There’s nothing high-tech about a T-nut. It’s an unimpressive steel rectangle with a threaded hole in the middle and squared-off edges that slide into slots on a metal scaffold.
But the way T-nuts are being made at Seurat Technologies in Wilmington is as high-tech as it gets. Seurat is printing them out of powdered steel, using a method with lasers originally developed for building nuclear fusion reactors. It almost seems like overkill to use such an advanced method to crank out cheap metal parts.
But “cheap” is the point, according to Seurat. The company says it’s solved the biggest challenge in 3D printing, by building machines that produce parts many times faster than rival printers. That means even inexpensive parts can be printed at a cost that’s competitive with old-school methods like milling and stamping.
“It’s the most unassuming part you pretty much could imagine,” said Seurat chief executive James DeMuth, “and we can print this more cost-effectively than they can make this today by any other method.”
Founded in 2016, Seurat has raised about $178 million in venture capital, much of it from chipmaker Nvidia and manufacturing giants like GM, Honda, and Porsche. The company recently signed its first production contract with Thorlabs, a New Jersey company that makes advanced optical systems used in laboratories and factories. Seurat will provide 100,000 printed nuts custom-designed for Thorlabs hardware. DeMuth said the company is prototyping 3D parts for other potential customers.
These days, 3D metal printing is a mainstream technology. There are printed parts in cars, airplanes, and even artificial human knees and hips. For critical, low-volume parts, it doesn’t matter that 3D printers need hours to build just one part. But this rules them out for making parts by the thousand. It just takes too long.
DeMuth said his system could never compete with mass-produced nuts and bolts, of the kind sold by the billions. But he said there’s a $2 billion market for customized fasteners like the T-nuts with production runs of 100,000 or fewer. And he said the Seurat system is fast enough to get in on this game.
The process was spawned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, a federally funded research lab where DeMuth was an engineer. DeMuth and the team developed a system that aims precise pulses of laser light at metal powder to create thin layers of solid metal. More metal powder is poured on top, and the laser makes another pass. And so on, building up the object layer by layer.
Other printers use similar methods, but the Seurat system divides a single laser into multiple beams that can carry out the process much faster while making dozens of objects at a time. And the finished parts require hardly any post-processing. Even the holes in the center are threaded and ready for use.
Other local metal-printing firms have struggled. Both Waltham-based Markforged and Burlington-based Desktop Metal were acquired by Israeli firm Nano Dimension, after disappointing sales of their printers. And just three months after it was purchased, Desktop Metal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
But Seurat has no plans to sell its printers. Instead, the company acts as a contract manufacturer, similar to traditional machine shops. A business needing a part would simply place the order. The parts will be made on Seurat’s machines and shipped to the end user.
Joris Peels, vice president of research at Additive Manufacturing Research, said Seurat’s total control of the process is a shrewd strategy. “What I like about their approach is they’re building their own technology stack,” Peels said, “and they’re centralizing it. ... There’s a business model advantage that’s really good.”
But he added that it’ll take time to figure out whether Seurat will produce parts of consistent high quality, while turning a profit. The system “needs to run for a couple of years for you to know if it has cost advantages,” Peels said.
The Trump administration’s tariff policy could give Seurat an extra boost, by driving up the cost of foreign-made metal parts.
“That’s a whole bunch of capability that we could then transfer from being done in China to being done stateside,” DeMuth said. “You don’t have to put it on a boat. You can put it on a train.”
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.