Beehive Industries’ Knoxville facility is about to get even busier
Beehive Industries is headquartered in the Denver area, but their 60,000-square-foot manufacturing facility is in Knoxville.
Over the past several weeks, Beehive Industries has announced a run of moves that seem to point toward more machines, more capacity and more work flowing into East Tennessee.
More printers are headed to Knoxville.
In mid-June, Beehive announced a deal for 30 new EOS M4 ONYX metal 3D printers, a $50 million investment that the company says is the largest single publicly announced order of EOS printing technology. The machines are being split between Beehive’s Colorado and Tennessee sites over the next year, bringing the company’s total EOS printer fleet to 50. Company leadership pointed to surging demand for its Frenzy engine line, built for swarm-class drones, as the driver behind the buy.
Tennessee facility named a “Center of Excellence.”
Just two weeks later, Beehive acquired two Cincinnati-area machine shops, Able Tool Corporation and its subsidiary Planet Products, adding more than a century of combined machining experience to the company. The move split Beehive’s operations into two specialized hubs: Cincinnati becomes the company’s high-volume machining center, while Knoxville is designated as their Production Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence. This will be the hub for metal printing and post-processing as the Frenzy engine moves into full-rate production.
A third investment adds large-format printing — and it could land squarely in Knoxville’s lane.
In early July, Beehive announced a multi-unit order of Nikon SLM Solutions’ NXG 600E systems to expand into large-format aerospace and space components. The two materials the new machines are dedicated to, aluminum and titanium alloys, are staples of defense and aerospace additive manufacturing. Beehive hasn’t said where the NXG 600E systems will be installed just yet, but given Knoxville’s standing as the additive manufacturing hub, it’s a logical candidate for some of that capacity.
Follow Beehive Industries on LinkedIn for more updates.
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