Why Aerospace Teams Are Moving From Machined to Printed Components
Picture a titanium bracket sitting finished on a bench. Next to it, in the bin, is a heap of shiny chips that used to be the rest of the block. Most of what the shop bought is in that bin. In aerospace, where the metal is expensive and weight is everything, that's a hard number to ignore. It's a big reason teams are looking at metal additive manufacturing for parts they've always machined. Nobody's closing the machine shop. They're just sorting out which parts belong where.
What Pushes Aerospace Teams to Look Beyond Traditional Machining
Machining starts big and cuts down. For some flight parts, most of the metal bought ends up as scrap. There's even a term for it, the buy-to-fly ratio, which compares the weight of raw stock to the weight of the finished part. Titanium and nickel all...









