AMS @ Formnext 2023 – Wrap up from Davey – 17/11/2023

Wow, it’s been a week since Formnext - Where ideas take shape closed its doors and I’m still not caught up on sleep??! This was our first company foray into the fantastic festival of Formnext - Where ideas take shape (and Frankfurt), and I can honestly say that we all loved almost every minute we spent either at the event and the night-time AM discussions that happened around the city.

?

This was our first outing as a company into Europe, with the team led by Robert Higham , joined by Joe Rowbottom , Lauren Ingleson and myself, so it’s fair to say we all learned so much. Especially considering the latter three had little or no experience of this sort of event. If you did speak to us, please can you let us know how we did? Either directly via DM or just comment on this post. We appreciate any feedback.

?

If you’re unaware, we shared the Dyndrite stand (once again, shout out to the fantastic people at Dyndrite ??!) where we showcased projects from our collaborations in formula 1, aerospace and in material development that we completed using Dyndrite ’s super game changing laser control software. These were a Renishaw build, which was made of Inconel showing off a fir tree compressor blade as well as a brand new, never been completed before build of Constellium 's Aheadd CP1 on an Xact Metal XM200G machine which showed Zeiss test coupons (ZTO) – printed by our good friends in the CFaM at the The University of Bolton (which we didn’t really celebrate enough, it’s a world first!) and finally the SLM 280 produced ELEMENTUM 3D 2024 RAM2 build which showed off the powder collection test we had produced for F1 capabilities launch of our development project to bring this material capability to the UK – printed by good friends and good people at Additure .

Here's a closer look at two of the builds:

Some of our highlights are:

• The response to Dyndrite ’s LPBF Pro – an overwhelming number of introductions, in depth discussion and demos showing just a snippet of the capabilities of Dyndrite.
• The F1 cars??? on show! It really gets the mind racing about the possibilities that we could help produce for and with them in the future… ??
• The general overall uptake in collaboration from larger companies all the way down to SMEs. This is exactly what Robert Higham has been asking for, for many years, so it’s great to see that the wheels are finally in motion!
• Free beers ??. I’m a simple northern man: If someone says free beers then I’m in!
• A significant increase in environmental impact discussions. I’m all for pioneering technology but I think the larger scale impact from our beloved industry is becoming increasingly important. Stay tuned for AMS’ answer to this over the coming months.
• Let’s not forget about that Dyndrite meme/postcard. What an absolute treat! The doughnuts seemed to also be a hit, except for the cleaners who didn’t appreciate the white powders. (Note: from the doughnuts, no metal powders were harmed in the making of this stand!)?

What was your favourite part of Formnext 2023 (especially if you’ve been to previous iterations of the show)??

The downsides are the amount of time we didn’t get to speak to everybody – I easily could’ve spent every minute speaking to every company about their business. Maybe next year? Another is that we didn’t get to see the city enough – though that could just be me!

?

Until next time, ?? Davey