Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Getting parts made typically means cutting a mold which can take months and be expensive. The larger the part, the higher the cost. It’s something that can break early-stage manufacturing companies, but a reconfigurable tool solves that problem.

David Preiss, founder of Boston-based Variable Machines, has built that tool. Now, he’s scaling it further over the next two years in the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The company is known for its large-scale, reconfigurable surface of actuated pins that can form complex molds for industries such as aerospace, construction and more.

It’s a small world

Preiss studied digital fabrication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At a conference, he met Alex Roschli, a research and development staff member at ORNL who works in large-scale additive manufacturing.

Preiss shared his idea, and that conversation became Preiss’ introduction to East Tennessee’s innovation ecosystem.

He later learned about the Innovation Crossroads program, which he described as the kind of opportunity most researchers hope to land after leaving graduate school.

The sense of it being a small world goes even further. Variable Machines has already landed its first customer, and it’s a Tennessee-based startup!

A pin-art toy for manufacturing

Preiss compares his company’s product to a familiar object.

“It’s like that little toy you’d see in a doctor’s office. But ours is a big table covered in pins that can move up and down very precisely, to about 10 microns of linear resolution and that can sense force as well,” he said.

The current programmable prototype is: 

• 4 feet by 3 feet in size.
• Full of 120 actuator pins, each capable of moving up to 2 feet with high precision.
• Mobile on caster wheels for mobility around a shop floor.
• Scalable to combine multiple units to form larger molds.

This unlocks faster, more affordable and more sustainable fabrication at scale.

“Construction is my favorite example,” Preiss said. “A facade with 10,000 unique curved panels means throwing away a six-hour mold after every single part. Removing that upfront cost lets you move much faster.”

Looking ahead

With Variable Machines already having a working prototype and early traction, Preiss said full productization is the company’s goal for its time in the program. He expects Tennessee’s resources to greatly help do that.

“Oak Ridge and the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) are a huge advantage,” Preiss said. “Tennessee has real support for what we’re building, easy access to the right people, space and talent. The MDF is built for hard manufacturing problems, and Innovation Crossroads gets us in the room with them and a chance to hear customer feedback we don’t have access to yet. That lets us leapfrog toward productization.”

And in terms of productization, mold-making is just the beginning.

“At our core, what we specialize in is building systems with large numbers of degrees of freedom,” he said. “I think of a degree of freedom as an actuator — something that moves, whether passively or actively. And when I think about applying this technology to mold-making, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many directions this can go,” he ended.

Follow Variable Machines on LinkedIn.

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