Additive Manufacturing has established itself in many industrial sectors as a method for making plastic parts. The 3-D printing of metals is on the road to becoming a similar success story. In the newly opened 3-D-Printing Lab for Metals and Structural Materials at the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, Ernst-Mach-Institut, EMI, researchers have investigated how resource- efficient the manufacturing process is when lightweight aluminum components are manufactured using additive methods. They discovered that even marginal reductions in the material and resources used per component yield high cost savings in series manufacturing.