Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Boeing have printed a steel Stamp Form Die measuring 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide, weighing close to 2 tons, in eight weeks. The tool is headed into Boeing’s work on NASA’s Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing (HiCAM) project, which is trying to raise composite aircraft production rates and cut aircraft weight for fuel efficiency.
The die was printed on ORNL’s Arc-1 system, a robotic wire-arc setup that can feed several wires at once and deposit more than one metal in a single build. That let the team combine mild steel in the structural body with a stainless steel working surface for corrosion resistance and dimensional stability, plus curved internal cooling channels instead of the straight drilled passages conventional dies use.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 6 ft |
| Width | 4 ft |
| Weight | ~2 tons |
| Print time | 8 weeks |
| Design iterations | 32 (simulation) |
| Final accuracy | within a few mm of target |
Warping from residual stress was the main problem: as deposited metal cooled it twisted the structure out of shape. The team bolted temporary ribs to the back of the mold and ran 32 simulation passes to pre-compensate the design, landing within a few millimeters of target. Baker Industries, a Lincoln Electric subsidiary, then annealed the part, stripped the ribs and finished it to Boeing’s spec.
For scale, a separate pilot between Eligio Re Fraschini and Caracol printed a single-alloy 316L spar tool on Caracol’s Vipra XP system, 110 kg and 1,000 x 550 x 85 mm, in 30 hours, claiming a 50% weight cut versus conventional tooling but without integrated thermal channels or a second metal. AML3D has also started a three-year project with an undisclosed aerospace prime to qualify its wire-arc process for tooling, citing sector lead times of up to 24 months.
Neither article gives a cost figure for the ORNL die or a comparison against what a machined, cast or forged equivalent would cost or take to produce.