Surface Finishing and Decoration for Direct Manufacturing using Laser Sintered Polyamide in Made-to-Measure Performance Footwear

High performance football boots for professional players have the potential to take the proof-of-concept of an approach focusing on highly individualized products to a market success. At the same time, they point to a long term strategy to enable the development of the manufacturing technologies involved to a cost and performance level that would serve in the production of consumer products on a mass-customization scale. This paper presents the background, motivation and research targets of a research project dealing with various finishing technologies to influence the performance of laser sintered parts with the focus on football boot outsoles for professionals. The gap between the performance and appearance of the pure sintered part, and the ideal performance and appearance of the finished product is elaborated. Various processes to bridge the gap and their level of performance are presented. Finally a recommendation for the ongoing work with the target of a market conformal selection is given and an assumption about the relevance to other applications is made.