Case Study: Dixon Valve achieves 30x cost savings and 10x time savings with Markforged

Dixon Valve - Customer Case Study

Dixon Valve, which uses robotic arms to add sealing rings to steel couplings, needed durable gripper jaws that could withstand the abrasion of threaded couplings. Although Dixon Valve had long used Markforged composite 3D printers for end-of-arm tooling, composite parts lacked the surface hardness required for gripping abrasive threads, so they could not print the thread grippers successfully.

Dixon Valve solved the problem by printing the gripper jaws on the Markforged Metal X, enabling metal parts with optimized contact surfaces and a fine finish via wet sanding. Markforged’s metal printing delivered a part that endures thousands of stainless-steel couplings while slashing lead time and cost: fabrication time fell from 14 days to 1.25 days (≈91% faster/≈10x time savings) and cost dropped from $355 to $7 per part (≈98% lower/≈30x cost savings).

Dixon Valve