There’s a brand-new US-based 3D printer manufacturer.
The company is Homefront Manufacturing, based in Claysburg, Pennsylvania. There’s quite an interesting story of how the new company came to be.
It all begins with a large non-3D printer company, NPC. They are a huge, long-time operation providing secure paper print services to governments and defense organizations. For example, they might print patent documents.
But as you’ve probably noticed, the demand for paper documents is slowly evaporating, and at some point, it may affect NPC. The company is looking forward and is now diversifying in several ways.
One of them is into additive manufacturing.
To get things going, they have partnered with John and Sierra Olhoft, formerly of FAME 3D (LulzBot) to create an entirely new entity, Homefront Manufacturing.
The goal of the company is to produce equipment specifically designed for military use. In other words, the 3D printers will be both robust and secure, in addition to providing high performance and reliability.
I believe this to be a brilliant idea, but you might not think so at first glance. That’s because the current market in 3D printing has become completely dominated by Asian manufacturers: 88% of today’s sales of 3D printers are now made by only four Chinese manufacturers.
In that light, it would seem hard to believe that a US company could compete. But there are some interesting twists that change the situation.
Homefront Manufacturing, as you might suspect from their company name, is focused entirely on providing equipment specifically for military use. Then consider the following:
- Military budgets are growing massively and rapidly.
- An extreme need for drones and drone parts has emerged as a result of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
- Drone parts are frequently produced on 3D printers.
- US military operations will not use foreign 3D printers.
Combine all that together, and you have a recipe for success.
That is, if Homefront Manufacturing can deliver a properly functioning and maintainable machine.
My guess is that they could, given the team’s experience with developing, manufacturing and selling LulzBot equipment.
However, they haven’t delivered any machines yet, and in fact haven’t even announced a machine. They plan to do so later this month, so we can only guess the machine specs. My guess at the machine’s name is “Alpha”, based on the hidden filenames on their website. One thing we do know is that they intend to price the machine under US$10,000.
