All I always wanted to know about Arcam EBM and dared to ask

Last week I was invited to visit the new Center that GE Additive built to meet the rapidly growing demand for Arcam EBM hardware. EBM has always been one of the most fascinating additive manufacturing technologies to me and I jumped at the opportunity. A few years back I had been planning a trip to visit former CEO Mr. Renè at the old facility but the trip fell through as the Farnborough Air Show was taking place at the time. This time everything was organized by the super-efficient GE Additive PR team so, even though I had a huge deadline coming up (the week before) on my upcoming 250 pages Polymer AM report, I just couldn't miss it.

Another reason for not missing it is that as an industry journalist I am particularly interested in things that make money and Arcam seems to be doing that: because its technology is used for serial production of thousands of parts (in two applications verticals in particular, aerospace and medical) GE can say with a certain degree of certainty that it's going to sell a lot of machines over the next few years. Implants - in particular spinal cages and hip cups - and jet engine blades are enough to drive the sale of several hundred machines, however, with the production of these advanced applications fully demonstrated and now underway, new materials (like copper and tool steel) and new ideas will likely drive demand for several thousand machines.

During our visit, we had the opportunity to see the production facility and interview some of the key people at Arcam. We really found a fantastic team, really friendly and open, with so much knowledge and so many ideas to discuss. You can find our review of the facility tour and some really great insights from the persons in charge of the Engineering and Technology teams in the articles we just published on 3D Printing Media Network. During the tour, I also finally had the opportunity to interview GE Additive CEO Jason Oliver and you can find that interview here, with some fantastic background info on how the union between GE Additive and Arcam came to be what it is today.

So long Arcam, and thanks for all the elk