Product Design to Production Aids — Grovemade
Grovemade designs and manufactures beautiful high-end office accessories. They excel at producing products that showcase the natural beauty of the quality woods, metals, and fabrics they are made from.
Product Design
The people of Grovemade are passionate about quality and details. This leads them to go through many iterations of their products to make sure they get the shape, feel, and aesthetics just right! Design engineer Ben of Grovemade lead the decision to bring the Natuilus’ 3D printing capabilities in-house. Since then, 3D printing has been an instrumental component of Grovemade’s product design process from concept models to functional prototypes.
“Being able to hand off the manufacturing of these prototypes to a machine has really increased my productivity. It’s been hassle free and required almost no fuss.”
Safety Jigs
One day during the production of their planters and pen cups, an employee nicked their fingertip on the router bit used to put the chamber on the base of these parts. Newly equipped with in house 3D printing capabilities, Grovemade was able to design and produce a safety jig that slides over the walnut part. This safety aid was designed and ready to use the same day as the accident and keeps the user’s fingers clear protecting them from slipping into the spinning router bit.
Grovemade was able to quickly design a custom solution and then hand off production of the part to the Nautilus, thus automating the manufacturing process. This saved a significant amount of time and energy; alternatively one of their employees would have had to find the time to machine the part using traditional methods.
“In the past I would have developed a part and machined it from solid stock in our mills, but now I just print it, once it’s developed.”
Production Aids
Another great application of 3D printing is the manufacturing of production aids. Grovemade has been taking full advantage of this, producing a number of jigs and fixtures for a variety of different assembly and manufacturing processes. They have even been dabbling in some robotic automation and will likely explore this further in the future.
The Nautilus’ ability to print high quality parts from engineering materials like Fillamentum ASA allows Grovemade to produce strong, accurate, and warp free aids for their production line.
“Automation can be expensive and I think that this printer could help us bring down that cost significantly.”
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Since acquiring a Hydra Research 3D printer just a few months ago, Grovemade has found countless uses for 3D printing in many aspects of their business.
Interested in what Hydra Research 3D printers can do for you and your business? Explore the capabilities of the Nautilus, or contact us at your convenience.
All images unless otherwise noted are the copyright of Grovemade
*Images licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International by Hydra Research, LLC