The Wall Colmonoy story begins with a pair of metallurgists, Norman Cole and Walter Edmonds, who developed an alloy called Colmonoy®. Recognizing the importance of this breakthrough, entrepreneur A.F Wall bought the Colmonoy® patent and established the company in 1938 and commercialized its early products.
Today, Wall Colmonoy is a global leader in materials engineering, manufacturing a wide range of products for brazing and hardfacing, as well as precision castings, coatings, and engineered components for the aerospace, automotive, glass container, oil and gas, mining, energy and other industrial sectors.
Parts used in oil and gas extraction will face vastly different requirements in terms of strength, corrosion resistance and hardness than those used in less demanding environments, like consumer products, and meeting those needs means overcoming different manufacturing hurdles.
To produce thousands of parts annually for those various industries via casting and machining, the company must not only create and maintain a large inventory of tooling, jigs and fixtures, but also be able to quickly fabricate new manufacturing aids as companies create new designs or modify existing ones.
(Photos of Desktop Metal Shop System’s Furnace )
Using the Shop System, Wall Colmonoy has been able to produce its own tooling through 3D printing its own metal parts. Wall Colmonoy has significantly reduced manufacturing downtime associated with producing tooling, and has been able to quickly make improvements to existing tooling designs.
In addition to creating tooling, the system allows the company to be far more agile by directly printing parts as new designs emerge or customer demands change.
That speed and flexibility also unlocks new levels of design freedom for Wall Colmonoy customers.
Here are some of the other parts that were printed with our Shop System
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