Optomec Brings Metal 3D Printing to Latin America With New Viwa Partnership

3D printing technology manufacturer and developer of the LENS metal additive manufacturing process, Optomec announced a new distribution agreement with Mexican machining and tooling supplier Viwa. The deal will allow Viwa to offer Optomec’s LENS family of metal 3D printers to their customers throughout Mexico and Central America. This is the third new market that Optomec has expanded into just this year after inking a similar deal with the UK’s Semitronics last June and a deal in March for the Netherlands with Benelux.

As one of Guadalajara, México’s first heavy manufacturing equipment suppliers, Viwa will be capable of offering plenty of support and industry knowhow. They currently distribute a wide range of mechatronic systems, CNC machining tools and robotics all over Mexico and Central America. Viwa was the first company to develop, build and market CNC machines in México and remains the countries leading supplier of manufacturing equipment.

“Adding LENS manufacturing technology to our product line follows our long history of introducing new and exciting metal working capabilities to the manufacturing industry in México and Central America. What’s especially exciting about the LENS process is that it can be adapted to our current line of CNC vertical machining centers bringing hybrid manufacturing capabilities to our customers, allowing them to produce parts which involve printing metal and then machining the resulting parts with a single setup on the same machine. The LENS process will provide value across their entire product lifecycle from printing new metal parts, to repairing old broken parts,” said Director General at Viwa Dr. Roberto Jacobus.

Founded back in 1997, Optomec rose to prominence after releasing their first commercially available LENS 3D printer only a year later. The industry award-winning LENS family of metal 3D printers is capable of repairing, reworking or completely manufacturing fully dense metal components in materials as diverse as stainless steel, titanium and multiple superalloys. The parts are 3D printed on a building plate with a full five axes of movement, allowing for complex geometries or complicated part repairs.

LENS 3D printers fuse metal powders together that are sprayed onto the printing surface using a high powered laser, building up three-dimensional structures layer by layer. The system requires a hermetically-sealed chamber that has been purged with argon gas to prevent the oxygen and moisture levels from rising above 10 parts per million long enough to prevent oxidation before the metal powders have been fully melted. The completed 3D printed component can be heat-treated, Hot-Isostatic-Pressed, machined and polished or finished just as any other metal part would be.

Here is a brief video overview of Optomec’s LENS 850-R system:

“We are very happy to partner with Viwa to bring LENS technology to the manufacturing market in Mexico and Central America. Viwa’s well established expertise in the machine tool market and their excellent reputation make them an ideal partner to reach a broad customer base in the region,” said Optomec Vice President of Worldwide Sales Michael Kardos.

Optomec’s deal with Viwa also includes the LENS Print Engine, a modular LENS 3D printing system that can fully integrate into a wide variety of metalworking, CNC and machining tools. The LENS Print Engine offers companies new to metal 3D printing the option to augment their existing CNC systems with additive manufacturing and repair capabilities. Optomec also offers their Print Engine to manufacturing equipment developers as an OEM for their existing lines of products giving them the option of adding the LENS technology for added value. Let us know what you think of this new partnership over on our Optomec Brings Metal 3D Printing to Latin America forum at 3DPB.com.