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Profile: 3T Additive Manufacturing
From rapid prototyping to rocket engines: The evolution of 3T Additive Manufacturing With two decades of experience in part production using Additive Manufacturing technologies, 3T Additive Manufacturing Ltd, based in Newbury, UK, today enjoys a strong position as an international developer and supplier of cutting edge metal AM components. At a time of transition for the company, Metal AM magazine’s Nick Williams and Emily-Jo Hopson met with outgoing CEO Ian Halliday and his successor, Nigel Robinson, to discuss the evolution of the metal AM industry to date and the business’s plans for further expansion.
In 2019 3T Additive Manufacturing Ltd, formerly known as 3T RPD, celebrates twenty years of additively manufactured part production. Throughout this period, the business’s growth has closely tracked the evolution of the AM industry as a whole, moving from the rapid prototyping of plastic products through to end-use part production, the introduction of metal AM and, more recently, a ramping up of production capacity to meet demand for the series production of components. This year also marks the end of Ian Halliday’s tenure at the helm of the business. Having taken over as CEO in 2005 from the company’s founder, Tim Plunkett, Halliday has guided the company through a long period of growth that has seen fundamental changes in all areas of the industry, from technical capabilities to materials and end-user markets. Halliday’s experience of Additive Manufacturing, however, extends beyond his career at 3T to the early 1990s where, as Chief Engineer at the Rover Group, he was instrumental in setting up an internal rapid prototyping and rapid tooling
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facility. It was under his guidance that Rover Group first investigated Stereolithography (SLA) in 1989, resulting, he explained, in a very fragile and very expensive part from a service bureau that, inevitability, no longer exists. The recognition of what the technology could do led to the establishment in 1991 of an
in-house rapid prototyping operation that was very much ahead of its time. To give a sense of the scale of this early operation, in 1998 the Rover Group produced 2,200 parts by Stereolithography, 3,200 parts by Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and 9,500 polyurethane parts from silicon moulds.
Fig. 1 3T’s headquarters and AM facilities are on the site of the former United States Air Force base at Greenham Common, near Newbury, UK
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