What’s DFAM?

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll receive wildly different unravelings of the acronym DFAM.

To music aficionados, DFAM might mean “drummer from another mother,” clever branding from Moog Music Inc. to describe its newest line of percussion synthesizers. I wish I’d thought of that phrase. DFAM could mean the Darlington Farmers Auction Mart but probably only to those who live near there in England and are interested in buying a cow, goat or sheep. At The Walt Disney Co., DFAM refers to the extended family of employees who share the stress of working at the Magic Kingdom—as in, “I’m going to chill this weekend with my DFAM before the big Labor Day rush.”

Then there’s the DFAM that manufacturers care about—or rather the additive manufacturers. That’s because DFAM is short for “design for additive manufacturing,” an acronym every bit as relevant to machinists as it is to people in 3D printing.

Granted, it’s a bit of a knockoff. Design for manufacturability (DFM), design for assembly (DFA) and design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) have been around for several decades.

DFMA is a registered trademark of Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc., which developed a suite of software products for making manufactured parts of all kinds easier and more cost-effective to produce.

Ironically, BDI founders Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst released the first versions of their DFM and DFA software for the Apple II Plus—remember that?—during the 1980s, right around the time that Chuck Hull introduced stereolithography 3D printers.

I’m not sure who invented the term DFAM, but the practice is clearly important for the same reasons that DFMA is important to traditional manufacturing. In some ways, DFAM is even more necessary, as 3D printing requires a fair amount of topology optimization and no small amount of nontraditional thinking if one is to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the problem with all this: Additive and subtractive manufacturing should not be considered separate technologies but different tools in the same toolbox. They have always complemented one another and are doing this more as 3D metal printing’s capabilities evolve.

Just as milling/turning centers and multitasking machine tools—many of which now have additive capabilities—are slowly breaking down the wall between the milling and turning departments, DFAM and DFMA can and must join together at some point.

It’s a problem ripe for the solving. However, until someone takes the “design for” bull by the horns, designers, engineers, machinists and programmers will have to continue doing the best they can with the tools they’re given. Just remember that there’s more than one way to skin the manufacturing cat.