A FAME Campus case study
When Raute needed a better way to grip veneer strips as they move through their production line, they turned to an unlikely design feature: spikes. Sharp, wear-resistant spikes give a feeder wheel the bite it needs to move material reliably — but the geometry required to make them work is anything but simple.
Raute’s spike wheels rely on an asymmetric, interleaved spike pattern to deliver strong, long-lasting grip on a veneer strip feeder. That geometry is difficult, if not practically impossible, to produce with conventional machining. Traditional manufacturing also makes it costly to test design variations — every new spike profile means new tooling, new setup, new cost.
Working at FAME Campus’s metal AM facility, the team printed 24 spike wheels in total: 12 in a left-handed configuration and 12 right-handed, split evenly between parts that received standard heat treatment and parts that didn’t.
How it was done:
The result was convincingly sharp spikes across every orientation, produced in a material that stands up to wear and corrosion. The printed parts also needed only minimal grinding to achieve the interference fit required between the wheels and their shafts.
Before printing the full batch, the team ran a separate fine-tuning build to calibrate machine parameters specifically for the wheels’ inner diameter — accounting for the geometry variations expected across the full set of parts.
The results were strong: overall dimensional accuracy came in well within the standard tolerance of ±0.2mm. One nuance did emerge — a slight conical effect, with holes measuring marginally smaller closer to the build platform. It’s a small detail, but one worth knowing for any future application with very tight tolerances.
IN718 is a demanding material to print, and the spike wheels’ geometry pushed it further. Layer 188 — identified as the most difficult layer in the build — showed almost no edge warping, even in areas with a minor design imperfection.
The key finding: the job would only have been buildable with both a hard (brush) recoater and Smart Fusion enabled.
| Parameter | Information |
|---|---|
| Part size | Ø40 × 25 mm |
| Material | EOS IN718 |
| Operator hours | 27.5h (covering planning, printing, and documentation for all 24 parts) |
| Material used | 4.90 kg, including waste |
This case shows what additive manufacturing does best: taking a geometry that’s simply not viable to machine and making it not only possible, but easy to iterate on. Raute could explore 12 design variants in a single build campaign — something that would have been prohibitively expensive with conventional methods — while gaining concrete, reusable process knowledge about printing difficult, fine-featured parts in IN718.
This case was developed at FAME Campus, a shared learning and production environment for metal additive manufacturing, giving companies hands-on access to industrial AM technology, design expertise, and process know-how without the need to invest in their own equipment. For more information, get in touch with us at fame@dimecc.com.
