Protomold®, the Proto Labs® rapid injection moulding service, supplies prototype and production parts to KTM Sportmotorcycle AG

Austria based KTM Sportmotorcycle AG builds just 110,000 motorcycles a year. By contrast, industry leader Honda usually pumps-out more than a million units every month, on average. So, how does a relatively small, niche builder like KTM compete in a market dominated by a Japanese manufacturing giant? First and foremost, KTM produces only high performance bikes, which are, famously, 'ready-to-race' the moment they leave the factory. Motorsport is without question the toughest test of man and machine – it's the quickest way to find a weakness in either. For many off-road races in certain categories, a typical starting grid consists largely of KTM bikes. Over the years, the company has accrued more than 130 world titles and is perhaps the best-known competitor in the annual Dakar Rally. A part-failure due to a material or design defect can have serious implications not just for the competitor, but also for the company and its hard-won reputation. Helmut Gröbner is KTM group leader for plastic components, and heads-up a team of 10 designers. "The pressure on the product development team is enormous," he says. "If a plastic part is approved for production it has to be 100% right. We leave nothing to chance. Our customers trust us implicitly." A new part is initially developed as a 3D CAD model in ProEngineer Wildfire and is immediately subjected to extensive static and dynamic finite element stress analysis. When the CAD design is finalised, the company uses Moldflow to simulate the injection-moulding process, and only then can a prototype part be made for physical real-world testing. In the case of KTM, 'real-world' is shorthand for conditions most people and most motorcycles would never encounter. But, KTM customers have very high expectations, and test-conditions for a new part need to be considerably worse than they are likely to come across. No amount of virtual testing will guarantee a durable prototype. The only way to test the part is to make it and subject it to extremes of stress, temperature, load, etc. A prototype should be as close to the final production version as possible, both in terms of mechanical qualities and also material. "Our first project with Proto Labs' rapid injection moulding service Protomold was a cover for a silencer on the exhaust," says Mr. Gröbner. "Our budget for tooling was only €25 - 30,000 and we couldn't risk going straight to production with a new design." Size of development budgets is also another way in which KTM differs to Honda and other big manufacturers. "Time was also short, but a colleague remembered seeing an advertisement for Proto Labs. So, we gave it a go, took delivery of the prototype and in testing quickly discovered that the part we had designed in plastic wasn't durable enough. Eventually, we decided to make the part from metal, but had we not made the prototype with the help of Proto Labs, we would have wasted a great deal of time and money and we may well have ended up with a sub-standard part on the bike."