Drone motor components in glass-filled nylon, 10,000 to 20,000 at a time.

The challenge

The customer's motor component had to stay light to protect flight time, which meant thin walls and many small slots. They needed it in production quantities of 10,000 to 20,000 units. An injection mold for the geometry would have needed numerous slides and close to a year of lead time before the first good part, and the design was still moving. HP Multi Jet Fusion could print it, but the per-part cost did not work at that volume. Standard Nylon 12 printed the shape but left the thinnest features too weak for service loads.

Our approach

• Chose selective laser sintering, where the unfused powder supports every slot and overhang, so the geometry prints without support structures and without witness marks to clean up.
• Moved from standard Nylon 12 to glass-filled Nylon 12 (PA12 GF), using the added stiffness of the glass fibers to carry features under 0.040 inch through flight loads.
• Nested builds for throughput and consistent thermal history, so parts from the front of a run match parts from the back.
• Automated powder recovery and media blasting for the finishing step, replacing manual sifting and blasting that had become the bottleneck at this volume.
• Released the program through our AS9100D quality system with first article inspection and lot traceability, so every delivery carries a complete build record.

The result

The customer moved into production at 10,000 to 20,000 units per run without tooling, without a year-long molding lead time, and with the freedom to revise the design between orders. Automating the finishing step took days out of the lead time, and parts now come off the line ready for inspection. The program is our largest-volume SLS work and a clear example of where powder bed nylon beats both molding and other additive processes for aerospace and defense quantities.