3D Printing Heats Up Northeast Ohio’s Manufacturing Sector

3D Printing Heats Up Northeast Ohio’s Manufacturing Sector

Additive manufacturing or 3D printing has been getting
widespread attention in Northeast Ohio. In this article from Fresh
Water, several key companies, universities and organizations talk
about how 3D printing is changing the region’s manufacturing
sector.

3D printing brings the sexy back to Cleveland’s
manufacturing sector
DOUGLAS J. GUTH | THURSDAY, APRIL
23, 2015
freshwatercleveland.com

The manufacturing industry in Northeast Ohio has always carried
a soot-stained appearance of dirty smoke stacks and imposing brick
factories, Matt Hlavin knows.

Those days are finished, declares the CEO of Rapid Prototype +
Manufacturing (rp+m), an Avon Lake company dedicated to the
“printing” of three-dimensional solid objects from digital files, a
process formally called additive manufacturing, but known in common
parlance as 3D printing.

“Manufacturing is cool again; it’s sexy,” says Hlavin. “You can
have facilities that look the same as any software company in
Silicon Valley.”

3D printing is ideal for complex projects requiring a high degree
of customization, maintain proponents of a practice that takes
ultrathin layers of plastic, steel or other materials and fuses
them onto a flat surface, creating an exact three-dimensional
replication of a digitally designed object.
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