Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Small Factory in Ohio Beat Tariffs with a 3D Printer Farm
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I want to talk about a factory in Cleveland that looks like most job shops in the Midwest — 110 people, a lineup of Bridgeport mills and Haas CNCs, a few older guys who remember when the neighborhood had twenty other machine shops. Luna: Right, the kind of place that's been fighting offshore competition for thirty years. Lucas: Exactly. But about two years ago, they did something that changed their entire cost structure. They installed a 3D printing farm — 24 industrial printers, mostly from a company called Markforged and a couple from HP's Metal Jet line. And they didn't use it for prototypes. Luna: They went straight to production tooling? Lucas: Jigs, fixtures, custom end of arm tooling for their own robots. Stuff they used to machine out of aluminum or order from a shop in Shenzhen. The tariffs on Chinese steel imports under Section 301 had made that Shenzhen option about 25 percent more expensive. And the lead time was fourteen weeks. Luna: And with the printers? Lucas: Six days from file to floor. And the material cost on a typical fixture dropped from about 80 dollars to 32 dollars. They printed in Onyx — that's a carbon fiber filled nylon — and for heavier stuff they used stainless steel via the Metal Jet. Luna: So the tariff basically accelerated the ROI calculation. Without the tariff, maybe they wait another three or four years before committing to a printer farm. Lucas: That's exactly what the owner told me. He said they'd been watching additive since 2018, but the per-part cost never penciled out for production runs. The tariff shifted the baseline. Suddenly, the payback period on a 30-thousand-dollar printer was eighteen months instead of four years. Luna: I've read that industrial 3D printing is still mostly used for prototyping — about 70 percent of the market. This shop flipped that. Lucas: Completely. Today, 80 percent of what those printers produce goes straight onto the factory floor. They printed a custom gripper for a Fanuc robot that used to cost 400 dollars and took three weeks to get from a specialty supplier. Now they print it in-house for 47 dollars and it lasts longer because they optimized the lattice structure for weight. Luna: That's a specific number I can use. Are they printing any end-use parts, or is it all tooling? Lucas: A few end-use parts for low-volume customers — they've done batches of 200 to 500 units for a medical device company and a specialty automotive restorer. But the real money is in tooling. They've actually started selling printed jigs and fixtures to other machine shops in the region. Competitors. Luna: Competitors are buying from them? That's unusual. Lucas: It is. But think about it — a shop down the street might need a custom fixture for a one-off job. They don't want to invest in their own printer farm, and they don't want to wait 14 weeks for China. So they pay this shop, call it 'Cleveland Additive,' and get the part in a week. The shop has added 17 jobs just from that side business. Luna: So they're effectively becoming a service bureau for tooling. That's a new revenue stream that didn't exist before. Lucas: Exactly. And it onshores work that had been lost. Those 17 jobs are people doing finishing, programming, quality control on the printed parts. They're not machinists, but they're manufacturing jobs that pay 22 to 28 dollars an hour. In Cleveland, that's a solid middle-class wage. Luna: Do you know if the tariff calculus is common across other shops? Or is this an outlier because the owner happened to be technically curious? Lucas: I think it's a mix. The owner, a guy named Mark, had a background in materials science before he took over the shop from his father. So he was primed for this. But the economics are generalizable. A 2019 study from the National Association of Manufacturers found that tariffs added about 1.8 billion dollars in costs to U.S. metalworking shops annually. That's a huge incentive to find an alternative. Luna: Right, and additive manufacturing eliminates the need for hard tooling — you don't need molds or dies, you just need the digital file. Lucas: That's the deeper point. Traditional tooling is expensive because it requires skilled machinists, long setup times, and often a separate supply chain. With additive, the setup is the file. The marginal cost of a second variant is nearly zero. So for a job shop that does hundreds of different parts a year, the flexibility is massive. Luna: But there has to be a catch. What's the limitation? Lucas: Scale. If you need 10,000 identical parts, injection molding is still cheaper per unit. The break-even point varies, but for metal parts it's usually around a few thousand units. Below that, additive wins on total cost because you avoid the mold or die investment. And for tooling, you're almost always below that threshold because each fixture is custom. Luna: So the sweet spot is precisely what this shop is doing: custom, low-volume, high-mix production. That describes a lot of American job shops. Lucas: Thousands of them. And if even a fraction adopt this model, it could meaningfully shift the demand for imported tooling. The U.S. imported about 2.3 billion dollars worth of industrial molds and dies in 2025. If 10 percent of that gets replaced by domestic additive manufacturing, that's 230 million dollars reshored. Luna: That's not nothing. And it doesn't require a massive factory overhaul — just a relatively small capital investment and a willingness to change how you think about part production. Lucas: The hardest part is the change management. Mark told me his older machinists were skeptical. They'd say, 'That plastic part won't hold up.' But after a few months of seeing printed fixtures survive longer than aluminum ones because they're lighter and don't corrode, the skeptics came around. Now they're the ones suggesting parts to print. Luna: That's a nice cultural shift. It reminds me of what we heard from that Danish factory that switched to thermal batteries — the technical change was easy, the human change was the bottleneck. Lucas: Exactly. And I think this Cleveland story is worth watching because it shows how trade policy — even a controversial tariff — can create a window for technological adoption that wouldn't have opened otherwise. The tariff hurt them at first, but it forced a decision that made them more competitive in the long run. Luna: They turned a regulatory cost into a strategic investment. That's the kind of story our listeners can learn from. Lucas: And honestly, if today's episode moved your thinking forward in some small way — maybe you're considering additive for your own shop — we'd appreciate it if you'd buy us a coffee. It's at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That support keeps this podcast ad-free and lets us dig into stories like this one. Luna: Yeah, it's a small ask for a show that we put a lot of work into. Every coffee helps. Lucas: So back to the Cleveland shop — one last detail I found striking. Mark said that the printer farm has reduced his electricity cost per part by about 30 percent compared to machining, because the printers run unattended overnight and don't need coolant systems or chip conveyors. That's an environmental benefit that he didn't even plan for. Luna: Unplanned sustainability. I like that. So the next question is: does this model scale to larger factories, or is it limited to job shops? Lucas: That's the big open question. A few larger players are experimenting — Ford has a printer farm at its Kentucky Truck Plant for tooling. But the ROI case is harder when you have a dedicated tooling department with decades of process optimization. For now, I think the sweet spot remains small and medium factories that need flexibility more than raw throughput. Luna: So the job shop becomes the test bed for the technology. And if it works there, it might eventually move up the value chain. Lucas: Right. And in the meantime, shops like this one are proving that additive isn't just for aerospace or medical — it's for the everyday parts that keep factories running. That's a story worth telling.