Heroes of U.S. Manufacturing

Yehoram Uziel
Soligen Technologies

or most of his life, Israeli-born Yehoram Uziel, 48, regarded industry's traditional methods for making metal parts in the same scornful way that Gutenberg, five centuries ago, must have viewed the hand copying of books. The parts have to be machined in a time-consuming process that wastes metal or cast in molds that often take skilled craftsmen months to make. Uziel's dream was to produce parts directly from the computer-aided design (CAD) images that have become industry's blueprints. "I wanted to be another Gutenberg," he says.

He is close to realizing his dream. CAD drawings are Uziel's equivalent of Gutenberg's movable type. These are fed into a special machine--a counterpart of the printing press--that quickly converts the images into three-dimensional ceramic objects. The machine can create industrial prototypes or end products, as well as ceramic molds used in a metal foundry. At Soligen Technologies, the small publicly held company that Uziel started in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, a visitor can watch the 3-D printer building up a ceramic mold in mere hours. Successive layers of sand deposited by rollers are solidified as 100 printer heads, following the CAD design, selectively squirt drops of a gluelike substance. When finished, the mold is taken to a Soligen-owned foundry, and hot metal is poured in to make the part.

Industry has taken notice, and Uziel's 60-employee company has been running on a three-shift, seven-day schedule. Revenues jumped 30%, to $5.5 million, in the company's latest fiscal year. Many of the parts Soligen casts in its foundry are metal prototypes suitable for rigorous developmental testing by such customers as GM, Caterpillar, and many others. But in the past year Soligen has achieved what Uziel considers the final step in Gutenberg terms: turning computer images into metal molds durable enough to mass-produce aluminum, magnesium, or zinc parts.

Uziel's last name in Hebrew combines "strength" (Uzi) and "God" (el). He has needed both on the bumpy road he has traveled, which included combat duty in the Arab-Israeli wars. An outstanding student at Technion, Israel's counterpart of MIT, he was the only undergraduate engineer picked to work with his Ph.D. teachers in a defense lab. With his boss at the lab, Uziel co-founded Optrotech Ltd., which became the world's leading maker of instruments using a laser to inspect printed circuitboards.

One day it occurred to him that a laser could trace outlines on a light-sensitive film emulsion, causing the emulsion to solidify. If stacked, the outlines could form an object. Uziel became convinced he could build a 3-D printer capable of making plastic prototypes for industry. But a California engineer, Charles W. Hull, beat him by 45 days in filing a European patent. Uziel served for a time as a VP of Hull's company, 3-D Systems, but still dreamed of mass-producing metal parts. The question was how.

The answer came in 1991, when he read about a 3-D printing process being developed at MIT, in which layers of powdered materials were solidified with glue squirted from an inkjet printer. Uziel persuaded the developers of the MIT process to give him an exclusive license to apply their idea to metal casting. With a few colleagues, he worked around the clock in his California garage to build big 3-D printers. He could find no venture capitalists to back him on acceptable terms; one wanted 60% of his company for $2 million. The persistent Uziel was able to raise $1.2 million from Pratt & Whitney, Johnson & Johnson, and the Sandia national laboratory in return for the right to use his machine experimentally. He also raised $4.2 million through a stock offering and got Soligen listed on the American Stock Exchange.

Soligen's process, called direct shell production casting, or DSPC, has advantages over conventional casting. While all casting makes possible parts with complex geometries, DSPC eliminates a number of steps in conventional moldmaking and can create more precise shapes with intricate internal cavities.

Ceramic molds have one big drawback, however. They can be used only once since they are made in one piece and must be broken to get at metal parts. Soligen's ceramic molds still represent an advance, because the company can make lots of them quickly, as needed.

Soligen has also begun using DSPC to make long-lived metal molds, which ordinarily must be machined. Here's how: Instead of making a ceramic mold in his 3-D printer, Soligen uses reverse CAD imaging to create ceramic molds into which steel can be poured to make two halves of a permanent mold. The resulting "hard tool" can make thousands of parts from any metal with a lower melting point than the steel mold. Soligen recently delivered permanent molds to Chicago Pneumatics, a maker of hand-held tools, which is evaluating them. Says Uziel: "We expect the life expectancy of these permanent molds to be as good as or maybe better than that of conventional tools."

Uziel's long-term strategy is to launch a network of franchised rapid-response facilities where CAD files can be transformed on the spot into finished parts or tools. The service centers, to be called Parts Now, will be located around the world and will have DSPC machines as well as casting and machining equipment. Last year Uziel took the first step by granting a consortium of French companies a license to operate a DSPC machine in an experimental center in Le Mans. Gutenberg would have approved.