A freer, faster and more sustainable industrial manufacturing process that revolutionizes motorcycle design thanks to collaborative 3D printing. It is the result of the agreement between Honda R&D Europe, specialized in car and motorcycle concepts, e WASP, a Romagna company leader in the three-dimensional printing sector. The clay prototypes will be made with 3D printing starting from computerized models, and can then be manually finished and possibly re-transformed if they do not correspond to the required characteristics. With this technology, the material used in the process can then be used and re-printed countless times, in a logic of environmental and economic sustainability.
The collaboration between the two companies thus tries to break the tradition in the prototyping sector, where the creation of a new model takes place through the manual processing of industrial clay. With this collaboration, in fact, they integrate manual knowledge with additive manufacturing (additive manufacturing), the manufacturing process that allows you to manufacture objects by adding one layer on top of the other.
WASP already in 2017 had experimented with types of extrusion for industrial clay, the process that reproduces a piece by compressing the material in a pasty state through a shape. The agreement with HONDA R&D allows these innovations to be applied also to the motorcycle design sector. “WASP’s research has led to the creation of a revolutionary machine for printing industrial clay, the DELTA WASP 40100 clay, capable of extruding and making the material infinite and reusable”, he explained. Nicola Schiavarelli, Product Manager and one of the founders of WASP. He adds: “This is why we consider WASP collaborative 3D printing a new concept in the additive sector”.
A processing method that does not intend to replace man, but wants to give him a hand, optimizing times and reducing the amount of material used compared to traditional subtractive processes, he noted Antonio Arcadu, design modeling coordinator of Honda R&D Europe. In other words, this innovation aims to overcome the dichotomy between man and machine, and also to reduce the impact on the planet caused by the development processes of new concepts.
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