Setting Some Standards for 3-D Printing

I gave a speech earlier this week at a National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA) meeting down in Akron, Ohio, all about 3-D printing and additive manufacturing.It was a fun speech – a kind of high-level overview of the capabilities and potential of the technology along with a few businesses cases they could take back to their shops. Exactly the kind of thing I like to talk about.
When I finished, the crowd of local tool and die executives, company owners and all the other industrial representatives and workers in attendance hit me with an intense 20-minute Q&A that came down to one subject: standards.
These guys are in the business of standards and measurements. That's how their companies get by – how they differentiate themselves in the market and win their contracts.
To them, however interesting additive might sound, however tempting it may have been to start investing in it, they couldn't consider any moves without knowing exactly what kinds of metals these printers were using and exactly how they compared to those they already knew.
And I didn't have a good answer for them. I danced around it, sure, I talked generally about strength comparability and worked in a few good anecdotal points, but I had no numbers to give them and no formal standards to cite. Because none exist.