Renishaw supplies Knust-Godwin with four RenAM 500Q systems to expand its metal AM capabilities
July 6, 2019
Renishaw’s RenAM 500Q metal Additive Manufacturing system (Courtesy Renishaw)
Renishaw, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK, has supplied four RenAM 500Q metal Additive Manufacturing machines to Knust-Godwin, a precision machining company located in Katy, Texas, USA. Renishaw states that the high-productivity systems, designed for serialised industrial manufacturing, have enabled Knust-Godwin to significantly reduce lead times for its customers.
Knust-Godwin, which has a history of machining large, complex parts for oilfield instrumentation, reports that it first introduced Additive Manufacturing as a new technology to help its customers develop new tooling designs and improve the efficiency and productivity of tools in the oil and gas industry. The company chose to expand its AM capacity to handle serial production by purchasing the four RenAM 500Q systems and is now benefiting from less waste, shorter lead times and fewer post processing steps – products that typically took six-to-twelve steps to complete can now be completed in two-to-three.
“Additive Manufacturing started as a prototyping technology, but it is now a serialised production process,” stated Mike Corliss, VP of Technology at Knust-Godwin. “Because we are designing components specifically for AM, we have been able to reduce customers’ lead times. A project which previously required a twenty-four-month wait from concept to commercialisation can now be reduced to eight months. The cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry means that providing parts quickly is extremely important.”
“Knust-Godwin has not only benefitted from the huge productivity gains of the machines, but also from tremendous support from Renishaw,” Corliss continued. “We see Additive Manufacturing playing a large role in our company’s future and we are expecting to see a 40% compound growth year-on-year in the oil and gas industry, and 20% compound growth in aerospace. We are even looking at purchasing additional RenAM 500Q machines for different metal alloys.”
Robin Weston, Marketing Manager of Renishaw’s Additive Manufacturing Product Division, commented, “The RenAM 500Q offers productivity and efficiency gains over traditional single laser machines. The benefits offered by AM mean that more and more industries are turning to the technology as a way of producing high-quality, efficient parts.”
