Army Seeks Expeditionary Additive Manufacturing at Three Bases

Expeditionary additive manufacturing is what U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command asked industry for this week: three hangar printers at Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg that turn a digital file into a fixture or non-flight-safety part on site. Inside Defense reported the call on August 27, 2026. For a shop that already prints jigs, aircraft-on-ground looks like a missing clamp — PLA, ABS, ASA, and TPU, not flight-critical metal.

What's Happening

AMCOM posted a Call for Solutions under its Advanced Manufacturing Commercial Solutions Opening (PANRSA-26-P-0000040885). The problem statement is blunt: forward-deployed liaison engineers cannot make structurally adequate replacement parts, fixtures, or specialized maintenance tooling on site, so simple component failures leave aircraft sitting. The service wants three complete systems — machines, software, consumables, warranty, and support — integrated immediately at those three installations. Phase 1 solution briefs were due August 31, 2026, after a question deadline of August 26.

The machine the Army described is closer to a rugged desktop than a metal cell. Public bid summaries list a minimum build of 250 × 220 × 254 mm, layer heights from 0.05 mm to 0.30 mm, USB or SD-card loading, and operation from 15–38 °C at 30–70% relative humidity. Named filaments are PLA, ABS, ASA, and TPU. Host software is called out for Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 64-bit. That last line is a tell: this is a file-on-a-stick workflow in a maintenance bay, not a hyperscale print farm. The SAM.gov notice, mirrored on SAM Daily’s August 26 issue, also says the parts must be “structural” and “environmentally-grade” — weather and hangar dirt, not a lab enclosure as a given.

Why Expeditionary Additive Manufacturing Matters for Shops

Read the call as a logistics document, not a product launch. AMCOM is buying the ability to print a clamp, a drill guide, or a non-flight-safety bracket when the depot lead time is the thing grounding the aircraft. Small shops already live that loop: a broken fixture stops a job; a printable replacement starts it again. The Army’s difference is the paperwork around “structurally adequate” and “environmental-grade,” plus an explicit ban on treating this as a path to flight-safety parts.

The envelope is the other practical takeaway. 250 × 220 × 254 mm is a large-desktop cube. A 300 × 300 mm bed clears the XY minimum easily. The Z number is stricter: 254 mm of usable height is taller than several popular enclosed machines. If you map your own printer against this list, check Z first, then whether ASA and TPU are real profiles rather than brochure words, then whether the machine will still extrude at 15 °C on a poorly heated bay floor. Offline media matters too. USB and SD are there so a liaison engineer can load a technical data package without depending on a base network.

How Expeditionary Additive Manufacturing Compares to Shop FFF

Approach	What it is for	Main limit
Wait on depot / OEM spare	Qualified part, known pedigree	Lead time is the AOG
This AMCOM FFF call	Fixtures, tooling, non-flight-safety polymer parts at three bases	PLA/ABS/ASA/TPU; 254 mm Z; not flight-critical
Enclosed desktop FFF in a shop	Same class of jigs and covers	Climate, materials, and file control still need a recipe
Ultem / PEI FDM spare (cabin interiors)	Flame, smoke, and load cases for interior parts	Different polymer than this filament list
Continuous-fiber desktop fixture	A clamp or drill jig that should not creep under tool load	Wrong answer if the call only named PLA/ABS/ASA/TPU

What the Research Says

Kobenko, Dejus, Jātnieks, Pazars, and Glaskova-Kuzmina printed two real aircraft interior spares in Ultem 9085 on FDM and then loaded them. The class divider took a 900 N vertical pull without cracks (21 mm of deflection at the load point). A horizontal push to 500 N broke one screw holder around 250 N and reached 72 mm of deflection, but the polymer body recovered with no residual plastic set. A folding-table body printed as one honeycomb part weighed 496 g assembled versus 913 g for the multi-process metal original — about 46% lighter — and also held 900 N in a middle pull. The lesson for a hangar printer is not “use Ultem on this Army call.” The lesson is that a polymer spare only works if you redesign for print orientation, wall width, and the actual load case, then test it. Ultem was chosen for flame, smoke, and toxicity rules that PLA and ABS do not meet (Kobenko et al., 2022).

Tymrak, Kreiger, and Pearce tensile-tested PLA and ABS coupons from five open-source printers in a public space without environmental controls — closer to a bay than a materials lab. Mean tensile strength was 28.5 MPa for ABS and 56.6 MPa for PLA, in the same band as commercially printed FDM parts in their comparison. Scatter existed, but the parts were not junk because the room was not a chamber. That supports AMCOM’s 15–38 °C window as a process problem (dry filament, first-layer adhesion, warping on ABS/ASA) rather than a reason to dismiss desktop FFF. It does not license PLA as a flight fitting (Tymrak et al., 2014).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is expeditionary additive manufacturing?

It is point-of-need 3D printing so a hangar can make fixtures, tooling, and non-flight-safety parts from a digital file instead of waiting on a depot. AMCOM asked for three systems at Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg. The printers must run PLA, ABS, ASA, and TPU in 15–38 °C weather.

What build volume does the Army want for these hangar 3D printers?

Public bid summaries list a minimum of 250 × 220 × 254 mm, with layers from 0.05 mm to 0.30 mm. That is a large desktop envelope, not a cubic-meter gantry. USB or SD-card loading is required, so the workflow is a local file, not a cloud slicer. Windows 7 through 10 64-bit is named; Windows 11 is not.

Are Army hangar 3D-printed parts flight-critical?

No. The call is for non-flight-safety-essential aviation items: fixtures, specialized maintenance tooling, and structurally adequate replacements when the supply chain is slow. AMCOM wants to cut aircraft-on-ground time for simple failures. A printed clamp is in scope. A flight-critical metal fitting is not what this filament list describes.

Fibricate's Place in This Story

A PLA cover and a clamp that has to hold a drill both live in the same maintenance story, but they are not the same print. Companies like Fibricate, whose FibreSeeker 3 continuous carbon fiber 3D printer lays thermoplastic with a continuous tow from feedstock such as the continuous carbon fiber spool, are not answering this CSO and do not match the 254 mm Z minimum — the FibreSeeker 3 build is 300 × 300 × 245 mm. Use fiber when the fixture’s job is a load path that should not creep. Use the Army’s named FFF list when the part is a weather-rated polymer shape from a technical data package. Do not mix those sentences on a bid sheet.

What to Watch Next

Watch who AMCOM invites to Phase 2, and whether the three-base buy stays filament FFF or quietly adds a higher-temp polymer. The Windows 7–10 line and USB/SD requirement will either get a modification or become a real integration headache on 2026 laptops. Over the next year, the useful civilian signal is whether more aviation maintainers publish which fixtures they will print locally and which they still buy. The next 12–24 months in additive manufacturing will keep splitting “print it tonight” from “qualify it for flight.” This call is firmly on the first side of that line.

References & Further Reading

1. Kobenko, S., Dejus, D., Jātnieks, J., Pazars, D., & Glaskova-Kuzmina, T. (2022). Structural Integrity of the Aircraft Interior Spare Parts Produced by Additive Manufacturing. Polymers.
2. Tymrak, B.M., Kreiger, M., & Pearce, J.M. (2014). Mechanical properties of components fabricated with open-source 3-D printers under realistic environmental conditions. Materials & Design.
3. Army wants to establish 'expeditionary' additive manufacturing capability at three installations. Inside Defense. Retrieved August 28, 2026.