The Future of Drone Manufacturing

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Every drone that has ever made it to market has pretty much started the same way. An engineer would finish a design and they'd send the files over to a CNC shop or sometimes worse, a mold tooling vendor, and then they'd wait. 2 weeks if they were lucky and 6 weeks if they weren't and sometimes months for injection mold tooling especially. And the whole time they waited, they were guessing. Guessing that the design was correct. Guessing that the motor mount geometry they picked would survive a crash. All kinds of [music] stuff.

[00:00:28]Because the minute the part came back, if it was wrong or off by a hair, like off by a millimeter or fraction of a millimeter, they would have to start over entirely. And that rhythm was how drone development worked and most [music] kinds of development, frankly.

[00:00:42]Design, wait, test, revise, wait again.

[00:00:46]In a space where mission requirements change faster than manufacturing can keep up, that rhythm has been killing companies. And in a wartime situation, [music] that rhythm kills troops.

[00:01:05]At Vision Miner, we've spent nearly a decade now helping engineers escape that exact cycle. And honestly, this video really hits home for us because this is actually the reason why Vision Miner exists. Patrick, our CEO, was designing drones back around 2010, that whole era.

[00:01:22]Multiple platforms, multiple iterations year after year. He was running a drone shop and actually that's how he and I met. I used to fly racing drones and still do sometimes, but I walked into a store one day and we got to talking.

[00:01:35]Patrick lived this problem. He would design a part, send it out, and then wait, and get it back, and find out what was wrong, and then start the whole cycle over again. The breakthrough for him was when 3D printing functional materials got good enough that the prototypes could actually be the parts.

[00:01:52]Not just look and feel models, but real flying components. And really at the time, it was still for prototyping. He designed all kinds of heavy lift kits and he was the first guy to ever put a red digital cinema camera on a drone.

[00:02:05]Very cool stories there. This is actually an old prototype that we still have floating around the office in ABS for a thermal camera. This is around about 2010, 2011. But you can see it it's still bendy, you know, this is the the material. It's just ABS, you know, it's not rigid enough. And then if you throw that up on a drone in the heat, it fails very quickly. So you couldn't actually use 3D printing back then for the final product. So when functional materials came out, he saw that there was a huge huge opportunity.

[00:02:38]And of course, there were some companies printing this stuff really just Stratasys, but that was locked behind, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment costs and licenses and all these different things. So pretty much only aerospace companies could afford to use them. But knowing that these materials existed, that insight is what actually built this company. And now, 15 years later, we're watching entire drones get printed end to end. The technology has caught up with the vision. So here's the thing that most people miss about iteration.

[00:03:08]It's not about the speed. The speed is just the surface level benefit. The real shift is what happens inside the engineer's head when being wrong stops being expensive.

[00:03:22]Now when a design revision costs you 6 weeks and 50 grand in tooling, then you tend to be a little conservative. You pick the safe geometry. You don't try the weird new idea. But when a revision costs you one print and an afternoon, then you start experimenting without worrying about any of that. You try the thing that's never been done before. You try the stuff that you're not sure about. You run three variants side by side, real example coming in a minute, and you let the testing tell you which one wins. And that is the real iteration problem, the real iteration benefit. The old manufacturing model just wasn't wasn't just slow, it didn't just take a long time and be expensive, it was a filter that would kill good ideas before they ever even got built. Let's talk about a company that's figured things out early. UVify, I hope I'm pronouncing that correct, they're a professional drone racing manufacturer. Racing drones, the same kind I used to fly, same kind that got me into Pat's store and actually started this whole company.

[00:04:23]They live and die by fractions of a second, which means their engineers are constantly hunting for aerodynamic gains or motor mount improvements, frame geometry tweaks, how to shave a gram off the weight, stronger frames so when you whack into a flagpole or something, the drone doesn't just destroy itself and you can recover that run. All these tiny little things, they really do add up in a competitive sport like drone racing.

[00:04:48]Now, their old workflow was the same as everybody's. Design, send a copy to a machine shop, wait, hope, pray it works.

[00:04:55]Now, they literally ship a new design iteration every single week, literally every week. They're doing prototypes in-house, testing them on the track, adjusting them, and the next version is literally on the machine before the previous one even cooled down. That cadence is virtually impossible with traditional manufacturing. It's not even close. It literally just doesn't even come close. So, here's where it gets interesting. One click metal, a really cool metal 3D printing company I've been actually hearing a lot of great things from users out in the field and whatnot about that company. They actually ran a case study using Autodesk Fusion 360's generative design tools paired with their machines.

[00:05:37]Now, this is laser powder bed fusion, so basically very very fine metal powder and a laser that fuses every layer together layer after layer, very cool stuff. They printed three completely optimized fully metal drone frames. And these weren't three copies of the same design. They were actually three completely different designs printed at the same time on the same build plate or the the same build chamber. So, from the design to the finished prints, only 36 hours. Hang on. That's a day and a half.

[00:06:09]It's basically nothing. 36 hours. Now, think about what that means. The engineer running the Fusion app does generative design. And by the time they walk into the shop 2 days later, all three are sitting there ready to be cut off the plate, post-processed, and tested in the field. Now, if you've ever tried to do this in CNC, the amount of time to set up each different iteration, all the different designs and styles, it's it's ridiculous. It just doesn't wouldn't make sense, right? So, instead, you just go with the best one that you think is best, and that's what you go with. But with 3D printing, you don't have to pick. You just print all three.

[00:06:46]Now, this is the part that connects the whole story. Generative design software takes loads and constraints as inputs and produces organic, bionic, almost cyborg-looking alien geometry, where material only gets put in the areas where the load path actually need it.

[00:07:04]The output looks like human bone or tree branches or something alien. Like, it's pretty interesting looking. It just looks organic. Now, a lot of these shapes can't be machined. And even more of them can't be molded. The geometry is physically incompatible with subtractive manufacturing and conventional tooling and molding methods and all these different things. You just can't do it.

[00:07:25]So, generative design isn't just better with 3D printing, it literally only exists because of 3D printing. The design tool and the manufacturing method are part of the same conversation. Now, this is something we see every single day here at Vision Miner. Like, out on our shop floor. Engineers bring us geometries that would have been impossible to make just 5 years ago. And the 22 iDex prints these designs in PEEK or Ultem or carbon fiber nylon, you name it, any of the materials. And it's open, you don't need a license.

[00:07:56]Open material system.

[00:07:57]But we also see the other side of this every single day. Engineers bring us parts that were designed for injection molding and they're totally not optimized for FDM like at all. There's This is really kind of a whole topic on its own and we're actually working on a series of videos for DFAM or design for additive manufacturing. And that'll come out in the next few weeks. We're still working on it in the background, but hit subscribe if you want to see that and drop a comment below if you are excited for that series.

[00:08:25]Uh that's one of the ways YouTube knows how to push it and how we know where to put our energy into these videos for you. But here's the bigger point. Engineers need to start knowing that they can print their end-use parts, their final products, on a machine like the 22 iDex in materials like Ultem and carbon fiber nylon and polycarbonate. And once they know that, they need to design for that.

[00:08:51]Specifically. Design for that. We've actually worked with some major automotive manufacturers that cannot be named due to NDAs. They wanted to print the parts in real ABS, the exact material they were going to mold it in.

[00:09:05]Uh and so they used soluble support material to get the geometry exactly like they were going to have. They print the part, rinse the supports off in water for a couple hours or whatever material, depending on the support material, and you've got a perfect prototype of the exact geometry that's going to go into a mold and shoot hundreds of thousands of parts.

[00:09:23]So you want to make sure that mold's correct. Now, and even that, the mold costs like a hundred to two hundred thousand dollars just to make the mold.

[00:09:31]I mean, this is a huge, vast, massively complex injection mold. So being able to prototype that exactly, it was a huge advantage. And let's just say they bought machines.

[00:09:43]So, it's a big deal. We see it constantly on all different industries.

[00:09:47]Now, back to the military side because here's the kicker. The ultimate iteration story isn't happening in a lab. It's not happening in the R&D department. It's not happening in the design phase. It's happening in the field, the battlefield.

[00:10:02]Skyfall's P1's son is a 3D printed interceptor drone. It's got a top speed of 280 mph, 450 km/h, uh ceiling over 16,000 ft. That's halfway up of a commercial airliner. That's more than 3 mi up. 5,000 m. And they're producing thousands of these drones every single month. But the production number isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is where the design revisions come from.

[00:10:30]The troops that are using the drones in combat send feedback back to the design team. And the team rolls those changes directly into the CAD and the next batch off the printers has the changes baked right in. Now, that's the fastest iteration loop that I as far as I know has ever hit a battlefield.

[00:10:48]I mean, there's definitely a lot that we don't know about. But it's fast. And from the user straight to the engineer, straight to production, and effectively zero tooling costs in between the revisions, it only works because 3D printing makes the cost of being wrong next to zero. Oops, that didn't work. Well, we changed it. Here, print it again, all right. Good deal.

[00:11:10]Let's Let's make this happen. So, when you can afford to be wrong and it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg, it's relatively cheap, then you get better designs faster than the competition that can't. The drone companies that are winning right now aren't the ones with the best ideas. They're the ones with the infrastructure to test the most bad ideas and to find the good ones before anyone else does. Now, this is a principle that runs through every kind of success. A lot of our customers and a lot of you viewers out there are business owners. And so much of the time, it's not about having the perfect plan. In fact, this is a principle from General Patton himself. A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

[00:11:57]And that's how he won the Battle of the Bulge. In December 1944, Patton turned the entire Third Army 90° in 48 hours through brutal weather, in the win-middle of winter, to relieve the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. The other Allied commanders were still drafting plans. Patton just moved. That single decision broke Germany's last major offensive in the West, and it literally changed the course of the war. And what we're watching right now in manufacturing, engineers iterating in hours instead of months, drones designed in the field and printed the same week, this is literally changing the course of manufacturing history. The same exact principle, a good plan executed now. So, if you're building drones or any kind of low-volume, high-iteration product, medical devices, motorsports parts, robotics, uh end effectors, you know, uh custom test fixtures, satellite hardware, anything where the design is going to evolve faster than the tooling can keep up or you want to try some things out, then this infrastructure starts with a machine that can actually handle and print engineering polymers on a production schedule, much like our 22 iDex. So, head over to visionminer.com/22idex and uh you can see all full specs and everything on our flagship machine. Just give us a call, shoot us an email. We're literally here to help you every single day. We help people figure this stuff out and we produce high-performance printers that are unlocked from all the licenses and proprietary materials that a lot of you in the industry are very well used to and love complaining about.

[00:13:39]So, thank you guys so much for watching.

[00:13:42]Have a positive rest of your day and I'll see you on the next video.