Brandforged announced the launch of H13 tool steel for its metal additive manufacturing platform, Metal X.
The company sought to bring this product to market to allow users of its metal 3D printing technology to produce high-strength, high-temperature parts. H13 is renowned for exhibiting excellent red hardness, thermal fatigue resistance, high toughness, ductility and good abrasion resistance.
Markforged believes this new material will enable its user to tackle unique and complex geometries, citing potential applications in metal forming tools, dies and punches, hardened inserts for jigs and molds for injection with compliant cooling channels. With the latter, the company says 3D printing can enable more efficient transport of heat out of the mold cavity and thus bring more uniform cooling, higher throughput, and reduced warping, cycle times and operating costs.
“We designed the Metal X system to change the way things are made, and the launch of H13 is the next step in that direction,” commented Jon Reilly, vice president of product at Markforged. “For high-volume plastic parts manufacturers, this is a game-changer, including the speed at which they can bring new products to market.”
One of these manufacturers to have adopted the Metal X is Grant Engineering, a company that produces millions of parts a year with injection molded plastics. Grant has leveraged the Metal X to print injection molds with 17-4 PH stainless steel, but hopes to further reduce iteration time and cost with the new H13 material.
“Injection molding is at the heart of what we do,” said Randy Grant, co-founder and co-owner of Grant Engineering. “Like the robots and automation we’ve already introduced into our workflow, we see 3D printing – especially Metal X – as a way to keep us hyper-competitive on cost and schedule while delivering the precision and quality we are known for. Being able to 3D print H13 should enable many innovations with injection molding. We can’t wait.
Markforged’s H13 tool steel can be reserved immediately at $229.99 per 1kg spool and will be ready to ship by March 2019. The company also plans to introduce A2 and D2 tool steel, 316L stainless steel, Inconel and titanium materials for the Metal X.
