Buy-to-Fly Ratio: Additive vs Subtractive Manufacturing

Every metal part starts as raw stock, and how much of that stock ends up as scrap is one of the biggest levers in sustainable manufacturing. This simulator renders a mounting bracket as a voxel grid and lets you watch it made two different ways: carved out of a solid rectangular billet on a CNC machine, or printed up layer by layer from metal powder in a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) 3D printer. A lightweighting slider punches larger holes through the bracket's web, a material selector switches between aluminum, titanium and Inconel with their real densities and market prices, and live readouts track the finished part's mass against the raw material you actually had to buy — the buy-to-fly ratio — along with the waste mass and stock cost for each process.