Angus 3D Solutions: Tight-Clearance Wrench

Angus 3D Solutions is a Scottish-based 3D scanning, 3D printing, and manufacturing service company. They help individuals, small businesses, and global companies across various industries create parts that are often impractical to fabricate using traditional manufacturing technologies. Recently, a company approached Angus 3D Solutions with an urgent request: a customer in the oil and gas industry needed specialized parts delivered to their offshore rig in 6 days. The customer had a new tool but couldn’t assemble or test it because they didn't have the correct tight-clearance wrenches. The parts needed to be custom-made and shipped via the next available sea freight.

Angus 3D Solutions’ end customer planned to use a conventional manufacturer to solve their customer’s problem. But when they realized it would take the manufacturer 2-3 weeks to produce the wrenches, they decided to explore faster alternatives. That’s when they reached out to Angus 3D Solutions. Their customer delivered the wrenches in just 3 days with their Markforged Metal X System (versus 10-day production time using laser powder bed fusion technology). This allowed the customer to deliver the wrenches to the offshore oil rig within the 6-day deadline, resulting in a savings of $25K in freight costs for Angus 3D Solutions’ customer, not to mention the potential savings of millions in unplanned downtime for the oil and gas customer.