of abs, plastic, correct. We are printing on a sheet of abs plastic. That is not necessarily the most important part of the print.
When you manage the first layer of the print. There’S good science that says printing a raft is often one of the best ways to be able to deal with contraction of the material. We think that, in this case, instead of printing on a raft printing on a broad sheet of abs plastic can provide some of those same controls.
It doesn’t give you the layer height in order to be able to work on deformation at the extremes, but so far the best that we’ve found is to print on a very stiff sheet of aluminum. That then, has a vacuum layer underneath it and a sheet of abs plastic on top of it, which is then effectively bonded through layer adhesion to the first layer of the car. So just tell me briefly about the machine that made this vehicle. You know we know it’s an additive process.
We know that you’re using carbon fiber pellets fed into a hopper and then it’s you know extruding layer by layer. What’S the size of the machine, you know, how do you do with shrinkage of the material things like that? The machine the additive machine, which is the first in these four processes, is about 20 feet long by 10, feet wide by about four feet tall, and so it was originally built on a laser cutter basis. So it moves very, very fast and it has an extrusion system that brings the plastic down to put it where it needs to go and as far as shrinkage is concerned, what you’re really dealing with here is you’re fighting. What are residual stresses in the natural shrinkage of an abs plastic with carbon fiber that is on the inside, so the carbon fiber gives structure, but it also gives like a cast or a mold or a hold to the plastic great well. Thank you. So much for taking the time to talk to me, i appreciate it. .