Manufacturing Unlimited Takes ICAM's Advanced Manufacturing Conversations Into the Field

From conference hall to shop floor

Advanced manufacturing has no shortage of forums. As the source material puts it:

"Advanced manufacturing is often discussed through conference presentations, technical papers, standards meetings, and carefully controlled demonstrations."

But those formats leave a gap. The open question — "What does adoption actually look like once the technology enters a facility, a production workflow, or a community setting?" — is the one that determines whether a technology survives contact with production reality.

That question sits at the centre of Manufacturing Unlimited, a new video series from ASTM International, hosted by veteran manufacturing journalist Peter Zelinski and brought to viewers by ICAM.

Why ICAM's audience should care

ICAM is hosted by the ASTM Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence, and it has become a forum for the technical conversations that move additive and advanced manufacturing from research into use:

"The conference brings together stakeholders from industry, government, academia, regulatory agencies, and national labs to address standardization, qualification, certification, materials, data, and workforce needs across the manufacturing value chain."

Manufacturing Unlimited extends that mission beyond the conference. Each episode focuses on a facility, project, or process where advanced manufacturing is already being applied to solve a defined challenge. The result is a series that connects ICAM's technical depth with real-world environments.

Case study one: interconnectivity in Kansas

The episode highlights the interconnectivity of CNC machining, automation, quality, tooling, and shop management within a unified digital system.

The takeaway is not about the machine itself. The first episode reflects the theme that advanced manufacturing adoption is about the surrounding system — the infrastructure that lets equipment perform reliably, repeatedly, and at scale.

Case study two: circular production in Austin

The second episode shifts to a Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Austin, Texas. There, the ReCreateIt initiative turns discarded plastic into household goods through large-format 3D printing. The episode focuses on local impact and circular production — a side of additive manufacturing that sits well outside the usual aerospace and medical framing.

The connected questions

"The technologies are different, but the underlying questions are connected."

ICAM addresses questions about scaling expertise, waste recycling, and lowering barriers to metal AM:

"How do manufacturers scale expertise? How do they turn waste into feedstock? How do they lower barriers to metal AM? How do they build confidence without making qualification itself a bottleneck?"

For engineers making adoption decisions, the series' closing argument is the one worth remembering:

"Adoption is no longer defined by whether a technology works in principle. It is defined by whether it can be integrated, trusted, repeated, and scaled."

The series documents the story of advanced manufacturing adoption, one episode at a time.