Firm Profile: Nick Hardman—Hardmarque Re-Imagines Australia’s Future Manufacturing

Nick Hardman speaks steadily with a sturdy, hybrid Australian—New Zealand accent and quickly comes across as a guy who doesn’t waste time getting to the point. He’s also curious, knows what it takes to build stuff, and above all passionate about the future of Hardmarque, his two-pronged business in industrial design and manufacturing. This past fall I had a chance to talk to him (in his morning and my evening) about both sides to this business, and in particular about his use of solidThinking Evolve and solidThinking Inspire to help ignite the 3D printing and nascent ‘additive manufacturing’ movement in Australia.

As someone who has been around in the construction and manufacturing management world, Hardman has solid knowledge about the general happenings of Australia’s big manufacturing world, which has been losing ground to nearby Asian countries who can provide global scale at lower costs. As Australia shifts—like so many other countries around the world—to reflect changing global manufacturing dynamics, Hardman has positioned himself, interestingly, on the perch of a nascent ‘additive manufacturing’ movement. As an industrial designer with experience in 3D printing of parts, he has also become a solidThinking expert and a channel for that company in Australia.

The Interview

AFR (Anthony Frausto-Robledo): Nick, how did you get started with HardMarque Future Design and Future Factories? 

NH (Nick Hardman): Well my background is in industrial design and I lost my job a couple of years ago—it was a job in construction management. I just realized that I was drifting further away from my core. So I decided to try to get back into it. And I decided I’d start out on my own; it was seen as the only way to maybe break through.  So that’s the origin of HardMarque.

AFR: Were you doing any industrial design work while you were working in the construction world?

NH: Just before I finished up I was. I was asked by my boss to design something, a part. And he wanted to buy a 3D printer and test it out and potentially make it. So we designed and went through the prototyping process. Unfortunately the project got shut down. So that little project didn’t see the light of day but I guess I carried on the idea of 3D printing from that little exercise.

AFR: How long did take you to get back into industrial design? I’m assuming you were likely out of it for awhile while working in management in the construction industry.

NH: Right. Well, I’m originally from New Zealand and that’s where I studied. And there is no industry there to speak of in terms of industrial design or manufacturing. So the only jobs I could start at after college were junior level quality assurance and management jobs. I got a job with a large manufacturer and they were quite specialized. That was my first experience in management and I just moved onto increasing levels in management. And then when I moved to Australia I got a job for a company specializing in ETFE roofing systems. If you are familiar with the Beijng Aquatic Center for the Olympics in China—the building was covered in essentially bubbles—I was working for that company.

From National Lab to Additive Manufacturing

AFR: How did you get your start in additive manufacturing and 3D printing?

NH: Within the first year of starting up my little company I met this guy who worked for CSIRO (Commonwealth, Scientific Industrial Research Organization) here in Australia. It’s a bit like Oak Ridge National labs in the states.

He was an American actually, from Lockheed Martin, and he was running the newly established additive manufacturing department. I got in contact with him over LinkedIn and I told him I was an industrial designer interested in additive manufacturing, and asked whether we could meet up and have a chat over coffee. He agreed.

Anyway, he asked me a bit later to redesign a brake caliper for additive, as a case study for a local brake manufacturer. And that’s how it really got started.

AFR: Can you explain to me what ‘additive manufacturing’ is?

NH: Okay. So let’s take the piston as an example. (see images 01 – 02) Traditionally, you would take a big lump of metal, stick it in a CNC mill, and cut away material lots of material to get the shape of the final product. That’s called subtractive manufacturing, you remove material to get the net shape. Additive manufacturing is the opposite, you start with a fine metal powder and use a laser beam or an electron beam to melt successive slices, or cross-sections, of the part on top of each other.

So if you can imagine a CT scan or an MRI scan of a person how it takes cross-sectional views of the human body, if you were to laminate those sections together you would have the full three dimensional body. So that’s basically what additive manufacturing is.

AFR: I take it the laser is guiding some kind of part that is providing the source of the metal itself.

NH: Yes, if you can image a moveable platform inside a box and a laser/electron gun pointing down onto the platform, this is essentially what a 3D printer is. The printing process involves a rake that sweeps over the platform to deposit a very thin layer of metal powder on it. Then the laser/electron gun draws a slice of the part on the powder, melting it as it goes, and once complete the platform moves down by one layer’s thickness (25-50 microns) for the process to repeat. This continues until eventually the entire part is built.

next page > Australia’s Manufacturing and solidThinking’s Inspire and Evolve

Australia’s Natural Resources and Manufacturing

AFR: So what sectors of the Australian manufacturing industry are ripe for this type of additive manufacturing technology?

NH: Well, we have had an automobile manufacturing  industry here for the past fifty years, but that will all be gone very soon. It’s going to leave a vacuum of suppliers and parts suppliers in its wake. We’ve had Toyota, we’ve had Ford, we’ve had General Motors and we used to have Nissan. Those three auto makers are pulling out their manufacturing operations in Australia and shifting them to southeast Asia by 2017.

So manufacturing in Australia has a big question mark hanging over it.

On the flip side of that we happen to have one of the world’s largest reserves of titanium ore. And we have a wealth of other metal natural resources, under the ground. So there is a bit of a paradox. We have natural resources but we don’t do anything with them.

So really the thinking behind the piston (see image 03) is to respond to what’s happening in the Australian manufacturing world and make a statement about it. If we can’t make cars what can we make? In the US the specialty equipment automotive parts industry is a 7 1/2 billion dollar industry. These are parts that people buy because they want them for their cars not because they need them—things like performance upgrades, engine upgrades, suspension, exhaust, right through to cabin improvements.

With the piston and 3D printing you can begin to imagine a business around this industry that could focus on customization and personalization. The interesting thing about 3D printing is that, in theory, you don’t need to keep any inventory; people order through web store, select pre-designed parts compatible with their ride and or have them designed, and get them printed and shipped to their door. Turn around time for 3D printing for something like this, would be of the order of a couple weeks, even less.

AFR: Do you see the beginnings of that kind of thing happening in Australia at the moment?

NH: It’s quite nascent, actually, 3D printing in general. It’s quite fledgling.

AFR: Is the benefit of additive manufacturing that you are not wasting metal…is that one of the benefits?

NH: Yeah, that’s one of the benefits. The other one is complexity comes free. For instance, if you have a very complex part and you are trying to manufacture it using conventional processes like milling or casting you run into limitations. For example, if it’s milling the cutting tool can’t access that section of the part of the geometry; or if it’s casting you need to be able to get the part out of the mould. So you can’t have things like undercuts or convex type forms where when it’s cast you actually can’t get the part out. These are the sort of shape restrictions you get with conventional manufacturing processes. However with additive manufacturing there are no such limitations.

AFR: I would imagine that the 3D printing machines, however, are quite a bit more expensive than some of the traditional manufacturing gear.

NH: Yes, and the powder is expensive too.

AFR: And speaking of the powders, what kinds of metals are possible with this? Are all metals really possible is this kind of process?

NH: In theory yes because all you really are doing is welding it. Any material you can weld conventionally you can theoretically make a powder out of it and use in additive manufacturing or 3D printing machines. Though my friends at CSIRO will tell you that it comes down to uniformity of particle size and particle shape. So let’s say you want to work with aluminium metal, you would need to process aluminium powder—where each individual grain of powder has uniform size and shape—and that can get expensive. It’s the technology behind creating the metal powder right now that is kind of immature. It’s quite critical to the success you have in the machine.

AFR: So due to the nature of this process is the strength the same with 3D printing parts as if you created the part with traditional manufacturing methods? 

NH: Yes.

next page: solidThinking Evolve and Inspired for Design and 3D Printing

Choosing solidThinking Evolve and Inspire for Design and 3D Printing

AFR: Are there some specific benefits in using Evolve and Inspire? What drove you to using these tools?

NH: Sure. So when I did the break caliper, I was using SolidWorks and the way you work in that program you setup orthogonal planes and you sketch 2D profiles on those planes. Then you extrude those profiles into 3D forms. However, when you to try creating more organic types of forms—which is what we wanted to do with the caliper—it starts to become very limiting. That software is a design tool that has mainly traditional manufacturing processes in mind, such as X, Y, Z axis tool paths on a CNC mill bed. Everything is either a box or a cylinder. So I started looking around and found solidThinking Inspire.

I was so impressed by how in Inspire you can apply real forces and loads on a part and the program would optimize its form to account for those loads, removing mass from the part that was un-used, structurally. (see image 02 above) And then you can take that optimized form and put it into Evolve and continue to refine it. solidThinking Evolve is really a pure 3D modeling tool and actually one of the easiest such tools that I have come across. You can sketch in two dimensions, but it’s easier and nicer to model freely and directly in 3D space. That’s a lot more beneficial when you are trying to do organic forms, which you have generated in solidThinking Inspire.

AFR: So how does one bring over the ‘organic forms’ coming out of real forces in Inspire and then smooth them out in Evolve? Does this program assist in this process automatically or do you literally smooth that part out in Evolve in modeling steps?

NH: You smooth it out in Evolve. You evolve or interpret that shape into a beautiful three dimensional object.

AFR: So as long as you exceed the amount or volume of metal in the part coming out of Evolve—that first was optimized in Inspire—you will exceed or meet your load testing requirements from Inspire? Is that how it works?

NH: Okay, so you do your initial optimizations in Inspire. You then bring it into Evolve and design over that and make it nice, and then you take it back to Inspire and do a stress analysis on it. (see images 09 – 10).  It will then give you a report—and it’s quite advanced now—you can actually see animated in real-time how the part flexes and moves. It also will give you a heat map of the part where in red is the maximum amount of stress and in blue will be no stress. And you can look at the forces in the red areas and say, ‘okay, those are within limits,’ and it’s going to be fine, the material can handle that and nothing is going to fail.

AFR: Okay, so as an industrial designer you are not a mechanical engineer, right, you are not trained in that engineering…

NH: Right.

AFR: So how easy was it to jump into a tool like solidThinking Inspire?

NH: Pretty easy actually. I have some friends who are engineers and sat with them for a couple hours with a cup of coffee and asked: ‘hey, does this make sense? Have I done this right?’ And 90 percent of the time I was on the money; and I just relied on some friends to cast their eyes over what I have done… What I have done with the piston is not exactly advanced, so I think I’m okay.

AFR: So the way I look at this tool I kind of see it as a “green” or sustainable design tool, right? Because everything can become lighter. The things you make can be optimized so there is low waste and thus low weight and that helps save material, save fuel with shipping, and ultimately help save the environment. So what you are doing with the piston is just attacking one part of a car. And that’s a great place to start and to attack other similar problems and other parts of the car would ultimately lower its weight. But what if you looked at this more holistically? What if you approached this from the point-of-view of the whole car—with Inspire—what might that car look like?

NH: (laughs…) Not sure, that’s a great question. I thought the piston, if you can make it lighter and just as strong, would have a great value proposition in it.  You know the lighter the piston the less fuel you have to burn to push that piston down to make the engine turn over to make your car move forward. So the lighter your internal components are the lower your carbon footprint is. And not only that, because it’s additive manufacturing and not subtractive manufacturing, you are not wasting 90 percent of a block of metal to achieve the finished product. You are only consuming the material you need for the product.

AFR: Do traditional processes really use that much metal?

NH: The rule of thumb, so I’ve heard, in aerospace manufacturing is 90 percent of machined material is waste. In the 3D printing machine, the metal powder is repurposed and run back through the machine again. So there is really no waste.

Organic Shapes, Green Engineering and Getting Started

AFR: I’m sure many product and industrial designers maybe reading this will want to know how one gets started developing organically driven and more sustainable designs. What tool did you learn first with solidThinking?

NH: I learned Evolve first because that’s just what I’m used to and I got trained to use 3D CAD modeling tools, so I just intuitively jumped into that one. And then I started experimenting with Inspire. But if I was an engineer I suppose I might start with Inspire and slowly work my way into Evolve. It really depends on your background and training.

AFR: I am sure the startup movement landed on your shores a few years ago too and lean manufacturing is a great place for innovation these days. Do you see the Australian market as a great channel or opportunity for the solidThinking company with Evolve and Inspire? 

NH: Absolutely. I just had four or five people requesting quotes for Evolve over the past three days and they are all Mac users. They are all using Macintosh. It seems to be a unique selling point to the software, that it is written natively for the Mac OS X platform and has full feature parity with its Windows version.

AFR: What are your favorite features or do you have one? What do you like so much over other tools?

NH: Evolve is very powerful with boolean geometry modeling operations. It can create just about any shape creating watertight booleans all day long. (see images 07 -08).  Another feature I like is the ability to create advanced fillets. (see image 11). In SolidWorks when you create fillets it’s one-size-fits-all. And if it doesn’t like your geometry it simply won’t create your fillet. Whereas in Evolve there are probably seven parameters you can control to fine-tune the curvature with the fillet…so you can get it to work. So it’s just a lot more powerful for that sort of thing.

I would say the last thing is probably the way it looks on the screen—there is just something about the graphics of the software. It just looks really good. It’s just very smooth and fluid and looks modern.

AFR: Thanks so much for talking to me about Hardmarque and the tools behind the your industrial design and additive manufacturing work. 

NH: You are very welcome!

To learn more about Hardmarque visit them online here.

[Title Graphic: image of solidThinking Evolve with portions of the break caliper remaining material after being structurally determined.]