PowerMill CAM software from Delcam (www.delcam.com) has been chosen for a new service being offered by Star Prototype that combines additive and subtractive manufacturing.

The new service, which the company calls AddSub Manufacturing, combines metal 3-D printing and five-axis CNC machining to quickly deliver complex low-volume components that would previously have required the input of two separate bureaux.

British-owned Star Prototype has been based in Guandong Province, China, for over 10 years. The company developed the new service after it identified a significant demand for a ‘one-stop shop’ for such components.

Company president Gordon Styles said: “Many metal 3-D printed parts are no longer used as prototypes but as complex low-volume manufactured components. As a result, many of these parts need certain high-precision features that are virtually impossible to produce with 3-D printing alone.

“Most 3-D printing companies don’t carry out secondary machining, so the customer needs to do the finishing work or farm it out to a separate specialist machining bureau.”

With the AddSub process, Star Prototype first uses its Renishaw AM250 3-D printer to produce extremely dense, high-complexity metal parts that are often not possible to produce using traditional machining techniques.

The Renishaw equipment uses direct metal laser melting to produce components in titanium, stainless steel or aluminium. The resulting parts are then finish-machined on a recently acquired Haas five-axis machine programmed with PowerMill.

Star Prototype sees this combination as being ideal for the production of mating faces, precision bores, tapped holes, spigots and other very necessary high-precision features.

Mr Styles, a British engineer who founded Star Prototype in 2005 after selling his Styles RPD company to the development specialist ARRK, says he has always used Delcam software in his UK companies and chose to use PowerMill in his Chinese machine shop to program a range of milling machines, predominately from Haas but also from Hurco and from local Chinese suppliers.

“AddSub was very much born out of a combination of our established prototyping and machining services. We are confident it will prove of enormous benefit to businesses across the globe, particularly companies in the motor-sport, aerospace, military, medical and dental fields.”