By: Alex Nelson
“3D printing is arguably the current industrial revolution, as slow and quiet as it may be”, says Dmitry Orlov of BBi Autosport in Huntington Beach, CA.
Slow and quiet isn’t exactly how anyone would describe the 700-horsepower fire breathing Pikes Peak going anti-gravity missile that the team at BBi have created. However, you can't blame anyone for letting the nostalgic awe of its Porsche 993 GT2 inspired silhouette overshadow the revolution going on underneath.
Evo underwent initial testing at The Thermal Club, deploying its modern suspension and carbon ceramic brakes.
Affectionately dubbed “Evo”, BBi is creating its version of the ultimate air-cooled Porsche 911 under their brand Type 99 Machines. Dmitry says they’ve leveraged just about every manufacturing technique under the sun to create its first prototype vehicle, which at this point has propelled Jeff Zwart to the summit of Pikes Peak.
It's easy for anyone to fall into the trap of waxing on lyrically, for better or for worse, about Porsche, racing, or the ever-growing resto-mod market share. But this time, its a case study to prove metal 3D printing isn't imprisoned in a skymall magazine at 36,000 feet. It’s not just theoretical and only possible by bleeding edge conglomerates. These are real parts, commissioned by California hot-rodders that care about going fast, winning trophies, and creating desire around their brand. For BBi that means turning their visions into something that’s climbing a mountain.
If you take a look at the suspension and engine components of your favorite classic car, you’ll find a plethora of cast aluminum, magnesium, zinc, stainless steel, or maybe a German cocktail featuring all of the above. These often highly sought-after original castings for valve covers, uprights, control arms, and brackets all share one thing in common - once the soot-covered multi-million dollar foundries stop making them, attrition begins. Oftentimes re-creations or aftermarket alternatives are a far-cry from original equipment, driving the price of genuine parts and unmodified low-mileage cars sky-high.
Furthermore, if you’re interested in creating your own parts, whether you’re a hobbyist or a low volume manufacturer, it’s very rare that you’ll have the opportunity to use the same casting or forging technologies featured at the OEM level, as the tooling costs are enormous.
These trends have driven CNC-machined components, often referred to as “billet” parts, into the limelight. If you look under the hood of any low-volume sportscar or supercar, through the pages of a Summit catalog, or at your friend's project that was supposed to take a “couple of weekends”, you’ll undoubtedly see machined parts everywhere.
There’s a catch to all that. Even though demand has driven machining prices down to the what is the equivalent of Nintendo products for custom machined parts, the very nature of resto-mods and automotive design still presents a gap between what traditional machining is capable of, and what’s needed to get people’s visions rolling. What’s needed is the ability to produce any geometry of a solid metal part with zero start-up costs. What’s needed is metal 3D printing.
Just like the stock market, you’re hearing about metal 3D printing in this newspaper because of opportunities that quietly arose decades prior. In fact, metal printing emerged from parallel research in the late 80s and early 90s at the University of Texas, MIT, and Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. Originally developed for aerospace and orthopedic parts, companies raced to develop the most efficient and scalable method of getting small particles of metal to like each-other enough to serve a useful purpose.
If all of this sounds like science-fiction, it’s not. In fact, if you’ve ever TIG or MIG welded, you’re not far off from a metal 3D printer yourself. The difference is scale, and it turns out if you replace bulky leather gloves from harbor freight with a laser aimed with some mirrors, and use ultra-fine metal powder instead of a spool of wire or hand-held rod, you might just have a new way of making solid metal parts on your hands.
In principle, DMLS or “Direct Metal Laser Sintering” works like this; take a metal such as Aluminum or Stainless Steel, and grind it into a fine powder similar to the consistency of flour, with particles just a few times larger than a red blood cell. Then, this powder is laid over-top of a metal plate at the desired layer height, usually ranging from around 0.02mm to 0.06mm in thickness.
After the entire build chamber has been pre-heated to get a head-start on melting the metal powder, a laser ranging from 400-1000W, concentrated into an area the width of a human hair, is aimed via a set of mirror paddles. When this beam hits the thin film of metal powder, it creates a small weld-puddle about 0.1mm across. The laser is effectively drawing the solid part into the powder bed. Once complete, the build plate is dropped down, more powder is deposited at the same thickness, and the laser proceeds to draw the second layer, fusing the layers together in the process.
Slowly and quietly, after 16 hours and fifteen-thousand layers melting millions of particles together, the aluminum suspension pickup point for Type 99’s Evo is ready for installation.
Aside from the sparse supports used to keep the crazy shapes in check on the build-plate, the only material that was used is just that which is in the part. All of the other powder is recycled, and ready for the next print. No casting foundry, no soot, no tooling, no forge, no dies, no CNC mill, no clamps, no forklifts, no molds, just the part you need. Dmitry from BBi is extremely familiar with CNC machining, having run the production of Porsche upgrades for years at BBi. In comparison to the hundreds of pounds of chips created during traditional machining, he says “..there’s a certain elegance to using printing, because it only uses the material that you need rather than cutting away everything you don’t need”.
While myself and hot-rodding friends alike have turned to metal printing to overcome the constraints of machining, Type 99’s Evo demonstrates the sheer depth of it’s use cases. From the grafted-in suspension pickup points which allow the 90s Porsche unibody to accept the double-wishbone suspension from the 992 generation, to the entirely 3D-printed inconel exhaust headers, these aren’t trinkets, these are the fundamental bones of a true race
There are of course many applications which still rely on conventional machining, though. Anyone who’s fabricated with sheet metal or created structural billet parts knows that there’s a difference between welded metal and solid sheet or stock. The same is true for metal sintered parts, and Dmitry identifies that, “it’s not like 3D printing came, and a bunch of other stuff stopped working… you should use it responsibly and do it in a smart way, whatever the application.” These differences in strength are why parts like the one-piece bracing under the Type99 Evo are machined from a solid block of Aluminum.
Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Mclaren, and of course Czinger are just some of the niche car manufacturers which are applying this technology directly into their manufacturing and assembly for 2026 model-year vehicles. As this technology is
made more available and trickles down into restoration shops and the aftermarket, it’s easy to see how metal 3D printing will revolutionize the production, and re-production, of car parts for the current and classic marques we love.
Next time you’re trying to recreate a metal component for your classic car, or designing your own to create a new breed entirely, remember that metal 3D printing isn’t just the future, it’s a revolution going on right now. And if you’re the air-cooled Porsche 911, well, this paradigm shift owes you a do-over, and we’re excited to look through the fire-breathing time machine that BBi and Type 99 Machines are working on.
