In 2024, a front-line operator at an additive manufacturing workshop documented three consecutive afternoons of production on metal additive equipment: the recoater blade in the workshop lays each powder layer at roughly two-thirds the thickness of a human hair, about 60 to 70 microns, and a laser fuses the metal powder layer by layer along a preset path into a dense metal lattice; the resulting parts can withstand tens of MPa of pressure. Freshly removed parts are covered in titanium alloy powder as fine as flour and require sandblasting and surface grinding to meet installation surface requirements. The operator once printed a small aviation bracket; preheating, powder spreading and laser scanning took 14 hours in total, but a gap in the workshop's dust-proof door let powder humidity exceed the limit by 0.3 percentage points, causing insufficient interlayer bonding and accumulated internal stress at the bottom that warped the top layers, scrapping an entire batch of titanium powder. Workshop environmental controls require temperature fluctuations of no more than 2 degrees Celsius and no drafts, and personnel must stand in an electrostatic discharge area for half a minute before entering. Hard clumps left on the recoater blade create thin spots in the powder layer that the laser melts through during scanning, with no way to remedy the defect. The workshop replaced the traditional drilled angled holes with threaded plugs in hydraulic valve blocks with additively manufactured internal curved oil passages, reducing pressure loss. For conformal cooling channel inserts printed as a single piece, the channels run equidistant from the part's curved surface, cutting injection-molded part sink marks in half and raising the yield rate by 20 percent. The same operator compared a solid aluminum milled block of the same size with an additive part containing an internal grid-based lightweighting structure: fatigue test life was comparable, while the additive part weighed 40 percent less. However, for solid large parts such as half-ton machine tool bases, additive manufacturing costs four times more than conventional cast steel processing and takes twice as long, so these are still handled by foundries.