Other than enabling uniquely advanced geometries, I believe that the 2 actually differentiating benefits of additive manufacturing (AM) are the potential for deployability and the potential for simplifying the method of coaching new manufacturing employees. If you happen to’re an trade stakeholder pitching policymakers on making AM a vital ingredient in a nationwide manufacturing mobilization effort, these are the strengths I believe it is best to lean into.
On the similar time, I believe it’s necessary to understand that these benefits are nonetheless very a lot of their “potential” section: manufacturing on the point-of-need and coaching new industrial 3D printing operators are removed from being plug-and-play options. Nonetheless, the variety of case research the place each of these benefits are being accentuated are regularly accumulating, and one firm that’s a standout on this context is SPEE3D.
Again in November, Vanesa Listek wrote about how virtually a dozen AM firms participated within the U.S. Navy’s annual Trident Warrior workouts, SPEE3D amongst them. Now, towards the backdrop of this week’s Army AM Summit 2026 (February 3-5), the corporate has revealed the way it labored with a frequent collaborator, the Consortium for Superior Manufacturing Analysis and Schooling on the Naval Postgraduate College (CAMRE NPS), to reveal how the corporate’s know-how permits front-line manufacturing of vital components.
At Trident Warrior ‘25, CAMRE educated service members from throughout the U.S. armed forces on the XSPEE3D, the containerized chilly spray AM (CSAM) system that SPEE3D launched within the fall of 2022. Particularly, the service members examined the XSPEE3D’s capability to help the restore of U.S. Navy aviation components in fight eventualities.
In keeping with the corporate, the trials validated that the XSPEE3D is an more and more viable choice for executing upkeep, restore, and overhaul (MRO) duties in contested logistics environments. SPEE3D’s mixture of an Australian headquarters and a heavy U.S. presence provides the corporate an edge in a world the place the U.S.’s counterparts within the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) partnership are signaling a shared curiosity in enhanced front-line MRO.
In a press launch about SPEE3D’s demonstration of coaching non-specialists to restore aviation components at Trident Warrior ‘25, SPEE3D’s US VP of Protection, Mark Menninger, stated, “Army readiness is critically necessary to all branches, and so they want applied sciences that present them the power to get property again into service. The Trident Warrior workouts demonstrated how SPEE3D supplied the warfighters and maintainers the quickest and most effective resolution to get their programs again up and working, giving them the perfect probability to finish their missions rapidly and successfully.”
Chris Curran, Lt.Col., USMC (Ret.), the Program Supervisor at CAMRE, stated, “I believe maybe the largest win for SPEE3D throughout the occasion was displaying how you should use the machine to exactly add materials to a broken half and never should manufacture a brand new half, saving materials labor whereas bettering readiness.”
Whereas this kind of exercise is definitely nothing new for SPEE3D, the angle about “coaching non-specialist operators” illustrates the importance of the operational trials. That’s not a peripheral element: it’s the foreshadowing of a quantum leap.
There isn’t any actuality during which the West addresses its long-term scarcity of producing employees with out non-specialists being quickly educated on new tools. Which means that until AM OEMs be certain that non-specialists can learn to use their {hardware} in unprecedentedly compressed timelines, then the AM trade has nothing to supply the broader manufacturing sector by way of AM’s usefulness as a workforce growth instrument.
The synergy between fast workforce growth and frontline manufacturing capability is exactly what makes the protection sector so integral to accelerating the speed of 3D printing adoption. That is why I believe that the U.S. navy ought to be serving to different vital industries standardize a system for the event of a brand new era of superior manufacturing employees.
Steven Camilleri, the CTO of SPEE3D, as soon as advised me in an interview about how he subscribes to Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation, particularly the assumption that, “The issue of any disruptive know-how just isn’t a technological one, however a advertising one.” If firms like SPEE3D can proceed to decrease the barrier-to-entry for coaching new employees on their {hardware}, the AM trade will go a great distance in direction of fixing its advertising issues.
Photos courtesy of SPEE3D
Subscribe to Our E-mail E-newsletter
Keep up-to-date on all the most recent information from the 3D printing trade and obtain info and affords from third celebration distributors.
Add your 3D Fashions and get them printed rapidly and effectively.
