The future of manufacturing is local, flexible and digital- podcast episode transcript
Dale Tutt: Welcome to the Industry Forward Podcast, the show where we examine industry and technology trends with the help of various experts from around Siemens and beyond. My name is Dale Tutt, Global Vice President of Industry Strategy at Siemens Digital Industry Software, and I’m your host for today’s episode. Many organizations are rethinking how and where products are designed and built. Driven by supply chain uncertainty, sustainability pressures, and the need for greater flexibility, so today I am excited to have Jay Rogers, the CEO of Haddy, to explore how these shifts show up in practice and what they mean for the future of manufacturing.
Jay, it’s great to have you here today. I’m excited about the conversation. And before we dive in, though, I got to start with possibly the most important question that’s on everyone’s mind. Everyone that builds the future has at least one go-to science fiction movie. So what is yours, and is it more inspirational or cautionary?
Jay Rodgers: Wow, Dale, that is a great question. Is it inspirational or cautionary? I’m going to go with Ender’s Game. And it is inspirational. And I think when I was a kid, I watched it, read the book first. And it is a book about, it’s a movie about leadership. And it puts it in a science fiction context like intergalactic war or other things like that to teach basic lessons of platoon level leadership. And I would call it just straight up team level leadership. So there you go. Ender’s Game and inspirational.
Dale Tutt: Wow, excellent, excellent, excellent. Well, I’m a kind of a Star Wars guy myself, which is what led me into aerospace and defense.
Jay Rodgers: Okay, maybe we’ll talk about the X-Wing fighter that we designed for 3D printing.
Dale Tutt: Oh, I would love that.
Jay Rodgers: Let’s do it.
Dale Tutt: I’ll send you my address when we’re done.
Jay Rodgers: It’s you would take a flatbed truck to deliver it because that swings are big.
Dale Tutt: It’s okay. All right. Can you share a little bit about your background and the origin story of Haddy? When you started Haddy, what problem were you trying to solve?
Jay Rodgers: Okay, so background and my origin story for Haddy. My background is definitely odd or different, and I think it is the origin story for Haddy. When I was 12, my father moved us onto a boat, and we went around world for seven years. And he did it his way. We as a family designed the boat together with a naval architect, and then we moved to Japan, and we built the boat and did all the sea trials. And so as a 12-year-old, I was fascinated by how you could build a system that was going to take us as a family around the world and safely. And the ocean is a brutal place. It can also be lovely, but it’s brutal. If I hadn’t had that experience, I definitely wouldn’t be running Haddy today.
I wouldn’t have founded Haddy today. And so we did, we went around the world for seven years. And all the systems that we designed, many of them broke, and some of them worked perfectly. The sails and the masts and the water maker and the generators and all those kinds of things. And I was fascinated by resiliency. I was fascinated by the ability to be able to do hard things the first time, because she was a ship that had never been built before. And so that was the beginning for me. And then as far as the later origin story, many years later, I was a Marine serving in Iraq in my third combat tour, and I was really wanting to do something for the world that was bigger than just being at the pointy end of a gun or on the other side of the pointy end of the gun.
And I was reading a book by Amory Lovins, and it was a book called Winning the Oil Endgame. And he hypothesized, what if instead of burning petrochemicals in our tailpipes, we could use them to make things, because polymer composites had this really wonderful fourth state called the glass transition zone. He’s a total nerd, like a sci-fi nerd, if you will. And he was like, we could 3D print the future, and I was hooked. So that was sort of the later origin story. And I had, was basically smart enough to give it a try and dumb enough to give it a try. dry. So there you go.
Dale Tutt: I love that story. And actually, just the thought of building a boat and then taking it out on the ocean, because as you say, it’s a very inhospitable place. And the lessons that you learn, the life lessons that you learn going through that is fascinating.
Jay Rodgers: Well, we did learn a lot of life lessons. And when I think about an origin story, some people don’t get to do what they love. To be able to have the origin story be something that was fascinating to me, as a 12-year-old and then carry it all the way through. I mean, I needed leadership. Like we talked about Ender’s Game for a little bit. And Ender’s Game really taught me leadership. And I joined the Marines because I was going to start a business maybe too early. And I met a Marine and we were at business school together. And he was like, have you ever led anybody before? And I realized that was super missing. And so I dropped out of business school and joined the Marines. It took me some time to get to that second part.
Dale Tutt: We started talking a little bit about 3D printing. And I’m always fascinated by the whole concept around 3D printing. A lot of times I think people, when they’re thinking about video printing, they’re thinking of a little plastic printer that’s sitting in their house. But you guys are printing big stuff. And I did take a few moments to sit in one of your chairs downstairs. And I was like, it’s really comfortable. It’s an interesting concept to be printing, 3D printing furniture like that. You know, you started out, you were printing 3D cars or 3D printing cars. And what were some of the lessons you learned doing that have now carried you forward into what you’re doing with Haddy?
Jay Rodgers: Fair question. So let’s see. I mean, I think it’s reported that maybe Lockheed Martin was one of the first corporations to lead into 3D printing 40 years ago. And so 3D printing as a singular technology has been around for a while. And when you think about like powder metal compacting presses, that’s a form of 3D printing. I mean, it’s just you ram a lot of powder together with heat and pressure and you get hot metal gear and has its own specific stress strain curve that it can manage. I have been fascinated by setting the record straight that 3D printing is a constellation of technologies. It’s only an industry if you think about the people that make machines.
But if you’re utilizing the machines to do your business and you don’t make the machines, then that’s not your industry. And so I love these constellation of technologies. When I got started, I didn’t know about them. I was just getting into it and figuring out like what is the stuff where you stack molten plastic on top of something else? What’s that called? You know, FDM, Fused Deposition Modeling. And then like what is laser sintering, and what’s the difference between sintering a polymer and sintering a metal, and then what’s direct laser melting, and we could go on and on about the different types that are available. And some of them are secondary processes, like you can make a print that makes a mold or a cast, and then you can use something that creates an isotropic thing.
I was fascinated by all of it, the secondary processes, the many different technologies that go into the constellations of 3D printing. But what I learned pretty fast is that you process polymer composites, and I then, I’m getting out of just the polymer matrix, but you process polymer composites for a bunch of reasons, and they’re good reasons. One of them is they’re easily recyclable on site. And that means that if you fail, you can grind them up one for one and reutilize all the material again. There’s no loss. The only loss is the energy from the second law of thermodynamics. And so basically, it’s like an infinite ability to be able to do what Amory Lovins said, which is like, instead of burning it in a tailpipe, use it to take a load off.
Like here we are sitting at a table and we’ve got like a mic stand. You can 3D print that. We got a box under the mic stand. We got a table. We got all these things, chairs, a floor. A roof, you can 3D print all of it. I was fascinated by the circularity. I was also fascinated by the fact that meant that it punished you a lot less if you were trying to apply machine learning. What you could do is you could virtualize everything. So we spend a lot of time here with Siemens talking about like, how can I digital twin things? Many times people need to twin because they’re so afraid to make a mistake because it costs so much money. I mean, fair enough. You should be afraid if it costs a ton of money. But if you have a polymer composite, you get less afraid because it’s like, well, you know what? Fire it. Let’s see if it works. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll grind it up, do it again.
I fell in love with polymer composites for those reasons at the beginning, the sustainability and circularity and the ability to iteratively learn and train quickly. And then what I had to do was figure out how to market because a lot of people, you would maybe not be shocked, but it is, even today, I’ve had three conversations, people are like, that’s great, way to go at Haddy. Can you print metal? And I’ll say, like, what do you need the metal for? They’re like, oh, well, we want to make like real products. And I’m like, fascinating. And so that there’s so much lingo out there that makes you think that a polymer composite isn’t a real product.
And then I’ll like, I have my stock answers for that. I’m like, it’s amazing that, you know, like Formula One cars don’t have a bit of metal on the whole structure. That’s not a real product though, right? right? composites get a bad rap a lot of the time, and composites are incredible, and so I’m all about them. And these are particularly thermoplastic composites as opposed to thermoset composites. And I’m fascinated by it, continue to be fascinated by it. It’s been coming a long way. It’s got a long way to go.
Dale Tutt: Well, yeah, kind of a curiosity question for me is we’re walking by your display area downstairs and you have furniture and I’ve also and a boat and a boat and a boat. That’s right. You had a boat. Just imagine if you had the button, the printer. 30 years ago.
Jay Rodgers: We print up to 60 feet now.
Dale Tutt: 60 feet.
Jay Rodgers: So that boat was a little bigger, but it’s fun to think about the fact that like I do have my favorite ones. I want to make a sailboat. I want to make like lots of different kinds of.
Dale Tutt: Well, absolutely. Well, and I think it’s when you think about your how you’re applying this technology, I think a lot of times people think about a self-contained printer, 3D printer, and you’re you have robot arms out there and they’re running around and they are printing the part as it goes. And so it seems like that’s a lot different than what a lot of other are doing. I have seen some large metal structures as well for rockets that are also kind of printing along the same lines. But I guess, how are you driving the accuracy of like the robot arms as you’re applying the layers of plastic?
Jay Rodgers: I had a feeling back in 2015 So we’re now 11 years past that time where I didn’t see a limit to extrusion deposition rates. If you think about just simple making, I need to make a boat. Well, an average boat, if it’s kind of 1 for one density, that boat maybe costs me, pardon me, weighs 1000 kilograms if it’s a 40 foot boat. So maybe 2,200 pounds. So if I can print at 22 pounds an hour, then that means that 2,200 pounds would take me 100 hours. If I can print 100 pounds an hour, it takes me 22 hours. Deposition rates are critical for building things because they define your manufacturing lead time and the number of robots you have define your cycle time.
For me, I was fascinated because the first robot we built together as a team and then we printed with, we were printing at 6 pounds an hour. which is still far above what a Bamboo Labs printer can print. It was a lot. I just asked the question of the extruder manufacturer at the time. I said, how big do extruders get? I wasn’t really, I didn’t know a lot about extrusion science. And he’s like, what do you mean?
And I was like, well, how big can they get? And he’s like, 2,000 pounds an hour. And I was like, whoa. And he’s, and I was like, could I put that at the, on a gantry? And he’s like, oh no, that’s way too big. And I was like, okay, well then like I ask a better question, like how big could a mobile extruder be?
So anyway, in 2015, I commissioned a study and the study was how accurate could I hold the end of a robot and could you prove it to me with like 2 million points in space if I wanted an extruder that could put things out at like 200 pounds an hour. So going up from 6 pounds an hour to 200 pounds an hour. And I didn’t have that extruder yet. I still don’t have that extruder yet, but it’s definitely doable. But I wanted to know how accurate you could be. What I realized is that not only was it pretty accurate with the robust robots that are out there, that are heavy duty robots.
But if they’re software corrected, because the robots are basically, what’s the right word, precise but not accurate, they go to the same place every time, or they’re accurate but not precise, they go to the same place every time, but that place just might be the wrong place where it’s commanded to go. If it’s going to do that, and you can correct it to go from the wrong place accurately to the right place, then that’s just software correction. And that turns out to be very doable today.
We can maintain subhuman hair accuracy for the placement of the robot across 2 million points in space in its entire build bed. If you have the right drives and if you have the right motors and if you have the right software correction. And so yes, you can print and that puts you beneath the space at which a human can see a defect. They can’t, if they look at the piece of furniture, it’s like, yep, that looks good. Check. If you’re a knitter and you get the stitch wrong and it’s a little bulky, then anyone can see it. I’ve seen some knitting like that before.
Dale Tutt: Well, you know, Haddy’s often described as rethinking where and how things are getting made. You know, how does your micro-factory model differ? from traditional manufacturing. And it sounds like you can really decentralize your manufacturing and place it at the point, more at the point of use, which is another sustainability issue.
Jay Rodgers: Very much. Let’s get right into the brass tacks of micro manufacturing. Some of the things that it’s not. It doesn’t take on the benefit of a mass economy of scale. So that’s a good and bad thing. It means that you don’t get cheaper for the more things that you make. You get small benefits. Like if you can buy polymer at a bigger rate, then you can get some cost on about that. But there isn’t like a benefit like you would find in a large car company for centralizing and doing things things at scale, like a Model T factory historically. So that’s the bad part of not having the benefits of mass manufacturing.
The good part is that you’re already so resource efficient and cost efficient, and you’re getting things close to where the customer is that you’re saving money in other places, and you’re driving up your pricing power because you’re getting people what they want when they want it, and they’re usually willing to pay more for that. So you get an economy of scope instead of an economy of scale. And so that’s what micromanufacturing in its strategy is. It gets you economies of scope.
We loved that thesis and now we’re totally making it manifest. Like we’re not just men. When I say making, I want to be really clear. We have made it manifest. Today, right now, while we’re talking, our robots are printing and they’re printing a radar tower, an autonomous docking pod tower, a deck of a boat, a boat, a whole raft of furniture and a whole host of other things. This is a capability that is out there right now in a micro factory making things happen. And it’s an economy of scope driven business.
Dale Tutt: Well, and the variety that you just shared there of all the things that are being printed right now. It really gets to, I think, one of the biggest benefits of what you’re doing in that if I was tooling up to make molds for all those things or machines to make all those different parts, I’m going to have a lot of dedicated equipment. But you have the flexibility with your factory model that you can print probably all of those things on the same machine or the same set of machines. Is that accurate?
Jay Rodgers: Yeah, that’s a great enumeration of like the next piece of where micro manufacturing takes you is it’s not linear, it’s not sequential, it’s not a line, it’s batch manufacturing. And so kind of the way that pantyhose used to be made or the way that other like types of like sort of craft batch manufacturing was done. I feel like for us, that’s kind of logical, that you have a robot and it prints the thing that you want. It doesn’t pass off something to the next robot and the next robot and the next robot. But what’s maybe non-op obvious about those things is that it does require you to change your thinking about the product that you make.
Typically, you’ll find a lot of people that are sort of hidebound in the vehicle industry. For example, we got our start 3D printing cars. And they’re like, so you print the chassis? And I’m like, actually, no. We print what would be a new word, which is like the 3D printed car structure. It’s the body, it’s the chassis, it’s the mounts, it’s the dashboard. It’s all those things that used to be subcomponents made on a line. And now it’s made in a unit. in a cell and it’s printed all together. That has so many benefits. It reduces time. It increases the legitimacy of your simulation because you’re making something where it’s like 1 unit.
And so you don’t have weldments that aren’t well-defined and other things like that, fasteners that maybe weren’t torqued to the right spec, all that stuff that can squeak, rattle, and roll and those kinds of things. So that’s when you batch manufacture 3D printing, you get a lot of benefits.
Dale Tutt: If someone walks into your Haddy microfactory tomorrow.
Jay Rodgers: Any one of them.
Dale Tutt: Any one of them.
Jay Rodgers: Yes.
Dale Tutt: What would surprise them the most about, what would they, what would they like, I didn’t know that.
Jay Rodgers: It’s that it’s so quiet.
Dale Tutt: Really.
Jay Rodgers: Yeah. I think that they would walk in. If you’ve ever read Roald Dahl’s book or seen the movies about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that is exactly what I think every day I go to work. And we don’t have a lot of windows. I would love people to be able to walk by and see what’s inside, but right now it looks like this magic box. You just stand outside the door and like a boat will come out and then like chairs will come out and then like ice baths will come out and then like, you know, a full coffee bar will come out. Like the most magical things come out and it’s just like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it’s local, you know, it’s like in town.
And it will be everywhere because we want to be close to where our population is. We stick to population like glue. Wherever the people are, that’s where we are. We have no intention to be off in some hinterland a long way away where it’s a place where you can like abuse the environment. Forget that. Like we want to be right face front with everyone so they can see what we do. You know, what you see is what you get and it’s quiet.
Dale Tutt: Well, and point of use is right there. So you just take advantage of it and you don’t have to ship things about 10,000 miles for it to get there.
Jay Rodgers: It also gives people a lot of pride when they know that their town and their cousins, sisters, nephews, friends, and other things like that actually work there or are part of the supply chain, that is awesome for them, and they take a lot of pride in it. You can build a t-shirt on that, and that’s very cool.
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