MILWAUKEE, Wis. – For the past two years, a conglomerate of trade associations, industry, government and academia have been collaborating on the world’s first operational 3-D printed excavator. That project made a giant leap forward with the recent printing of a prototype that leveraged large-scale additive manufacturing technologies and further explores the feasibility of printing with metal alloys. Known affectionately as Project AME (Additive Manufactured Excavator), the excavator is being 3-D printed using various machines at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, in Tennessee, to create and assemble three components: the cab, the boom and a heat exchanger. … Read more