There's nothing like driving a jet car.
As soon as you see it, you want to just be-.
280 miles per hour
and a quarter of a mile, in just five and a half seconds.
No brakes, just parachutes.
This sport is extremely dangerous.
You know, my life is on the line every time I get in the car.
Every part is pushed to its limits.
The first time our product’s going to be tested is at 280 miles an hour.
We want our parts to be as safe as possible
so if something goes wrong, our drivers, they don't get hurt.
Jet racing is our wow factor.
We do a lot of fabrication, prototyping,
and small production-run manufacturing in our facility.
The jet engines we use are General Electric J85.
They're out of the F5 Freedom Fighter
that the U.S. military uses.
But we take them onto a custom-built chassis about 26 feet long,
strap them to a driver inside that.
We build a custom afterburner that doubles the output of the engine.
I started racing when I was 16 years old.
In the entire world, I'm one of five female jet dragster drivers
Our steering wheels are what you call butterfly steering wheels.
They have little grooves for your fingers to fit in.
The steering wheels are typically made for bigger hands.
Because my hands are so much smaller, I don't even use those grooves.
I kind of just shove my hand up in the corner.
The drivers have to reach specific buttons.
If I can't reach this button, then I can't drive the car properly.
The driver's life depends on this steering wheel.
If it breaks or something goes wrong with this component,
then they will most likely crash.
So we decided to 3D print a steering wheel
that would fit my hand exactly.
Quality, precision, and safety are probably the biggest factors for us.
Especially when it comes to the racing, because someone's life is on the line.
We're asking, can we make it stronger?
Can we make it faster?
Can we make it lighter?
And can we make it more customized?
This is the aluminum steering wheel
we would order from our vendor.
It would take about eight days to get to us.
It would weigh more, and it doesn't actually fit
the driver's hands exactly how we would want it to.
The original aluminum part,
we had to put in a lot of button holes,
a big top plate on the top of it.
It's just a lot of extra work when we can just make it one solid part.
And we really needed to keep the strength of aluminum.
So the Markforged Onyx with the carbon fiber inlay
lets us meet that aluminum strength.
Continuous fiber reinforcement is extremely important for us.
It gives strength in certain areas that you know you need it.
You don't have to put it everywhere,
so you can make your strength specific to the area you want.
And it really beefs up that component,
and a little bit goes a long way, we’ve learned.
So we added on these bolt-on grips,
and then we added in this cross member
to actually stiffen up the whole thing.
Alright Josette,
if you could get in and try and break the steering wheel.
I’ll try.
All right.
Where the switches are, the grips, thickness, any of that?
It’s easy enough to change now.
Yeah, no, I think everything's perfect on it.
You can't break it?
Can’t break it.
I want you to break it.
I don't think she could.
I don’t think I could.
The aluminum one, does it bend?
It moves. It’s flexy.
Can you do that with the other one?
This one doesn't move at all.
I'm struggling to even, like, make it think about moving.
Yeah.
Markforged machines are extremely accurate.
The parts we're printing
are within the thousands of the part we designed.
I've never seen or heard of anything like the Simulation software
that Markforged has provided for this testing.
It was able to give us confidence through the iterations
that we were getting a better and better design every time
before we even have to print it.
This is going to allow people
to start really testing, optimizing their designs.
They don't have to print ten different parts.
They can do it all in Simulation.
The print bed on the Markforged X7
is large enough where we can print the steering wheel
with all the grips in one print.
I hit go on Friday afternoon, I came back Monday morning,
and I was able to take all the parts off we needed,
and I assembled the steering wheel right then and there.
What used to take us eight days just to get a part shipped,
if they have it in stock, we can now 3D print
whatever part it might be in two days or less.
It's a game changer for us.
So we want to bring that all in-house and we can streamline everything
so anything can go from one car to the next.
If something breaks, you don’t need to carry 20 different spare parts,
you carry one.
Many people believe 3D printing is hobbyist
and you don't get this great finish.
But businesses like ours,
we can see the benefit to spending
and getting those high quality printers like Markforged.
And you get those parts that come off the line
and are ready to go directly into your racecar.
I think this new Markforged software is going to be significant,
and it's going to change the way people can manufacture.