The Navy’s Big 3-D Printing Bet

DANVILLE, Va. — Dozens of miles from an interstate or a major airport, a tiny mill town in the Virginia piedmont is the crucible for next-generation manufacturing for the Navy. At the height of the 600-ship Navy shipbuilding boom in the 1980s there were more than 2,000 casting and forging businesses in the U.S. Hundreds of different valves, fittings and other hull parts were made from molten steel and packed into warships as precisely and densely as the gears in a Swiss watch. Forty years later, the forging supplier base is a fraction of its 20th-century peak. The Navy and