About the Program:
The VT Department of Economic Development has recently been awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of Economic Adjustment to help Vermont businesses that have been impacted by DOD spending reductions over the last few years.
Qualifying Businesses:
Businesses in which the Department of Defense was the ultimate recipient of products and services representing at least 10% of the company’s sales in one of the last five (5) years qualify for assistance under the grant.
Program Specifics:
The primary goal of the grant is to develop an advanced additive manufacturing capability to the defense related precision metal working businesses locate in Vermont. Deposition printing provides manufactures with the ability to provide limited quantities of complex parts quickly and at lower cost. This is because it eliminates the need to build the tooling required to create parts using subtractive techniques. Eliminating the need to manufacture tooling reduces the time required to produce parts and eliminates the need to amortize the cost of these parts over a manufacturing run. This provides DoD with faster delivery times, lower costs and, in addition, the ability to request modifications to parts without the need to change tooling which results in more flexibility in product design. These are important benefits that our manufactures will need to be able to provide in order to remain competitive.
Next Steps:
- Develop a cluster of precision metal working businesses that can share experiences, transfer technology and exchange knowledge about this new technology
- Provide a means of allowing these businesses to share the cost of exploring this new technology so that they can develop their skills earlier and faster.
- Develop a workforce training and development capability that will provide the employees that will be necessary to deploy this new technology.
Additional long-term goals:
- Provide an advance precision metal working sector that can thrive and grow with the transition from metal removal to deposition processes
- Use deposition printing technologies to create parts more effectively than is possible with current methods.
Expand the skills of our precision metal working businesses so that they can employ these capabilities in both the defense and commercial sectors which will allow them to grow and improve their resilience in the event of swings in the amount of defense business available.