Wilson Sporting Goods using 3D printing to accelerate the injection molding process

Baseball bats. These are not the products that one would typically associate with accelerated product development for injection molding. Unless, of course, your name is Glen Mason and you are the director of advanced manufacturing for Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods Co. 

Mason, who sold his injection molding company CF Plastics in Hillsboro, Ore., to Wilson in 2019, joked in a recent interview that "Advanced manufacturing means something we don't know how to do. So I'm the director of things we don’t know how to do."

But he is learning fast, and he and his colleagues are leveraging the latest 3D printing technology to accomplish things in injection molding that were never possible before. The Wilson subsidiary called DeMarini Sports Inc., headquartered near Mason's former firm in Hillsboro, has been developing and manufacturing youth baseball bats for more than three decades. These include aluminum bats, polymer composite bats with carbon fiber-reinforced barrels and bats made primarily with thermoplastics. Specific components such as knobs, end caps and the interface between the handle and the barrel tend to be injection molded from engineering resins.

DeMarini's customers include everyone below the Major League level – from Little League and college teams to the minor leagues. Mason said he has known these neighbors of his since the late 1990s, just years before Wilson bought DeMarini in 2000. "I started working with Wilson as a customer," he recalled, "and we developed a lot of great technology together."

Mason says "Most people don't think of injection molding as low volume – why would I want to do that? But that's really the world that we're in. We make a lot of parts in a relatively low-volume model, on time. Our average lead time is 24 hours, between when we know we need something and when we deliver it to our team." Wilson employs a range of engineering plastics and no commodity resins, but he declined to specify which materials they use.

Mason had been dabbling in 3D printing since 2008 but three years ago, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, he met some officials from Copenhagen-based Addifab ApS, the developer of Freedom Injection Molding (FIM) technology, which has proven to be a game-changer.

Their FIM process creates tool parts from computer-aided design files to a molded component in a single day using soluble, single-use 3D printed molds. This process previously often would take months. The FIM technology also eliminates demolding and ejection obstacles, such as drafts, split lines, sliders and collapsible cores.

"We benchmarked the process," Mason recalled in a phone interview. "We brought in their original system, a very small printer. It was very easy to use, but just too small for us."

Then, in April 2023, Ventura, Calif.-based 3D printer maker Nexa3D Inc. closed on its deal to acquire Addifab. At roughly the same time Nexa3D also introduced its latest model, the Xip Pro, its largest industrial resin printer yet with what Nexa calls the largest build volume and fastest print speed in its class. With a 19.5-liter build volume, XiP Pro is said to deliver the daily throughput equal to more than four other industrial resin-based printers.

Nexa3D leverages its Lubricant Sublayer Photo-curing (LSPc) photopolymerization technology to achieve its high speeds. "That's what sets the Nexa3D printers apart," says Lasse Staal, the firm's business development director.

Mason was fascinated by the possibilities. "Once the Nexa3D relationship started, we thought this was fantastic. Their print speed was much faster – not just in the Z print direction but also the actual X-Y capacity they have, the overall build volume. We were probably 10x faster on the X-Y plane and probably 20x faster on the overall build volume. For us, this opened up many more opportunities."

"We started working together – Nexa3D as the printer supplier, Addifab as the resin supplier, and us as the black-box R&D for Wilson. We saw the opportunity for Wilson to help both Nexa3D and Addifab to integrate this technology for their customers."

Mason rightly proclaims that "Nobody wants molds. People want the parts that come out of the molds. So I helped to integrate the solution version of this – not the technology version, the solution version – of how do we get to that finished part."

Via this novel arrangement, Nexa3D reaches out to Mason and his team when a customer wants to test a specific product concept, and Mason then works with the customer to develop prototypes and find solutions based on FIM.

"It's a good partnership because Wilson learns a lot as we get exposed to challenges, ideas and processes that we probably wouldn’t have looked at. And it helps Nexa3D to better support customer application development. So it's a great collaboration, a win-win for all, including for the OEMs."

Mason says that he that he believes the team at Nexa3D, "has fundamentally changed what injection molding is. They've opened up access to injection molding for so many new ideas. The cost of participation is so low. Cap-ex is relatively low. The operating costs of the machine are almost insignificant. Material cost, if you’re doing elegant design work, is not that high."

"Now I can get there faster, cheaper and continue to iterate within our model. We can try all the ideas and see which ones develop more organically."

Mason notes that Wilson has been using the Xip Pro to print prototypes. Prototypes are great, he says, but as with molds, a prototype is not really what you want. "What you want is a prototype process that can scale to deliver. Right now, Nexa3D has that process."

Nexa3D has its xMOLD resin, a high-performance dissolvable resin developed for the Freeform Injection Molding process. Mason sees this technology as a tool "that basically unlocks all of the injection molding options."

To date, he says he has yet to find a process that is faster and less expensive than injection molding. "So my focus is how do I use 3D printing to accelerate injection molding. We're already very good at low-volume injection molding, what I call digital injection molding, basically making one part. This enabling us to do that on a much, much larger scale and at a way lower cost."

"Because we can iterate so much quicker, print tools faster than we can machine, and eliminate a couple of the steps in the process, our R&D team can afford to be wrong," Mason said. "This helps us to greatly improve our time-to-market, allowing us to be quick and nimble with our design decision-making process."