METHOD X Fuels Bespoke Luxury Car Design

Bespoke products are a thing these days, and luxury cars are no exception. Yet producing those custom supercars can present significant design and manufacturing challenges, especially when trying to balance demand with cost-effective production.

CALLUM, an automotive and lifestyle product design and engineering firm founded by renowned automotive designer Ian Callum CBE, is turning to Makerbot’s METHOD X industrial printer to solve some of those challenges. The plan is to leverage the 3D printer to produce functional prototypes, tooling, and production parts across its luxury vehicle fleets, including the limited edition Aston Martin CALLUM Vanquish 25 by R-Reforged.

CALLUM has been using additive manufacturing for some time to transform design concepts into representative models for internal review and proof of concept. The advanced capabilities of METHOD X, and specifically, the wide array of available engineering-grade materials, led CALLUM to extend its use of 3D printing into those other application areas.

“At CALLUM, our mission is to design luxury, low-volume and one-off products that meet the exact requirements of our discerning customers, and AM is the perfect technology to enable us to that,” says Adam Donfrancesco, CALLUM’s technical director. “The ability to produce infinite geometries gives us a much greater design freedom. Additionally, it is more cost-effective and faster to produce low volume or individual parts using AM compared to traditional manufacturing processes.”

CALLUM will lean on METHOD X to create robust prototype parts capable of withstanding rigorous testing, helping to provide a much more accurate representation of how a part will perform in real life. In addition, the technology can be leveraged to produce tooling in the low numbers that is required for bespoke part production—a practice that isn’t as cost effective with traditional manufacturing methods. “With AM, we can produce as few tools as we need that meet our exact requirements, quickly and cost effectively,” Donfrancesco says.

The METHOD X and AM, in general, also helps CALLUM accelerate its prototyping processes—prior to the METHOD X, the firm either relied on its own limited in-house manufacturing capabilities or would outsource work to an external 3D printing service bureau. “With the METHOD X, our objective is to be able to print a part in a matter of hours, tweak the design if needed, and repeat the process as many times as necessary to get the part we want,” he explains.

Watch this video to learn more about the CALLUM Vanquish 25.