Brooke and Mackenzie

Brooke and Mackenzie specialize in designing and manufacturing parts for agricultural equipment. They were looking for a solution to make functional prototypes to reduce design cycle time. They chose the Markforged platform to quickly and inexpensively create prototype parts that have the mechanical strength and durability to test in real world conditions.

This replacement change gear arm is part of a lathe. The original part failed, and no spare parts were available anywhere. They could have taken a casting of the failed part and machined the replacement, but that would require a pattern and multiple face machining. It could be done, but it would be costly and time consuming. Making it at a CNC machining center would cost hundreds of dollars and would have to sit in a queue due to limited machining bandwidth. Instead, they uploaded the part into Eiger and printed it on a Markforged machine using fiberglass-reinforced Onyx. It took only a few days to refine and print the part, which in the end cost ten times less than any other option Brooks and Mackenzie had.