Interview: Stratasys VP of consulting Dr Phil Reeves

Businesses that fail to engage with additive manufacturing will also fail to reap its benefits. If reading this line gives you a sense of déjà vu then don’t worry, you read it before in High Value Manufacturing Catapult chief Dick Elsy’s piece on additive manufacturing (AM) in the October 2016 edition of The Engineer.

In his article, Elsy talked about how leading figures from UK industry were joining up with academia and government to establish the UK Additive Manufacturing Steering Group, which is working towards the publication of a UK National Additive Manufacturing Strategy in 2017.

Similarly, if you’ve noticed a correlation between this author and a certain additive and rapid prototyping machine manufacturer and solutions provider based in the US then you would be right, but then there are very good reasons for Stratasys to have featured throughout 2016.

The company that introduced fused deposition modelling (FDM) in 1988 has evolved, with advances in technology and materials that have gradually taken additive from a successful method of prototyping to the point of being a means of production, be it for tooling, jigs and fixtures or for production parts.