Metal AM would only continue to advance for those parts and designs that can't be built any other way Alan. The cost/profit return just isn't achievable for metal AM vs traditional manufacturing, and likely won't be for the foreseeable future.
I think there are many here(probably most) who vastly underestimate the significance of the IPQA effort and event. It is hard to erase two hundred and fifty years of traditional metal manufacturing mentality and beliefs. The history of metal manufacturing has come so far,and gotten so exact, that there are almost no unknowns in traditional metal manufacturing. And then along comes two dudes by the name of Cola and Dave who started saying that the metal manufacturing industry can safely toss two hundred and fifty years of hard earned learning and knowledge out the window. In process inspection can do the job, just trust us.
There will long be many entities who will never, ever believe that software based IPQA can tell them if a part is good to go. Until IPQA has decades upon decades of success, it will always be a bit of a leap of faith that a part coming out of the printer is indeed good.
And to boot, those two guys didn't start off with lawnmower blades. No sir. They went straight after the very most high-reliability, most difficult to make, most mission-critical flight enabling parts manufacturing has to offer. We are talking about tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, and numerous human lives at stake, per incident, in the prospect that PR3D is indeed capable of replacing two hundred and fifty years of history. It is a mind blowing thing. What SGLB is trying to do is unprecedented in the history of humanity. If they do it, you will be able to read about it in history books a hundred years from now. And you are frustrated after just five years of effort. Enough said about the type of people invested in SGLB.
All the best,
Silversmith
