Just one of the frightening realities of launching an independent business, manufacturing or otherwise: Because we do not know what we do not know, success probably hinges on the course of the business not going entirely as planned. That means the breakthrough developments for a business often present themselves initially as bad news.
Lifestyle Additive Manufacturing got bad news soon after the company was founded. The specialist in selective laser sintering (SLS) additive manufacturing expected to begin with two major opportunities for SLS work, using these as the opportunity for beginning and growing. Then, unexpectedly and for different reasons in each case, the two opportunities failed to materialize.
Co-founder and technical director Nate Stevens was left with SLS machine capacity and time on his hands. He used this to explore the SLS process, to push it: to learn what he could through one trial-and-error SLS build after another to find the points of failure and identify how near he could come to these points in search of greater precision, speed or part density within the build. As a result of this exploration, he was ready when the challenging jobs from customers began to come.
Stevens is one of the most knowledgeable people I know in terms of SLS part design, build design and process engineering. As he makes clear in the latest episode of The Z Axis, in which he shares the story of Lifestyle Additive’s journey so far, he undertook to launch the business at a point when he understood 3D printing but still had little practical knowledge of this process. His accelerated expertise is almost entirely the result of the unexpected interlude resulting from the planned work that did not materialize.
Watch this episode on the startup manufacturer’s journey:
Stevens, as I say, is one of the most knowledgeable people I know on applying SLS for polymer part production. He and I recorded a series of videos in which I tried to draw out some of this knowledge. That series is The SLS Mindset. Here are links to all of the episodes: