Drill Bit Manufacturer Digs Deep with 3D Printing 

In his State of the Union Address this year, President Obama stood behind additive manufacturing and the role he believes it will play for the manufacturing industry, saying, “...3D printing has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” Now, BlueFire Equipment Corporation well on its way to making the president’s prediction a reality, reporting that its own 3D printing initiative for creating drill bits is underway.

The company’s polycrystalline diamond cutter bits are used to drill shale, sandstone, limestone and sticky clays to help find and produce oil and gas in the United States. But in order to stay cool during drilling and for easier cleaning, the bits are specially designed and manufactured with unique ports and the precise placement of drilling fluid nozzles that help to lubricate the bit. Conventional bits, on the other hand, cannot focus the fluid ejection, which leads means that the lubricant isn’t always well-distributed across the area where the bit meets the ground.

BlueFire has since found a more than 30 percent decrease in the temperature of cutting surfaces, which will in turn extend the life of the drill bit. Beyond expanding drilling capabilities, however, the company expects the switch to additive manufacturing to greatly reduce costs.

To form the drill bits, engineers first design a 3D model that a printer can read and translate into a physical form. Rather than starting with a block of material and shaving away pieces until the finish product remains (as is the norm for “subtractive” manufacturing), 3D printers add and fuse material layer by layer, minimizing waste and easily accommodating design variations, making it ideal for mock-ups and low-volume production.

According to additive manufacturing authority Terry Wohlers, efforts such as these are playing into a boom from the industry’s current value at $2.2 billion to $6 billion by 2017. For many companies, additive manufacturing is used primarily for rapid prototyping, but increasingly manufacturers of all sizes are using it to offer customized designs at a low cost to the consumer.

“We are indeed experiencing a very dramatic paradigm shift in manufacturing worldwide,” said BlueFire Chairman and CEO William A. Blackwell.