It is a time-honored tradition...
There's the opening S&P 500...
The ringing of the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange.
100 million people watch the opening and closing bells each day
Markforged a leader in continuous carbon fiber 3D printing are preparing to go public.
We thought that we wanted to go big.
The plan is to 3D print our own version of the bell in metal so when we go public we're
actually going to be bringing our own bell built with our technology.
We have the ability to print things out of metal and continuous composites, these are
structural components so printing our own bell that we can bring on the day of the IPO is
the most Markforged way to go public.
The Markforged team has entered the trading floor
and everyone is waiting to get a look at what these engineers have created.
Hey it's Ross here from Markforged. We are in
heart of New York here to reverse engineer the ticker bell.
My role in 3D printing the bell is to execute on the design.
The first step was flying down to the New York Stock Exchange,
walking up to the bell and then create a one for one replica.
The original bell is iconic. It's quite an elegant design
and it's been sitting inside that exchange for years.
Not only are we going to ring this bell at the moment we become a publicly traded company,
but it is going to be living inside the New York Stock Exchange for the rest of history.
Let's hope I don't screw up.
When people think about 3D printing, they usually think about these
desktop plastic printers that they're using to print
Yoda heads or or little desktop tchotchkes. But Markforged what we actually have built is,
I mean you could print the Yoda head, it would just be out of stainless steel.
This is a part that's made out of steel and started out on these printers.
Literally it comes off the printer and a day later we have like a sintered and ready
metal part which is kind of unheard of in terms of turnaround time.
We invented a box that you can put your idea into
and out the other side comes a part that you can actually use made out of carbon
fiber or stainless steel or copper or inconel or kevlar that you can then take and put onto
your robot or onto your factory floor or into your product and then ship it.
Markforged is involved in anything and everything. From the automotive industry all the way to the
aerospace industry to biomedical to mom and pop machine shops that are making bolts or anything.
You know someone's making something, there's room for a 3D printer
and there's room for a 3D printer there's room for a Markforged system.
So i just wanted to show you a bit of an idea
I don't even know if i can
build a raft on this either but we can make the raft smaller like without even any offset.
We came up with a small team to streamline the design process.
I mean we get we probably get two maybe three cracks at this and then
I'm a little worried about it I because I want whatever we do to be visually stunning.
Yeah i know you're saying I am a little nervous though like as far as risk goes...
As we were going through the design process, it dawned on us that we shouldn't just copy it,
we should do something that really captivates the Markforged technology
and is something that only our technology can actually physically produce.
We're leveraging all our technology to make this bell happen and really
showcase what our printers can do.
We wanted something that could highlight our
capabilities as well as our ability to design and think.
So we came up with this new design this design isn't like any bell that you've seen before.
It's split up into six different components,
which is a nod to our logo which consists of a six-sided hexagon.
The bell itself is going to be made out of a whole suite of materials that Markforged uses every day:
17-4 stainless steel,
a copper button head cap with our logo front and center,
the onyx base reinforced with the carbon fiber
to ensure it's strong enough to stay up for the rest of history.
We need to get this design perfect because it's going to live there forever.
The date's coming up soon and the pressure is on
but we work with tight deadlines around here that's what Markforged really does
we push the limit on technology and on getting things out the door fast.
We've finally hit the point where the bell is printing
and now it's up to the printer to do the rest.
It's got roughly 1500 layers to print, we're looking at a very tight deadline. We have some
more work to do, everything's gonna be fine. It'll be fine.
So if we were to machine this bell out of a massive billet of steel,
first we would have to wait weeks if not months just to get that massive piece of steel.
From there, we would have to get the special cutting tools to remove the material
and arrive at the final shape.
And if any issues occurred during this stage of the process,
we would have to scrap the entire thing and start over.
Hey it's Ross here from Markforged, you're looking at this beautiful trophy right here.
We got six more bell sections to go we are really pushing it to the tail end
like we're really cuttin' it close.
We're gonna make it. Don't worry we're gonna make it. We're gonna make it.
Markforged CTO David Benhaim ready to ring in the company he co-founded...
Everything around us is manufactured: your iphone, your car, your pants,
your house, your furniture and then the pieces of equipment that make all of those things.
All that stuff is made, but the limits of what we can create are fundamentally
bound by our technology that produces those pieces.
Plus the constraints of cost.
We are limited by traditional manufacturing what we can imagine.
But we believe in a world where those limits don't exist.
Where human imagination can manifest easily in front of you.
We are reinventing the fundamental building blocks of manufacturing
so that anything you imagine can be built today