Great Plains’ Pattern
Experiment L
The agricultural equipment manufacturer used a 3-D printing machine to prove out a new part as a casting, saving time and money. SHANNON WETZEL, SENIOR EDITOR
arry Spaeny, shop manager for the product develop- ment team at Great Plains
Manufacturing, Salina, Kan., was frustrated by missed opportunities for casting product launches. Troughout the shop floor, he saw multiple-piece weldments that would work better as castings but remained unconverted because time wasn’t available to accomplish the redesign, re-tooling and re-testing. When Great Plains launches
new farm machinery product, the company is on a timetable to have it ready for the next growing season. Often, that means the products are designed and prototyped as fabrica- tions and weldments because they can be produced in-house without any tooling investment. Even when the intention may be to convert to a casting further down the road, resources are often not available. “Te biggest issue here is if we
30 | MODERN CASTING August 2012
welded it up and did the testing first, we would never get around to doing the casting later on, because the testing takes forever,” Spaeny said. “If you test it as a weldment and it is a structural piece, there is no going backwards to test it as a casting.” Earlier this year, Great Plains
purchased a 3-D printer to produce prototype plastic parts. It had Spaeny thinking. Perhaps the company could use the equipment to make investment casting shells to prototype its iron components. Designing parts as cast- ings from the prototype stage would help Great Plains take better advan- tage of the reduced inventory and part numbers inherent in the casting process. Unfortunately, a search for an investment caster pouring ductile iron came up empty. “We were down in the mouth
about it,” Spaeny said. Eventually, the tooling and engi- neering staff at Great Plains wondered
Great Plains’ Guinea Pig The first component Great
Plains experimented with was a quick-attach mount for the NP4000 NutriPro Liquid coulter assembly. The mount holds a large disc, or coulter, to the farm machinery. The coulter assembly is designed to be removable so the farmer can use the NP4000 to pre-apply nitrogen fer- tilizer to the soil, as well as reapply fertilizer between the planted rows, using the same equipment. “If this wasn’t an option, the farmer
would need two implements,” said Kevin Reade, an engineer for Great Plains. “It’s basically two machines in one, and when the first version came out, it was very difficult to take the assembly on and off.” Te basic idea for the mount was
if it would be feasible to produce a sand mold pattern out of the ABS plastic produced by the 3-D printer.
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