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Absolutely - The costs/complexity associated with CNC machining Ti is good news for metal AM - you can cut take an existing design and deliver a commercial benefit and then add further technical benefits on top of that.
It's a similar story with Inconel which is relatively straightforward to print but a pain to machine.Without a cost advantage, it's harder to sell the 'unlimited potential' of AM to someone who already has a cheaper solution that works - why take the risk?
Rik_Van_Looy-
It's a similar story with Inconel which is relatively straightforward to print but a pain to machine.
In racing it was basically the same with all the 3D printed materials. Big cost and time savings coupled with the ability to make more complex shapes, strength and stiffness almost identical to conventional materials, but poor fatigue life. So it was suitable for static components like roll hoops and flanges, but no good for suspension or engine components.
I saw a whole 3D printed exhaust manifold in Inconel when I was at the team. It was paper thin! No idea who made it.
Jonny69
^ The simple fact is it's wasteful and time consuming cutting parts like those out of solid titanium. In a lot of cases it makes much more sense to 3D print. An example in F1 are those tiny Nessie separators on the the front wing (centre left of image). They are sometimes one piece and are hogged out of a solid chunk of Ti the size of a house brick! The fatigue was too much for components like those, but the loading is far lower on a dropout.