Oakland County is stepping up efforts to give local businesses training and access to industrial-grade 3D printing machines, and the equipment's latest batch of widgets and parts are ready to be shown off.
County Executive Dave Coulter on Tuesday officially opened the new Digital Transformation Center, a 3D printing production and training warehouse in Auburn Hills that is available free of charge to qualifying businesses in the county. machine printing machine
The 23,000-square-foot center is owned by Geofabrica, an Auburn Hills-based company that develops advanced manufacturing processes, and it is filled with Israeli-made 3D printing machines purchased with county grant funds.
The Digital Transformation Center is an initiative of Oakland County's and Automation Alley's Project DIAMOnD, which launched in 2020 to help local businesses make hard-to-source personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic using 3D printing. Some Macomb County businesses also took part.
Funded by $15 million of pandemic-era stimulus funds, the Digital Transformation Center offers 3D printing training and 3D printer access to small- and medium-size manufacturing, engineering and design firms that apply via the Project DIAMOnD website.
So far, 38 businesses have been approved. County officials said they hope to expand participation to 250 businesses by 2026.
“This helps us to compete for contracts with folks in China, in South Korea, in Germany and all across the country," Coulter said. "This helps us keep manufacturing right here in the United States, here in Michigan and — near and dear to my heart — here in Oakland County."
Geofabrica helped to design and build the Digital Transformation Center and its employees are responsible for maintaining the equipment.
Geofabrica CEO George Caravias gave tours of the center Tuesday morning, showing visitors the printers and related equipment that is kept inside special climate-controlled enclosures.
He held out a roundish, gray piece of molded plastic that a medical device company designed and had produced as part of a prototype cancer detection machine. He couldn't identify the company for privacy reasons.
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"This firm that has really world-class scientists in cancer detection and detection technology came to us with a design that was unmanufacturable," Caravias said. "They need five prototypes over the next year so they can do clinical trials, and they want to produce those for a relatively tight sum, to keep their clinical trial costs low."
Next he displayed a tray of custom-made, 3D-printed finger splints that were designed by a local group of hand surgeons and produced at the center. The doctors believe these 3D-printed splints will be superior to ordinary finger splints, which sometimes don't fit snuggly and can fall off.
"There are many cases where you can 3D print a part or a component that would really be unmanufacturable —parts within parts, parts that are already assembled or parts that have geometry that would be practically impossible to produce by any other means," he said.
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