Using Additive Manufacturing Technology Via Autodesk Fusion 360 and Inventor

ROB BOWERMAN: Hello, everybody. And welcome to this session on additive manufacturing technology using Autodesk Inventor Fusion 360 and Inventor. My name is Rob Bowerman. I'm a senior technology consultant here at Autodesk. And I'm going to be taking you through this session today.

So before we start, I have to show you the obligatory safe harbor statement. I'm sure you've seen this enough times already. If this happens to be the first presentation you're seeing, please pause for a second and read through this. But we'll move on from it because I imagine many of you have already seen it.

So a little bit of content around what we're going to present today. I have a slide on what to expect from this talk. Hopefully, not too many of you will leave after hearing this slide. I'll give you a bit more of an in-depth introduction to myself.

And we will then look at the workflow from going from Inventor into Fusion 360. We'll look at how that works with your data and also why you should be doing this, why as in Inventor user you will be interested in using Fusion 360, what it offers you in terms of new capability. We'll then go into a demonstration of how this actually happens and what this looks like in product.

And then we'll get into the meat of this presentation, which is really around metal additive manufacturing, and how Fusion 360 opens up a range of new possibilities for you and this technology, and how you as an Inventor user can access those capabilities [? through ?] Fusion. So we'll talk about things like what is metal additive, what kind of technologies does Fusion support, and why might you want to use them. And then to embody all of this work, we're going to take you through a real customer use case, an Inventor customer who is using metal additive manufacturing. So we'll go through that before we do some closing remarks to round out the presentation.

So what can you expect from this talk? Well, the talk is titled Using Additive Manufacturing Technology via Autodesk Fusion 360 and Inventor. So hopefully, it's fairly self-explanatory. We're going to talk a little bit about metal additive manufacturing. You're going to learn something about those technologies, who's using them, and why they're using them.

We're going to look at the Inventor to Fusion 360 workflow. So how does your data actually move between the two products and what are your options there? We're going to look at Fusion 360's design and manufacturing capabilities. But we're going to look at those through the lens of a metal AM user and what specific capabilities the product offers you for that technology. And then, like I said, we're going to wrap all of that up in a demonstration of this workflow and the customer who is interested in using this technology.

So like I said, a little bit more about myself. My name is Rob Bowerman. I'm a senior technology consultant with Autodesk. I've been with Autodesk for about five and 1/2 years now. I'm based in the Fusion 360 product team. And day to day I spend my time working with metal additive manufacturing technologies, either with customers to help them implement the technology or with our software development teams in helping set direction of the functionality and the capability that we need in our software products for our customers to be successful with this type of technology.

So what's new in Inventor which enables you to go from Inventor to Fusion 360? Well, with Inventor 2023, we've included some new and improved interoperability tools that enable you to do just that, send your data from Inventor into Fusion 360. Now this enables additional workflows for you as in Inventor user.

These additional workflows are in design, so with generative design for example, in simulation, and the whole suite of simulation capabilities that Fusion 360 has, but also, and specific to this tool, in manufacturing, so in milling and turning, in fabrication with waterjet cutting and laser cutting, for example, but in additive manufacturing as well with plastics and metal additive manufacturing.

Now alongside additional workflows, you also have additional improved collaboration tools by using Fusion 360. Now Fusion's data storage is primarily on the cloud. So this enables you to share data and collaborate on projects across teams or with external vendors in a very easy manner. And you can either do this directly through the Fusion 360 application or you can do this through a thing called Fusion Teams. And Fusion teams is like the web application where all of your Fusion data is stored. And you can view and send data directly from Fusion Teams to an external vendor, for example.

So going a little bit more into detail on this workflow, what does the workflow actually look like if we were to do it? Well, if you opened Inventor 23 today, you would see this new toolbar that appears at the top of Inventor. It's called Fusion 360. And within that toolbar, you will see four different options of workflows that you can launch into. So we have options for generative design workflows, for simulation workflows, for manufacturing workflows, and just for pure design workflows.

Now each of these workflows corresponds to what we call a workspace in Fusion 360. So in Fusion, you'll see a generous design workspace, simulation workspace, manufacturer workspace, and pure design workspace. Now regardless which of these options you use, the process is pretty much the same. Right. So we click on one of these options. And what happens is our data, in Inventor our CAD data, is copied across to Fusion Teams, which is where all the Fusion data is stored. And then we can see that data in Fusion 360.

The difference between either doing a GD, simulation, manufacturing design workflow is the environment that we're launched into when Fusion 360 opens. So for example, if we do a manufacturing workflow, when Fusion 360 opens, we'll be in the manufacturing workspace to begin with and the first few steps of that workflow will have been automated for us. So we have a video in a moment that shows that. And we'll go into a little bit more detail then.

But one thing I wanted to touch on first was sort of the prerequisites you need to be able to do this workflow. So obviously, you need to have Fusion installed. And within Fusion, you need to have a Fusion team set up. Now you'll set up a team when you first open Fusion. You'll either create a new one or you'll join an existing team. And then in a team, you need to have a project in place. And then in a project is where you will save your file that comes from Inventor.

Now there are a couple of ways that you can create a project. You can either create a project directly in Fusion, which is fine, or you can create a project through Fusion Teams. And I find if you use Fusion Teams, you have a few more options available to you for creating that project. So how do you open Fusion Teams maybe is the first thing to point out.

Now the image on the left is your data panel in Fusion. To the top right of that, there's a little globe with an eye. If you click on that, that will open your browser. And that will open Fusion Teams for you. In Fusion Teams, you then have a Create Project button. If you click on this, you'll see a dialog that appears.

You can name a new project. And then you get a few options for security levels. And this is why it's quite nice to create a project in Fusion Teams because you get a few more options than you do just in the Fusion application. So you can create an open project, which means anybody in the team can go in and access data in that project.

You can create a closed project, which means only specific people have access rights but everybody in the team can see that that project exists. You can create a secret project, which means only people with access rights can see that that project exists and then enter that project, or you can create a folder level project, which is the same as a secret project but within the actual project you can also have granular rights access to each of the data folders within.

So that's creating a project. Now let's have a look at what the actual workflow looks like in software. So when you open Inventor, you'll see the new Fusion 360 toolbar. Within there, we have all the options that we discussed. Let's say the part on screen we want to 3D print. We want to additively manufacture.

We click on the Additive button. That then brings up this new panel on the right hand side of Inventor. In here, we can see things like all of the teams that we have access to in Fusion so we can go ahead and we can select the team that we want to put this data into. And within that team, we can then see all the projects that exist.

We come in. We select the projects that we want to add this data to. We can keep the same name or we can rename this project. So you'll see this goes across as an IPT file. We can then select to launch Fusion 360 once the upload's complete if we wish to do so. Click Upload.

We get a warning message that your data is going to be sent across. Click OK. And then we'll see that the data will start to be sent across to Fusion. Once this has happened, Fusion will automatically open for us. You'll then see the model or the file that we've sent across will appear. The document's already open.

And in the data panel, we'll see that IPT file appear in the project that we've selected. You can see that we're in a manufacturing workspace straight away. A new set up is being created for us. And in this setup, the additive operation has been selected and the model for this operation is the part that we sent across. So the piece of automation that is specific to selecting the additive button is that we are in the manufacturing workspace when Fusion opens.

The setup has already been created for us. This body has been selected for the setup and an additive operation has been selected. So it's automating those first few steps for us. We can then obviously go on to create support structures for this part, tool parts for this part, and then send that data to our machine for manufacturing.

So really, it's as simple as that. That's the simple tool for getting your data from Fusion 360-- from Inventor, sorry, into Fusion 360 that is now available to you. There are some limitations to this at the moment. This is something that's actively being worked on.

So anybody uses this, your feedback is obviously very important to us. And we would love to hear that. But I thought I'd point out some of those limitations at the moment. So the data can only flow one way. It can only go from Inventor to Fusion. We don't have the same utility for sending the data back into Inventor at the moment.

The data in Inventor, if it is changed at any point, isn't automatically updated in Fusion 360. Now this is a really important one. So if you change anything in Inventor around your design, you'll then need to follow the same workflow to update that model which is in Fusion. And alongside this, there's no flag in Fusion to say if something has been updated in Inventor so your link between the two models is lost slightly once you want to send the data across. And at the moment, not all of your Inventor data is supported with Fusion 360. So one example I can think of of this is if you're doing model-based definition in Inventor, you're doing some G, D, and T there, that isn't transferred across with your part into Fusion 360 right now.

OK. So we've shown you an example of following this workflow, of going between the two products. We've spoken a little bit about the additional capabilities that you get by having Fusion 360. And as we said, one of those additional capabilities is additive manufacturing and, in particular, metal additive manufacturing.

So now you probably want to know a bit about, OK, what is metal additive. Why is it interesting? And what sort of companies are using it? So that's what we're going to go through here. Apologies if people listening to this are already familiar with the technology. Some of these slides may be a little bit basic and introductory. But just for level setting with everybody, I think it's always good to go through this and then everybody sort of knows what we're talking about from a conceptual point of view.

So there are, fundamentally, four main manufacturing techniques for processing metals. They are casting, where you pour molten metal into a mold; forging, where you heat up metal and then you press it into the shape you desire; machining, where you start with a big block of metal and you use cutting tools to remove excess material to get to the final shape; and then additive manufacturing, which is different to all of these.

With additive, we start with nothing apart from a build plate. And on that build plate, we deposit material. And we build up that material in layers. And those layers represent the cross-section of a component. And we stack all of those layers on top of each other. And then at the end of the build process, we have a component which represents the geometry we wish to build.

So why are people interested in this technology? So we've worked with metal additive for over a decade now. And the customers, the users that we've worked with, all have sort of the same reasons when you boil it down as to why they're using the technology. Some of them are trying to be more sustainable with their manufacturing processes.

Some of them are trying to have shorter production lead times from design to first off parts. Some of them are trying to reduce their material wastage, particularly if they're using high value materials. When you're comparing additive to something like machining, for instance, you have a lot of material wastage because you're removing that material to get to the final part whereas, in additive, you're only depositing the material that you need. Therefore the savings can be considerable.

Some of them are trying to improve their part performance. Additive gives you a range of freedoms with design of products that you can't get from other manufacturing processes. So if you design a product in a smarter way, it can perform better. Therefore you make savings over the life of that component. And some of them are trying to decentralize their manufacturing process. So instead of manufacturing a part at a centralized factory, they're looking to just produce the parts at the location that it's needed.

Now traditionally, the industries we've worked with have all been sort of high end and advanced industries. But we have seen over the past few years that the technology is starting to become democratized. And it's starting to be used by a wider range of industries out there. And there are some changing trends that are leading to this really.

So when we started working with this technology, the only machines that were available on the market really sat on the right hand side of this chart and this shows really expensive machines. So high capital value to begin with. This meant that the level of accessibility was extremely high and not just in terms of the cost of the machine but also the knowledge and expertise of the people that you needed to be successful with the machine. So previously, you may have spent multi-million dollars on these machines and also needed two or three people to be able to run them successfully.

What we're starting to see now are more commercial offerings come onto the left hand side of this chart. So these are lower cost machines, but also they only require maybe a single person to be able to use them. And the level of expertise doesn't need to be as high to be successful with them. So that accessibility of the technology is starting to come right down, which is making the technology much more appealing for other industries that were previously priced out.

So that's sort of metal AM in general. But what does Fusion 360 support within metal AM technologies? So there are two main technologies that we support today for metal AM. The first is called directed energy deposition. As the name suggests, this is a deposition type of technology. It's where we deposit a bead of metal. We stack these beads of metal on top of each other and we reveal the full component.

A DED system comprises of three things. You need a manipulator, so that's usually either a robot or a gantry. You need a material feed. And that material feed is usually either a powder or a wire. And you need an energy source, a heat source, to be able to melt that material feed. And typically, that will either be an arc or it will be a laser.

Now the characteristics of this process are that it has a high deposition rate so you can deposit a lot of material in, say, an hour. For DED, that's typically in the multiple kilos per hour. But the trade off of that is within the resolution of the part. So we tend not to be able to build as high fidelity parts as we can with other processes. And our components tend to have a rougher surface finish.

So often this process is coupled with an additional machining process. Now we can do that in two machines, so we could do the deposition in one machine and the machining in another machine, or we could do that in one machine. And when we combine additive and subtractive in the same machine, we call this a hybrid machine. And that's quite important for later because we'll be talking about a hybrid machine that we used in our use case.

So in Fusion, we support this process with our multi-axis deposition tool path. This is a new type of tool path that was released at the end of last year. These tool paths are aimed at driving any large scale or multi-axis additive machine but, specifically, DED machines. They enable you to deposit entire components or add features to existing parts. And you can do this deposition either on a planar surface or you can do it on a cylindrical, revolved, or arbitrary surface, which will give you the multi-axis motion in the deposition.

The nice thing about this being in Fusion though is that you also have a whole suite of milling tools available to you. So once you have programmed your additive process, you can also program your machining process in the same place. And you can send all of those toolsets parts in a single file to your hybrid machine, for instance.

The other process that we support is called metal powder bed fusion. Now metal powder bed fusion is not a deposition process. I sort of label this as a consolidation process. So we're melting material that's already laid down. The way that this process works is that we spread a very fine layer of powder, typically 20 to 60 microns thick, across a surface. We then melt that powder with a laser beam.

And in the case of the video that you're seeing here, this machine has four laser beams so that obviously speeds up the process. Once we've melted that layer of powder, we spread another layer of powder and we go ahead and we melt the next cross section of the part. That cycle repeats again and again and again until we've built all of the layers of the component. And then at the end of the process, you can reveal the final part from the powder bed.

So we support a range of metal powder bed machines within Fusion 360. These are all parts of our additive build extension. So that is an additional package that you can purchase through Fusion. This will give you access to all major machine brands.

You can then select your component, add it to the machine. You can do an automatic orientation study to see which is the best orientation to build that part in. You can generate support structures for your component within Fusion. You can then go ahead and slice the component and see the tool path that the machine is going to build.

You can simulate those slices on top of each other so you can get an idea of any overhanging surfaces that may exist or any problem points that you think you may have. And then when you're happy with the tool path, the way you orientated the parts, altered it, and sliced it, you can export that machine file to your machine.

The caveat here is that we can't do that for all machines. Some machines require some specific information from the machine's own software. But for certain machines, you can generate the file straight away and send that straight out to the machine.

So I wanted to give it a little bit of a comparison of these two technologies so you kind of know where they sit with each other. And I think this chart does a fairly good job of doing that. This chart shows the resolution or part complexity you can achieve versus the part size that is possible with these technologies.

Now DED traditionally has been used for building larger components that are lower resolution and powder bed as being for building obviously smaller components with higher resolution. So that's kind of been the divide. We are now starting to see with newer DED processes a drift towards the left of this chart to producing smaller parts also.

And you can also get a bit of an idea of the cost differences between these processes. So traditionally, powder bed has been more expensive than DED. But again, we're seeing the cost of all of these processes starting to come down. In terms of some of the additional advantages of DED, if you have a multi-axis DED machine-- this is something with more than three axes-- you have the ability to move and manipulate a part so that you can take out overhanging surfaces.

Overhanging surfaces traditionally are something that need to be supported in the AM process. If you can re-orientate your part to remove those, you obviously don't need support structures then. With DED as well, you have the ability to build in multiple materials. So you could be building in one material, stop building with that material, and come in and build with the second material.

And also you can do feature additions to existing stock. So if you have something like a large casting, you can take that casting and add on additional features, bosses, ribs, et cetera, using the DED process. And that's something that would be very difficult in the powder bed process. And in a similar vein, you can do part repair with DED. So if you have a worn component, you can take that component out of service, repair the necessary area, and then put it back into service.

So I just wanted to highlight some of the other tools that are available in Fusion that support the AM process. So these aren't directly AM technologies but these are things that you may use to reap the benefits of AM technology. So two of these are design pieces, design tools. And one of these is a simulation tool.

The first design tool is volumetric lattice. This enables us to create a highly complex lattice structure within a solid body. This thing gives us a geometry, which is very well suited to the additive process, and, in particular, the powder bed process.

The second is generative design. And one of generative design's use cases is within lightweighting components. Typically, the designs that it comes up with for lightweighting are more suited to the additive process than any other process. So you may use that to give you additive design options.

And the third thing is a simulation tool. This is the metal AM process simulation tool. This will essentially help you be successful with the powder bed fusion process. This will simulate the heat inputs during the process and any distortion that your component may see within the process.

And the aim of this is to try and reduce process failures. So if you have a machine, you don't want that machine to be giving you bad builds or failing all the time. So by being able to do simulation up front, we can get an indication as to how successful we're going to be at building a part.

OK. Excellent. So you've learned now about the workflows that are possible by going from Inventor into Fusion. You've learned a little bit about additive manufacturing and metal additive, why that's interesting for our users. So what I wanted to do is try and embody all of that into a use case that we've been working on over the past several months.

And this is a use case with an Inventor customer of ours. The customer is called Unverferth. And Unverferth are a family-owned manufacturer of agricultural equipment. They've been designing and manufacturing agricultural equipment for nearly 75 years. They have a sort of vision and mission of innovating with the help of and for the farmer to assist them in efficiently and responsibly feeding the world, a very noble mission if I say so.

And they've been collaborating with Autodesk for over 35 years now. So we have a very good partnership with them. They are an Inventor user. And they are interested in additive manufacturing so they are the perfect, quote unquote, "Guinea pig" for this type of workflow and experimenting with this type of technology.

So upfront, we asked them the question, why are you interested in additive manufacturing? How could additive manufacturing help a company in the agricultural industry? And they came back and they said to us, metal additive manufacturing is progressing rapidly. They can see that. And interestingly, they see it getting more affordable. So this comes back to the points that we made around the accessibility of this technology starting to come down and these other industries can start to play and experiment with this technology.

Hybrid additive manufacturing-- remember that's the combination of additive and subtractive-- is interesting to them. They are particularly interested in the wire version of DED. They already have wire. They use that in other processes, such as welding for fabrication, so the material is already in shop as it were. And it's ready and available for them to use.

They know that they can get the material that they use within wire form. And in some cases, they can get it quicker than they could in billet form for other processes. And wire also has the added advantage of not having the sort of additional environmental hazards or health and safety risks that are associated with powder processes.

One thing they did mention was if they're not doing-- if they had a hybrid machine, for example, and they're not doing any additive work on that machine, they can use their machine for just regular machining. So this helps with the uptime of the machine. And it helps with the return on investment.

In terms of how they would use the machine and how they would use the process, they had two good use cases. The first one was around prototyping new designs, which would go on to be forged or cast. Traditionally, they have to be quite conservative whether their design changes and just make small iterations.

It's quite expensive to pay for tooling for casting so if you're going to make a big design change, it's quite a risk to go ahead and create tooling for that design change. If it doesn't work, you're essentially scrapping off that tooling and you're losing that cost straight away. With this process, they can make one or two parts of a new design, test it, and then, if it works successfully, they can go ahead and have tooling made and then have a batch of these parts cast instead.

The other use case is around servicing their legacy machines. So they have a range of machines in the field. These machines are designed to last for decades but, obviously, at some point, parts of them are going to wear out. And if it's an older machine, they may not have any spare parts in stock so they have to go and have one part made, which can be quite expensive. So they could supplement getting that part made with a casting process by manufacturing it on their hybrid machine. And this would make that part much more accessible in terms of the time it would take to produce it but also the cost it would take to produce it. And then along a similar vein, they could also use the machine to repair parts if they became worn in service.

So the use case that we explored with them was of the first type. So it was a prototype for a new design. And it was of the part that you can see here. So this part is an injection knife. And I have to admit I was very sort of ignorant to this industry to begin with. So I had no idea what this was but I know a bit more about it now.

The injection knife is a component which sits on this beast of a machine that you can see in the image. This gets pulled by a tractor. And the knife essentially goes into the ground and it digs the furrow or the trench into which you can insert a seed or fertilizer before the ground is closed up with the machine behind. That means that this is a very high wear component. It spends its life getting dragged through pretty hard ground and hitting stones, and roots, and rocks, and all of these things.

And it's traditionally a cast component. It's about 400 millimeters in height. They traditionally cast it with a hardened steel. For this use case, we're going to use a 316 stainless, which is obviously a different steel alloy but it's something that we're familiar with on our machine and it will serve the purpose and the prototype no problem. Once we're happy with it, we can always look to produce this in a hardened steel later.

The manufacturing requirements were fairly loose actually. So Unverferth are happy with a majority of the part to just have the as deposited surface finish. And it was quite a funny moment when I asked them if it was OK for us to give them an as deposited surface finish. And they told me that it's going to get dragged through the ground for the rest of its life. It's probably going to end up machining and smoothing itself out in those first few trials so there's no need to machine it beforehand.

So the only features that we actually had to machine on this part were a bore and the slot. And those are for fitment of the part to the trailer. So those pose some challenges to us, the slot in particular. When you've deposited the whole part, the slot is actually quite difficult to reach so here we can leverage the hybrid process.

We can actually do some deposition. And before we finish depositing, we can come and machine that slot and then carry on depositing the rest of the parts. The part is also quite tall so we were slightly worried we might have some distortion issues but also some machining vibration issues if we needed to machine higher up the part.

So we decided we were going to produce this part on our very own hybrid machine. This is a hybrid machine we have in our Birmingham Technology Center. This is a standard Haas UMC1000 with full range of motion of five axes. But our UMC1000 is fitted with an additive deposition head produced by a company called Meltio.

You can see on this video on the left that is the head being extended out. We extend that out when we want to do the additive process. We deposit the material. And then when we want to machine the part, we can retract this head back into the machine, come in, and do whatever machining we need to do at that point in time.

So how are we planning on actually building this part in this machine? So this is a bit of an idea of the process plan. We start with the original design. We didn't need to make too many design changes to this part because the customer were happy with the as-deposited finish so there was no need for us to really add much machining allowance onto the component. The only thing we did do is we added in a build plate. So in this second image here, you can see a build plate. This is what we start depositing onto.

And you can see we've extruded the bottom of that foot down to that build plate. And what you're seeing here is the first section that we're going to deposit. So we're going to deposit up to a point. We're then going to requalify that surface back with the machining process. We're then going to reorientate our part such that that big overhang of the arm has been reduced.

And we're going to deposit the second half of the component in this new orientation. So this is like a three plus two style setup. And obviously, having a five axis machine makes this very easy to do. We then went ahead and we programmed our tool path for the first stage, which is what you can see on the bottom. And then we program our tool path for the second stage.

Now in reality, we had to come in and we had to machine a slot at the back of this component. So actually, we had to pause the second half of the deposition, come in, machine that slot. Once that slot was machined, sorry, we could then continue and build the rest of the component no problem. So that was a little bit on the process that we followed. This is the actual footage of the manufacturing. I won't show you everything. It's quite long in its time. But you can see on the left hand side here some deposition happening.

So we deposit a perimeter around the outside of the part. And then we deposit an infill to make our part solid. And we just build these layers on top of each other until we have a completed component. And then on the right hand side, you can see that slot that I was mentioning. So you can see we've stopped depositing at a certain height. We've then come in with a machining tool. We're cutting that slot out. And then once we're happy with that, we can get back to continue depositing.

And this is pretty much where we are today. So we've deposited the entire component. We're fairly happy with it. We did have some issues along the way. So you can see the bottom of the component has a much rougher surface. This is where the deposition conditions weren't quite optimized. You can see halfway up that part, there's sort of like a witness mark or a flash line. This is a point in time where we actually had to recalibrate the lasers on our machine.

And you can also see, particularly towards the top of the part, some kind of like pinprick looking artifacts on the side of the component. These are start and stop points for each of the layers. But overall, we were relatively happy. We've taken a 3D scan of the part. And we intend to try and align that to the final CAD to see how close we were and to see if there was any significant distortion.

So I wanted to give some stats around the time this took to make and the cost associated with it. Now build time was around 15 hours. This is just for deposition, keep in mind, so no machining yet. So about 15 hours of deposition. We think with the machine that we have, we can probably reduce this by making the process run faster.

And then in terms of cost, the total cost of this part is around $612 to ourselves. This is just using our in-house cost calculator that we have for these types of components. And you can see in terms of material, that's $47. In terms of energy consumed, that's about $12. And in terms of gas, that's about $25. So the largest proportion of this is the machine overhead. So that's the cost of the machine across a period of time.

So you get a bit of an idea of the feel for this. Obviously, if we did this on a less expensive machine, that would bring the cost down. If we did this with a different material, that would change the cost as well. So there are many different options but this is to just give you a feel of how much it costs for us to manufacture such a part.

So what's next? As I said, this is a live project. So it's certainly by no means finished. We're kind of midway through at the moment. You saw that the part is deposited and it's attached to that build plate. So next for us, we need to remove it from that build plate and we need to do the final machining. So we intend to machine out that bore. We intend to machine the bottom of the foot. But to do that, we need to actually put it in a flat orientation. And to hold it in that flat orientation, we've actually designed some soft jaws to hold the components. So we designed these in Fusion 360.

And then we've gone into the manufacturing workspace again. We've done another additive set up and that's enabled us to print these soft jaws on our own in-house printer so we've got our own fixture for holding this part. And we can come in and then do the final machining. And I think this is pretty cool. So you can design all your fixtures. You can print your fixtures. Those fixtures can then hold the part that you're going to be machining anyway. So doing this all in a single place I think works really well.

So once the part is finished, the plan is to send this over to the team at Unverferth. And they're going to put it on one of these monster machines that they have. And they're going to put it in the ground. And they're going to see how it performs. We're then going to get some feedback on how that part went. And we'll take that learning forward for a future iteration of this part that we want to make.

Aside from that, I think we want to sort of build this use case. We want to make a nice story around this so I'm sure you'll be seeing some more to come on this use case in the future.

So that's pretty much everything from me. I just have a few closing remarks. So I guess the headlines really are why use the Inventor to Fusion 360 workflow. Well, you get these additional design simulation and manufacturing capabilities and, particularly, the manufacturing capabilities and additive manufacturing capabilities we've sort of dived fairly deep into today. You have this additional ability to collaborate across your own company with data but also externally with vendors as well, which is exactly what Unverferth were doing when they shared the data with us.

And one thing I didn't mention really in the case study was we found that Fusion Teams is actually a pretty good communication tool as well. We could put written information up there in the forms of a wiki. We could share media such as photos and videos and give progress updates alongside all the other things we were showing, like CAD, and drawings, et cetera. So really the cool is if you're an Inventor customer, don't miss out on these additional capabilities. At least go and explore them and see what's there.

The other main takeaway is metal AM technologies are becoming more accessible. And they're becoming more accessible year on year as the technology and the software becomes more accessible.

And then the other thing is are you interested in finding out more about this technology and perhaps working with us to have your parts made as well? We're always looking for partners to collaborate with to make good stories around. So if you're interested in what metal additive can offer you and you want to explore that, please do reach out. We'd love to have a conversation with you. And yeah. Just keep your eyes out for more to be released on this use case. I think there'll be way more to come over the coming months.

So my final slide is some other talks that you can go to or listen back to on this topic. So I'll keep this up for a second. But Scott, and Jess, and Alessandro have some interesting talks around using Inventor and Fusion 360 together, that data workflow, and how they're combining the two products to make successful workflow and successful components. So with that, thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoy the rest of the show. And again, please reach out if you have any further questions. Thank you. Goodbye