From Prototype to Full-Rate Production at RAPID + TCT: Garrett Hawkins on Scaling Additive in Aerospace

In aerospace additive manufacturing, you expect the story to start with rockets. This one starts with an ink cartridge.

Years before working on aerospace antenna systems, Garrett Hawkins was a high school student measuring a printer cartridge with calipers, recreating it in CAD and sliding the printed replica back into the machine to see if it would be recognized. It was. That experiment eventually led him to Optisys, where additive manufacturing is no longer a classroom exercise but a production technology for defense and space applications.

At this year’s RAPID + TCT, this April in Boston, Hawkins will present Bringing Aerospace-Rated Product to Full-Rate Production, tackling one of the industry’s hardest problems: not proving additive works, but making it repeatable. We spoke with him ahead of the event about changing perceptions in aerospace, why documentation matters as much as hardware and the scaling mistake companies still make.