Ford's New F3T Manufacturing Technology
Metal stamping is a long and tedious manufacturing technique that is used to shape sheet metal into usable pieces. This technique is essential to auto industries, our military, etc. What makes the process tedious is that every different shape takes a different dye, and many shapes take multiple dyes. Once these dyes have been made and set up in the correct order, you can make parts as fast as you can push them through the different dyes. So this process limits creativity and promotes generic models.
Ford's new F3T Tech (Free-form Fabrication Technology) promotes the opposite. This new fabrication tech does the whole sheet at once and allows variability to the shapes it can create. The advantages of this new technology range from faster production times to more flexibility and quicker transitions to different forms. F3T, like stamping, is all based off of CAD which all engineers are accustomed too so there will be no change in material.
I attached the link right under the title of this blog. If you watch the video in that article it shows the process of F3T's fabrication. Do you think Ford's new technology promotes more creativity than the metal stamping that is now in use?
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