Pedal to the Metal Paging Dr. O

Kip Hanson

Contributing Editor

elanie Lang never planned to live in San Diego. An Illinois native, she and her husband relocated to the Golden State after she accepted a new job assignment with Lockheed Martin. That was 13 years ago, and although she might complain at times about the West Coast’s high cost of living, the area’s beaches, mountains, and enviable climate keep her there. So does her job.

MOlga Ivanova has 3D-printed plenty of interesting parts during her time in manufacturing.

Rocket nozzles. Turbine blades and impellers. Neonatal tracheostomy tubes. There are more, which we’ll get to in a moment, but to Star Wars fans, it’s the Static Dissipative Yoda that’s most intriguing.

“We printed a bunch of Yoda and Groot (Guardians of the Galaxy) figurines for high school students who visited our facility recently,” said Ivanova, director of technology at Mechnano, an additive manufacturing materials

Lang is the co-founder and chief executive officer of metal 3D printer manufacturer FormAlloy Technologies Inc. of Spring Valley, Calif. Since 2016, the company has designed developer near Phoenix. “It’s our way of getting young people interested in additive manufacturing.”

Padawan Learning

and built directed-energy-deposition (DED) equipment boasting five axes of motion, closed-loop control systems, multiple wavelength lasers, and powder feeders able to deposit up to 16 different alloys in the same build or even within the same layer. Such capabilities open the door to 3D-printed parts with gradient or multimetallic structures that would otherwise be impossible to create.

As with her becoming an erstwhile Midwesterner, her decision to go into business with Jeff Riemann, chief technical officer, was a case of turning life’s curveballs into home runs.

She’s quick to point out that those educational giveaways were made of a gray-colored base resin, not the more expensive static dissipative material (which is black) that she spends much of each day working with—and yes, which she occasionally uses to print Yodas that are just as resistant to electrical charge as they are to the Dark Side of the Force.

Voices AMplified

“If you include my first position with Boeing, I’d been in the aerospace and defense industry for about 10 years when I started exploring additive manufacturing as a hobby,” Lang said. “All these maker fairs and spaces began popping up in California and around the country, and I thought it was a really cool technology. So I bought a 3D printer kit, brought it home, and began making little polymer objects for fun.” funding for a range of programs and ensuring that the people who serve are well taken care of, along with their families.”