Renishaw 3D Prints Gift for HRH Anne, British Princess Royal

Formnext

Share this Article

Renishaw 3D print Mill HQIn case you’re not familiar with how the Royal Family goes about referring the membership, the Princess Royal is the title awarded by a British monarch to his or her eldest daughter. There have been seven ‘Princesses Royal,’ and Princess Anne is the current holder of the Princess Royal designation.

Renishaw, the British engineering and additive manufacturing firm, has 3D printed a special gift for Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal.

So when the company additively manufactured a replica of their nineteenth century mill headquarters building, they decided to gift the unique piece to Princess Anne as she opened the company’s new Innovation Centre and presented Renishaw with the eighteenth Queen’s Award.

4c686008f72043ed9f808b160881c02bThe visit also marked the occasion of the 35th anniversary of HRH The Princess Royal handling the 1980 grand opening of an extension to Renishaw’s first commercial offices. At that stage, the company had just one facility and employed some 100 people. The Renishaw Group has now grown to operate 70 offices in 33 countries, and employs more than 4,000 people around the world.

Manufactured in titanium using Renishaw’s AM250 machine, the model was produced in a single build and it took some three days to print. The mill HQ replica was then heat treated for stress reduction, and following an additional finishing process, it was mounted on a piece of treated pine which was reclaimed from an original beam in the mill building dating back to 1802.2140dbba4a76403aa23c30af23fbc75a

“A few years ago we milled a replica of our mill HQ building so we already had CAD designs that we could edit to optimise for the additive process,” said Jeremy Pullin, the Rapid Manufacturing Manager at Renishaw. “This meant adding channels to allow powder to run off. It also gave us design freedom to be able to add minute definition – like roof tiles and window detailing.”

Pullin said the AM version of the Mill HQ model had a predecessor.

“The original milled model was made from solid aluminum and produced in multiple parts – as you can imagine, it was quite heavy,” Pullin says. “The flexibility of the additive manufacturing process allowed us to produce the piece as one hollow part, reducing weight and production time.”

de63fbb631fc4af396125b8d96a54aacThis latest Renishaw facility is the $31 million Innovation Centre located at the company’s HQ site in the English countryside near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire. They say it provides the company an additional 153,000 square feet of space which will be used for research and development and corporate services staff, as well as hosting demonstration, training and conference facilities.

Renishaw says the facility represents one of a series of investments the company is making to address their plans for future growth at home and in overseas markets. Another such project, the new 90,000-square-foot facility built to house the Additive Manufacturing Products Division, is based in Stone, Staffordshire, UK.

The engineering technologies company supplies products for applications from jet engine and wind turbine parts to appliances for dentistry and brain surgery.

What do you think of this gift from Renishaw to HRH The Princess Royal Anne? Have you seen any other such projects which created architectural models? Let us know in the Renishaw and HRH The Princess Royal forum thread on 3DPB.com.

b73ccb5c6d9346169fa6d0224cd48fb6

 



Share this Article


Recent News

3D Printed Aorta Model Helps Surgeons Remove “Ticking Time Bomb” Artery

Novenda Secures $6.1 Million in Series A Funding for Dental 3D Printing



Categories

3D Design

3D Printed Art

3D Printed Food

3D Printed Guns


You May Also Like

The Market and Industry Potential of Multi-Material 3D and 4D Printing in Additive Electronics

Additive manufacturing leverages computer-based software to create components for products by depositing either dielectric or conductive materials, layer by layer, into different geometric shapes. Since its birth in the 1980s,...

3DPOD 262: Bio-inspired Design for AM with Dhruv Bhate, Arizona State University

Dhruv Bhate is an associate professor at Arizona State University. There, he looks at structures, materials, and design. Previously, he worked at PADT as well as in the semiconductor and...

3DPOD 261: Tooling and Cooling for AM with Jason Murphy, NXC MFG

Jason Murphy´s NXC MFG (Next Chapter Manufacturing) is not a generalist service; instead, the company specializes in making tooling. Using LPBF and binder jet, the company produces some of the...

3DPOD 260: John Hart on VulcanForms, MIT, Desktop Metal and More

John Hart is a Professor at MIT; he´s also the director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity as well as the director of the Center for Advanced Production Technologies....