The last day of Australian Manufacturing Week. Still lots to see. A record turnout.
The compact Additive Engineering stand was this morning buzzing with people. All are interested to dig into the details of the titanium, SWaP-C, biocompatible medical devices that are being delivered ready for surgery for their clients. Additive also develop for its aerospace market-specific carbon-fibre parts for wings, engines, and propellers.
I visited the Zeiss stand to rediscover my cinematic roots. Once upon a time Zeiss just made camera lenses and glasses. Now, Zeiss visualises bone parts for thalamic microscopy, they create diagnostic instrumentation, they also have a precise vision division. They do still make lenses for glasses; they mainly do R&D but their aim is to create bionic eye parts for direct implants. A phenomenal range of applications and all I can think of is the surgeon on Blade Runner.
Over at Objective3D, I was shown several examples of 3D models brought together from the VRML and OBJ files, which also include colour data for specific opacity in models. With the polyjet technology, they can now generate photorealistic results out of the 3D printer which truly will replicate the best real-world result, in UV-cured epoxy. Managing Director Matt Minio tells me the Digital Anatomy Printer (DAP), realistic sections of human anatomy can be printed for pre-surgery analysis. The market for these has surged during COVID for obvious reasons.
Justin Davis at Lightwave Technology tells me about the Geomagic software, metrology solutions and construction lasers they distribute to the manufacturing industries. They were showing a Radian Plus laser tracker, used onsite on surveyor’s work. A single-point, highly accurate tracker being used by BAE.
There’s a quirky reason for this year’s show being two halls and not three. We really wanted that third hall but there was a huge schools’ event being run upstairs on Wednesday and thousands of kids were coming in for that one day. They’d booked out a full hall so there was a place to park the large number of buses.
By 4:30pm, our crew is out on the freeway on the way to the crowded airport. A long line awaits us at the start of a long weekend. All the very best to everyone bumping out over the weekend. Well done, thank you for coming, and we will see you in Melbourne next year for AMW 2023.