Beehive Industries orders 30 EOS M4 ONYX metal 3D printers to scale Frenzy 8 drone turbine engine production
Hardware
Originally reported by 3Druck
Beehive Industries has ordered 30 EOS M4 ONYX metal LPBF printers, six-laser systems that will arrive at the company's Colorado and Tennessee facilities over the next twelve months. Once installed, the order brings Beehive's total EOS metal fleet to 50 machines, a scale increase aimed squarely at ramping output of its Frenzy 8 small gas turbine engine for unmanned aircraft and drone swarms. Beehive says Frenzy 8 has completed altitude testing and demonstrated flight readiness, and a $29.7 million US Air Force contract is funding aircraft integration, further flight trials, and formal qualification. COO and CFO Darius Ehteshami cited unprecedented demand for Frenzy 8 tied to large defense programs and the push for low-cost series production of unmanned systems.
The EOS M4 ONYX's six-laser configuration lets multiple zones of the build chamber process in parallel, a design increasingly common among vendors chasing higher throughput on jet-engine-class metal parts rather than one-off prototypes. EOS pairs the machine with an RFS Pro filtration system to stabilize the process atmosphere and powder handling, plus software for real-time monitoring, build-job data capture, and quality management, tools Beehive plans to use across the expanded fleet. The order lands in the current wave of defense-funded AM capacity building, where drone-engine and munitions programs are pushing suppliers toward dedicated, high-laser-count LPBF lines rather than shared job-shop capacity, reinforcing that production credibility now rests on fleets configured for repeatable factory output rather than demo-cell throughput claims.
The execution test for Beehive is whether 50 EOS systems can hold consistent melt-pool and layer parameters across safety-critical turbine components at the rates the Air Force contract implies, with traceability tied to individual build jobs rather than batch-level records. That documentation burden, more than the laser count, will determine how fast Frenzy 8 clears the qualification milestones tied to the $29.7 million award.
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