3d printing in Formula 1

Once upon a time an F1 car was made using hand crafted tools shaping metals and cutting and tapping and boring. You needed a lot of patience to work this way where parts came out precise and accurate. Perfected. 

These days Formula 1 cars rely heavily on cad cam and rapid prototyping otherwise known as 3d printing. Car designers have these fantastic machines at there disposal and still they cant seem to make the parts fast enough for the hundreds of iterations of a design for a single part.

There is definately a limit to layer object manufacturing and it looks like that may be reached sooner than expected. 

Magicmodel Small batch production and low volume manufacturing

Minimise transport costs by using uk suppliers
When it comes to manufacturing the far east has dominated and to some extent still does. But things are changing for the better. No longer will small manufacturers into research and development need to source their components from china and Taiwan etc. parts can now be bought at much less cost from uk3dprinting firms such as magicmodel who are specialising in producing and manufacturing small batches of hard plastic parts. Obviously accuracy is never going to match that of a precision cnc or injection molded part but it is a great accessible solution for proof of concept. At magicmodel we encourage our customers to try one before  committing to a small batch of say 50-100. This way our customer is able to test their design with very little to no collateral damage.