Once a year, we open up our parking lot and our doors to the Arizona Technology community and ask our customers, partners, and employees to join us and celebrate engineering and manufacturing at our annual Nerdtoberfest. This year, we combined the biggest engineering party in Phoenix with our quinquennial anniversary celebration to make it even bigger and better! And it was.
Here are some stats:
- Number of people registered: 576 people
- Number of hotdogs/sausages/brautwurst consumed: 630
- Pretzels twisted and distributed: 270
- Stations visited by attendees: 7
- Engineering Jeopardy Games Played: 1
You can skip right ahead to the slide show below to get a look at what went on.
The event started at 4:00 pm, and the caterer we have used for several years now, AZ Barbeque Catering, had their grill fired up and slinged dogs right away. PADT employees managing our makeshift bar were handing out water, soda, beer, wine, and seltzer on ice as soon as the crowd gathered because it was a not-too-bad 95f at the start.
A New Addition: the Arizona Manufacturing Pavilion
This year we invited 11 manufacturing companies to join us at Nerdtoberfest. We started this event back in 2017 to celebrate Manufacturing Month in Arizona. Since we were celebrating our 30th Anniversary as the region’s leader in additive manufacturing, we wanted other companies who make stuff to come join us. We were lucky enough to be joined by:
Look for this feature to grow in 2025 as PADT partners with the AZ Tech Council, AZ MEP, and other organizations to make the “Arizona Manufacturing Pavillion” its own destination event.
Getting to Know What PADT Does
Even if you are one of our customers, it’s sometimes hard to get the full breadth and depth of the products and services that PADT offers. Nerdtoberfest is a great way to not just walk into the building where our Phoenix employees work; it is a time to touch the parts we design, pick up the objects we 3D Print, and see demonstrations of the software we use, sell, and support. This year’s stations featured:
- The Stratasys Demo Room – All of the latest Stereolithography (SLA), Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), PolyJet, and Programmable PhotoPolymerization (P3) technologies from the leader in Additive Manufacturing.
- EOS & Metal 3D Printing Overview and Examples – PADT’s partner and leading provider of metal AM systems, EOS, joined us for Nerdtoberfest to give a great overview of the process, materials, and advantages of 3D printing for metal components.
- Fancy Physics Modeling with our Simulation Services Team – We get to build simulation models of a huge variety of parts, and we showed off some of our favorites, including Ansys LS-Dyna simulations of impacts and crashes.
- The Product Development Lab – PADT’s product development team gets to work with companies to realize their innovation by designing and prototyping their products. And it all comes together in PATD’s PD Lab. This was also the site of a fun game of Engineering Jeopardy – “Simulation for $800, Alex”
- Cool Parts from 3D Printing Services – Our 3D printing team from the 3D Printing Factory, our team that prints parts for other people, had some of their favorite parts on display and answered a pile of questions about the different processes and materials we offer and why, in a very crowded market, companies come to PADT for their additive manufacturing needs.
- Digital Scanning and Reverse Engineering – The scanning table had parts, lasers, fancy lights, and high-end cameras that our scanning team uses to optically create computer models of hardware in the real world. We also are a partner with ZEISS #handsonmetrology, and this station gave customers a chance to see how easy it would be to bring this technology in-house.
- Ansys and Flownex Simulation Solutions – This small station showed off the expertise of PADT’s biggest team, which is the one that most customers interact with, our simulation sales and support team. Our engineers showed off the 1-D Thermal-Fluid simulation tool, Flownex, and several of the simulation tools from Ansys.
- Partner Row: Oryx Additive + True Turn + ASU Advanced Manufacturing – We were also lucky enough to be joined by three organizations we work very closely with:
- Oryx Additive is a spinoff of PADT, and the world’s leading provider of support removal equipment for polymer 3D Printing.
- True Turn is a customer who worked with PADT to design and manage the manufacturing of their golf fitness product.
- ASU Advanced Manufacturing is our term for the professors and students at the ASU Polytechnic campus who work in multiple ways with PADT to make breakthroughs in advanced digital manufacturing.
30 Years of Making Innovation Work – The 30th Anniversary
We also gathered this year to celebrate a milestone birthday for PADT, our 30th Anniversary. To do that, we had cake (of course), but some of our partners also came and said some kind words. The funny and energetic Forbes Shannon was gracious enough to provide his excellent hosting skills to walk us through some touching speeches from our great partners:
- Dan Brown – Honeywell Aerospace
- Steve Zylstra – AZ Tech Council
- Sandra Watson – Arizona Commerce Authority (letter)
- Joan Koerber-Walker – AZBio
- Zak Holman – ASU Vice Dean of Research and Innovation, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering
- Greg Barr – Phoenix Business Journal
- David Garafano – AZ MEP
- Shezad Nilamdeen, Ansys A&D Global Technical Accounts
- Robert McGloughlin – Stratasys Regional Sales Manager (former)
- Nic Neath – EOS Sales Manager
But Mostly, It Was About the People
An anniversary celebration is a great time to look back and reflect. A big party with over 500 people showing up and talking and laughing and connecting. It was a chance for our employees to show what they do to their friends and family, to get to know their customers a little better, and a chance to hang with each other. There was an energy that was hard to describe, an energy that only comes from being around smart, caring, and enthusiastic people.
We will do it again (minus the anniversary cake) next year in October, so make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter so you get an invitation.
Here are just some of the great images that capture a small part of the evening:
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