unclefester

Two of those to choose from if you want arms locally

CynicG

Shhhhh! More pleasant & apparently way better for you than statins. If your local drug pusher (GSK or the other lot) reads that, there'll probably be a 'terrorist attack' on JLR and that would be a shame.
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Indeed. That's why they go on about liberals being nut-eaters, in an attempt to undermine the blantent health benefits.

Ultra_Nexus

They have been doing extrusions for years. The Elise was built by toothpaste manufacturing and it's 20 years old

Nick Graves

Indeed, but what they've done is eliminate the 'prototype tooling' stage, which used to be time and money-consuming.

You'd mould the end piece of a door casing for example, only to find it shrunk slightly and didn't fit/squeaked and have to adjust the prototype mould all over again.

Now you can design and crash-test the whole car virtually, then print the first prototype at a far later stage than before.

It saves the big companies billions, and allows the forlorn hope that the likes of Lotus and TVR can produce a fresh design less wrong out of the box.

Polemicist

GE are 3D printing engine components - fuel nozels IIRC - for their new LEAP gas turbines.
The components are of such a design that the only viable means to manufacture them is by 3D printing.

These engines are mooted to be significantly more fuel efficient than existing engines, and cleaner.

This is where real creative engineering will excel; using this disruptive manufacturing technology to develop and create new products, rather than employing it to make old stuff in a new way.

Fascinating times.

Nottm_S2

citroen have been printing cars for years.. the body panels are 80gsm laminated paper

i struggle to believe Jag are really doing some engineering because for a long time they didnt. and that £1m car show was a bunch of untrust worthy old blokes round a table with some spanners and a lot of shrugs

Polemicist

70gsm matt varnished, with micro perforation.

Nick Graves

Trudat.

Actually JLR did do a lot of very advanced stuff (they inherited the Gaydon Research bit from BLzebub) but Ford raped all the IP out of them for a decade. That's where the aloominum F-150 came from.

Kinda like they did with Volvo too.