Fleet Readiness Center East Innovation Lab Lead Engineer Jeremy Bunting displays a handful of an F-35 O-ring installation tool recently manufactured by the lab. The two-person team at the Innovation Lab used additive manufacturing – commonly referred to as 3D printing – to fulfill a critical request for 2,000 tools, and successfully completed the order under two weeks. Within days, the effort put tools in aircraft maintainers’ hands across the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force. The turnaround time represented less than 10% of the estimated six months procurement would have taken through traditional acquisition methods.
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