Beehive Is Building 8,000 3D-Printed Drone Engines a Year

From Prototype to Production Line

Beehive Industries has spent two years convincing the US Air Force that a 3D-printed jet engine can fly. Now the Denver company is trying to prove something harder: that it can build them by the thousands.

Since April, Beehive has stacked up a $29.7 million Air Force contract for its Frenzy 8 engine, a $50 million order for 30 EOS metal printers, two acquired Ohio machine shops, and a $70 million expansion in Southwest Ohio promised to add more than 200 jobs. Read together, those moves are not a buying spree. They are the skeleton of a complete manufacturing system built around additive metal printing.

Why Print the Engine

Frenzy 8 makes about 200 pounds of thrust and weighs little enough to sit in a swarm drone or an expendable decoy. Beehive did not take a conventional turbine and figure out how to print it. The engine was designed from the start to be additively manufactured, which let the team collapse many cast and forged parts into fewer printed builds.

That is the pitch for affordable mass. Traditional engine programs lean on specialized castings, forgings, tooling, and a web of qualified suppliers. Beehive wants to cut that chain down. The bet is speed: fewer dependencies means a part can go from file to finished hardware without waiting on a foundry.

The Machining Problem Nobody Mentions

Metal printing gets the headlines, but Beehive spent real money on the boring part. Its acquisition of Able Tool and Planet Products in the Cincinnati area brings more than 120 years of precision machining, and the company is frank that printed aerospace parts rarely leave the build chamber ready to install.

Surfaces need finishing. Holes, seals, and interfaces need machining. Parts get cut off build plates, heat treated, inspected, and documented. At the volumes Beehive is talking about, control of those downstream steps matters as much as access to printers.

Bigger Printers, Bigger Ambitions

The EOS M4 ONYX machines, six lasers each with automated powder handling, are the workhorses for engine production. But Beehive also ordered ultra-large-format NXG 600E printers from Nikon SLM Solutions, with build volumes tall enough to print whole vehicle bodies and satellite substructures.

That hints the company does not want to be only an engine shop. Those large printers could take contract work from space and defense customers who need domestic access to big metal additive capacity, and keep the expensive fleet busy while Frenzy ramps.

The Real Test Starts Now

Beehive says its target is more than 8,000 engines a year. That number is a goal, not a demonstrated rate, and the hard part is operational: install and qualify machines, merge acquired businesses, hire skilled staff, and repeat the build at the promised cost.

Additive manufacturing has spent a decade proving it can make a brilliant turbine part. Beehive is the latest and best-funded attempt to prove it can make eight thousand of them. If it works, the playbook gets copied fast.