Each year, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE; Warrendale, PA) holds a competition during which SAE student members conceive, design, fabricate, and compete with small formula-style racing cars.

This year, the Formula SAE (FSAE) team from Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU; University Center, MI) redesigned their car from the ground up to reduce weight and improve efficiency. In addition to replacing the sheetmetal on the car with carbon-fiber panels, team members reviewed and redesigned other components with an eye toward reducing weight while maintaining design integrity.

Spherical ball ends for the car's suspension system were among the components that came in for redesign. In 2004, the team burned more than 56 man-hours to build wax patterns needed to produce the investment-cast steel parts. With the competition a few months away and a local company willing to produce the parts, the students needed a way to reduce pattern-building time.

They turned to the SVSU Rapid Prototyping Center and its Solidica Formation Ultrasonic Consolidation RP system (from Solidica Inc., Ann Arbor, MI). The system uses ultrasound to make solid-state welds in thin aluminum tape to create solid metal parts that are then machined with very small end mills with short flute lengths. According to the company, this process allows production of parts with features such as sharp corners, without secondary EDM processing.