Dixie Iron Works/MSI

Dixie Iron Works started in 1933 to supply valves, fittings, well service pumps, and other flow control equipment to the oil and gas industry. The company’s mission is to provide the highest quality, safest flow control equipment available. Dixie Iron Works is also known by its primary product line’s name, MSI.

Over the last two decades, tremendous growth in the oil and gas industry attracted new competitors. As a result, the products Dixie produced became commodified. Intense competition drove down prices so far that competitors moved their manufacturing overseas to take advantage of inexpensive labor. Dixie remained committed to U.S. manufacturing from its two plants in Texas. 

Current owner Gerard Danos has an engineering background. He strongly believes that innovation is the future of Dixie Iron Works. He trusts his engineers and challenges them to develop creative solutions to the challenges the company faces. He has also diversified his workforce with young engineers who are already trained in additive manufacturing and bring fresh thinking to the game. These approaches add up to a unique way of managing a manufacturing business.

Danos realized the need for innovation to maintain the company’s relevance, particularly by developing new product designs that could command premium prices. He believed that adopting additive manufacturing could be a solution, allowing for faster iteration of designs and full production of parts without disrupting the company’s busy CNC production schedules. To this end, he invested in a Markforged X7, an industrial-grade printer capable of producing composite parts reinforced with continuous carbon fiber. He further encouraged his engineers to explore the possibilities with Onyx, a durable thermoplastic developed by Markforged, as well as metal parts.

An opportunity to validate Danos’ learn-by-doing approach arose when a supplier attempted to charge Dixie a substantial sum for engineering changes to a $4.50 nylon o-ring support. The Dixie engineering team improved the support ring design, produced them on their X7, and tested them. They were pleasantly surprised by the 3D printed parts’ performance at the required operating pressures. This success inspired them to produce the parts in-house at a cost of just 47 cents each.

Dixie now manufactures 400 o-rings weekly using a fleet of ten Onyx One printers. This experience convinced Danos and his engineering team that additive manufacturing could play a key role in building production parts. 

As they expanded their additive manufacturing knowledge base, Dixie engineers eventually ran up against the performance limitations of 3D-printed composite parts. They wondered how much farther they could go with metal, potentially even producing production parts utilizing this state-of-the-art technology.

Investing in a Markforged Metal X printer was an easy decision for Danos. The Metal X, offering the capability to produce industrial-grade metal parts, presented an ideal solution for Dixie Iron Works’ expanding manufacturing requirements. It is more economical than Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) metal printers. And, the metal powder it uses is bound by a polymer, which eliminates the need for Personal Protective Equipment to protect against potentially dangerous loose powder exposure.

Furthermore, the Metal X utilizes the same Eiger software as Dixie’s Onyx One and X7 printers, meaning the engineering team didn’t have to learn new print management software. This compatibility streamlined the integration of the Metal X into their existing processes.

Danos wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Machinists in the shop saw the quality of the 3D printed metal parts and asked if they could schedule time on it to print lower-volume production metal parts – those that required a lot of intricate setup time on a CNC machine to produce a small number of parts. 

Eliminating tooling and setup time for these parts generated significant savings. The Dixie team discovered they could cost-effectively build lower-volume production parts on demand, without straining the company’s CNC production capabilities. Redesigning parts to take full advantage of additive manufacturing generated additional savings. 

One part Dixie Iron Works is running on the Metal X is a dart check valve stop. “Because of its unique flow characteristics, machining it from solid stainless steel was very time-consuming and expensive,” Danos recalls. “We also cast it, but we had to produce significantly more than we needed to make that approach cost-effective.” The team now prints this component as needed on the Metal X.

Production costs much less, and Dixie Iron Works no longer needs to tie money up in inventory for a low-volume part.

In another case, the team redesigned a small, intricate part that was previously designed for CNC machining so it would be better suited to the Metal X process. They consolidated an assembly into a single component that uses 75 percent less material and can be produced on a single printer. They also moved from carbon steel, which tended to corrode and lead to performance issues, to 17- 4PH Stainless Steel. “We were able to reduce production costs from $20-30, including labor, to $5 of material,” Danos emphasizes.

The Dixie Iron Works team also uses the Metal X to produce wear-resistant end-of-arm tooling for industrial automation. “In one case, we designed and printed long, skinny grippers that needed to be made of metal to have the required durability,” he indicated.

Despite the higher material cost of 3D-printed metal parts compared to CNC-machined equivalents, they become less expensive when factoring in CNC machine programming, setup, tooling, and labor costs of highly- trained operators. That’s why designing for 3D printing has become one of the core principles of product development and continuous improvement at Dixie Iron Works

The Metal X has dramatically expanded Dixie Iron Works’ ability to design and produce metal parts and to achieve the level of innovation Danos envisioned. A major factor in the company’s success lies in Danos’ willingness to invest in additive manufacturing tools, coupled with his trust in his team to maximize their potential.

Danos is exploring the potential of metal binder jetting printers, like the PX100 from Markforged. This technology would further enhance Dixie’s capabilities in manufacturing end-use components through additive manufacturing, enabling higher-volume production while maintaining the process efficiencies and cost savings achieved with the Metal X.