Shop Tour Video: How to Integrate Additive and Subtractive Machining

ADDMAN Advanced Manufacturing Solutions (formerly Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing) has scaled quickly since its launch in 2018 by NASCAR champion Brad Keselowski, building an operation that pairs metal additive manufacturing with in-house CNC finishing. The company has grown from a single machine to roughly 25 metal 3D printers, producing laser powder bed fusion parts ranging from small, 10-inch-cube builds to components approaching a meter tall, then machining those printed parts to the accuracy levels demanded by aerospace, defense and space applications.

In this tour, we explore how that model works at production scale: print runs that last multiple days, customers moving from small quantities to orders in the tens of thousands, and an engineering workflow where additive and subtractive teams plan stock, workholding and machining strategy before a build begins. You’ll also see some of the downstream steps that can determine success or failure — powder removal from internal channels, build monitoring, and fixturing approaches such as printing a negative “nest” of a complex part to hold it securely for precision CNC machining.

Explore the shop alongside guest host Paul Van Metre in the video below, or follow along with the full transcript. 

 

Transcript:

Paul Van Metre (Guest Host and Proshop Co-Founder): Hey, I'm Paul Van Metre on behalf of Modern Machine Shop magazine, we are here at ADDMAN Advanced Metals, formerly Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing, which was started only a mere six years ago by Brad Keselowski, the famed NASCAR driver. But what we're about to go inside and see in this facility is something you have probably never seen before.

This is a company that is taking metal additive parts from ten by ten cubed or smaller, up to almost a meter in height, and then finish machining them in their machine shop.

Scott Whitehead (Engineering Manager): That's not something you can just do on a on a fancy machine. So all these are 3D printed using laser powder bed fusion.

Paul Van Metre: They went, in the last six years from one machine to having 25 printing machines now, and a host of CNC machines from horizontals, verticals, Integrexes and five-axis. So it is pretty darn cool, I cannot wait to show you, and let's go check it out.

Alright, so we are standing in front of, what, about ten machines? What do we have here?

Scott: Yeah. So there's ten EOS M280s in here. The EOS M280 is kind of a workhorse for us. It's considered a small-frame machine. It's about ten inches by ten inches by ten inches. And, we're using them in all kinds of materials. We use them in titanium, Inconels, aluminums. Right now, almost every machine in here is in an M300 maraging steel for a specific project we have going on, but right now, it's a large-scale production run.

Paul Van Metre: What's the large-scale production for you guys?

Scott: Four years ago, we were making twos and fives and tens of things. This customer came to us about a year ago and ordered 40 of this small part. And recently they came back to us and they were so happy with them, they ordered 19,000 of them with the intention to double that in the next few months, and continuing orders beyond that.

So it's one of the biggest growth opportunities we've had internally is to take all of our systems and scale them up.

Paul Van Metre: So if you do a ten by ten cube here, and you're doing small parts, you can do many at a time. Do you do multiple layers of the same part

Scott: We can. We do sometimes, but in most cases it's easier to just make one layer of a part. But in this case, it's a small part, maybe about the size of my hand. We actually stand it up and we make rows of these parts. So there's about there's about 50 parts on a plate.

Paul Van Metre: And then how long would a machine typically run, for example, with 50 of these parts?

Scott: These machines, these prints take about three days, just under three days.

Paul Van Metre: So you've been here with Brad since the very beginning of the company. Tell us what inspired his vision to start this company.

Haley Cook (Senior Director of Operations at ADDMAN): Yes. So Brad basically has been in manufacturing his whole life. So he started off, you know, with his dad and his uncle in their race shop. Then as he became a driver and, you know, was engritted in the motor sports industry, it really took off because he started to see AM parts infiltrate into motorsports. And then he saw them really producing performance results that were increased and heightened. And when he saw that, he really then saw the opportunity that that capability could really enhance aerospace, defense and space — commercial space launch.

Paul Van Metre: So it's worth noting that we can't show many of the parts you make, but these are samples and some parts we can. So yeah tell us what you guys specialize here.

Scott: That’s an unfortunate reality of doing a lot of work in the commercial space.

This part is actually kind of a generic injector, very similar to something use in the space field. This is just something that we threw together, design-wise, so that we can show it off, but it shows off some of the capabilities of really being able to create parts that have really complex internal channels.

Paul Van Metre: Yeah, designed for additive, not just subtractive.

Scott: That's not something you can just do on a CNC machine. So all these are 3D printed using laser powder bed fusion.

Laser powder bed fusion is a technology that starts with a thin layer of powder, uses a laser to solidify that powder, and then the whole part drops some small amount called the layer thickness. We spread another layer of powder on and laze that next layer. And one layer at a time, we create a solid part that allows you to do all sorts of things, like create parts with really complex internal channels that you can't even get to. But we can exactly what we can manufacture.

Paul Van Metre: All right. This is kind of like the don't knock on the windows for the —

Scott: Yeah.

Paul Van Metre: But tell us about these guys in here?

Scott: So our engineering layout, I think, captures exactly the way we run parts. And what I mean by that is we have four sections here. And each of them is a critical part of what we do. But it's laid out in such a way that they're constantly communicating.

So our first layer is materials and processes. Then we have a section for our quality team, we have a section for our additive team and a section for our subtractive team. Before we ever print a part, if it's going to be machined in here, then our subtractive engineer and the additive engineer who are working on it will meet together — review added stock, review part holding, and all of that gets done before we ever hit print for the first time.

Paul Van Metre: And then I also see they have, a bunch of cameras all showing from these machines.

Scott: Every one of these machines has a small camera on it, and that allows the engineers in there to watch all their builds. They can actually remote in right from home and watch their builds, because builds happen 24/7 and unfortunately, so do build failures.

Paul Van Metre: Ho ho. As a car guy, I'm loving this part.

Scott: When your company was originally started by a NASCAR driver, and a championship winning one at that, It's kind of hard not to have race cars here. One of the coolest things about them is when we first started as a company, we were looking for case studies to do. We were looking for things that we could make an additive.

Paul Van Metre: I was just going to say, I can see that shifter.

Scott: And that shifter handle is the perfect example. And there's several other parts in here that you can see as well. So the shifter handle obviously is additively designed. The headrest support here is additive. The fire bottle mounts are additive.

And, you know, we didn't pretend that they were the perfect design at the time. What they were was proof of concept and proof of the ability to make parts that were lighter and stronger.

Paul Van Metre: So do Brad’s actual cars have any printed parts like those.

Scott: They do. Several under the hood.

Paul Van Metre: So now we're going to go see your biggest machine. Tell us about the travel on this thing.

Scott: So the Velo Sapphire XC is an eight-laser machine capable of making parts — I hope I get this right — 600 mm in diameter and 550 mm tall.

Paul Van Metre: Wow.

Scott: The build plate alone, before you start making parts on it, weighs several hundred pounds and only gets heavier from there as you start adding metal to it.

Paul Van Metre: So you have to climb a good four feet just to even look in the window.

Scott: Just to get in. And the reason for that is this machine actually can be expanded to a one meter vertical height. So we actually had to lift this up to be prepared for that one meter expansion that wasn't available at the time we bought the machine.

It is quite a monster. It allows us to make huge parts. And that's one of the things that the space industry is clamoring for. Rocket engines are — they're pushing the reusability of those rocket engines. And in order to reuse those rocket engines and not make them be, you know, $100 million, one-use things. The way to do that is through additive.

Paul Van Metre: So when we were on the tour, Scott was talking about some parts that traditionally with a casting would take possibly two-plus years and possibly millions of dollars for making new new molds. And you guys are able to produce that same kind of part in a matter of weeks. Can you just talk a bit a little bit about that?

Haley Cook: Yeah. And that's that flexibility. So, you know, whereas you have to have the very labor-intensive and expensive tooling created, et cetera for, you know, a casting or something of that nature — we don't. So it is literally the speed that a engineer can create that digital file. And that's the lead time up to that, that's our tooling per se. Our tooling is digital.

Paul Van Metre: Yeah. So these don't look like printers. What are we looking at here?

Scott: They’re definitely not. When you print a part in a bed of powder, you’ve got to get that powder out. Okay. Now, if I was printing a simple block of material, that's very easy. The powder just kind of flows off it. But when you make parts with internal complex channels, you have to get the powder out of those channels. And that can be very, very tricky.

And it's really important to get that powder out before you send it off to stress relief or any kind of heat treat, because if the powder is in there and you send it to any kind of heat treat, you're never getting it out. You now have solid material in there.

So what this machine does, it's basically a platform that can spin 360 degrees like this, can rotate up and down, and has vibration inducers on it, high-frequency and low-frequency thumpers on it to shake that powder, free it up and get it out of all the ports that we print down there. So basically get the powder out.

Paul Van Metre: Alright. We're in the machine shop, finally.

Scott: Yes. Making chips.

Paul Van Metre: I see a bunch of Matsuuras, bunch of Mazaks, both turning and milling and horizontal.

Scott: Yep. Definitely machines for all different aspects. The Matsuuras are great for their multi-pallet pool capabilities. You know, we can set up a lot of parts and jobs that can be a variety of different jobs and go before we leave for the night, and let all those parts run and come back and have a bunch of good parts.

So the operators, I think a lot of times people will walk through here and be surprised at how few of the spindles are spinning, but we really emphasize the fact that the guys should be spending their day setting up parts and the nighttime running them. So it's it's really kind of a culture thing that we have to, you know, kind of share with the guys is make sure those spindles are running when they're not here.

Paul Van Metre: Yeah. These Integrexes are beautiful machines.

Scott: Integrexes are monsters, right? I mean, they're just perfect for large parts, really complex parts. They just give us a lot of capability.

Paul Van Metre: Yeah, I imagine for rockets and aerospace you're doing a lot of round things that have lots of features coming from all over.

Scott: Perfect for the Integrexes. Yeah, a lot of threaded ports, things like that.

Paul Van Metre: And then a couple of horizontals here at the end.

Scott: Yup. Horizontals we do for a lot of our plate production. We do some antenna components and some thermal transfer plates that run great on the horizontals.

Haley Cook: We have, you know, differentiated ourselves by being able to basically do the precision CNC on 3D printed material.

It's not always the same. And, you know, and everybody's like, well, machining is machining. No, there is a little bit of difference when you're handed a casting, and in this case, then handed an additive manufacturing parts that has even more geometry built in.

So, we always joked in the beginning, we actually could probably spend more time making a fixture than we actually did making the part. So we realized there had to be some strategy brought to that.

Scott: The challenging part of additive parts is that we want to machine them with the same accuracy as the best high-end billet parts. But you're starting with a part that, number one, doesn't have two parallel surfaces anywhere on it. Yep. And two, has just a little bit of variability itself. And the key is fixturing the part. Well, how do you fixture an additive part? Let me show you.

So when you have a complex additive part with lots of curves, the best thing to do is use that same additive machine to print a negative of the parts. And now you have an additive fixture that is perfect for holding that part. Drill a few holes for a rock block pattern —

Paul Van Metre: Put in some index pins —

Scott: And you’re good to go.

Haley Cook: You know, seeing the ability for additive to literally change parts and create parts that change the world, create parts that could never be made before, and just seeing those come to life, that's what is, I think, really fulfilling. And any new employee that comes to KAM, one of the first things I say is, “You will always be challenged, you will never be bored and it will never be easy," because we are literally pioneering different realms of manufacturing right now.

Brent Donaldson (Editor-in-Chief, Modern Machine Shop): Hey everybody, Brant Donaldson with Modern Machine Shop here. And if you just watched that video and you're thinking, “Boy, I'd like my shop to be featured in The View From My Shop series,” then just send us an email at shopvideo@MMSonline.com and tell us what sets your shop apart.