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You are clearly right that the degree of hype depends on where you read the article, but most people don't read the articles aimed at specialists.

One of the progressive trends in manufacturing is that, what was once advanced manufacturing tool chains has radically come down in price and accessibility - i.e. not so much specialists any more. A buddy of mine, a residential general contractor, just build a 3-axis CNC router from of the shelf extrusion and MDX sheets for making cabinet panels. He's a little smarter than the average bear, but only has an associates degree from a community college - but the documentation and online forums were there (community knowledge). I am using the free-tier of Onshape ( https://www.onshape.com/ ), a parametric CAD ecosystem that ten years ago would have cost $30,000 a seat - and almost all their partners have free tiers from advanced simulation and visualization capabilities. Online market places like https://www.shapeways.com/for-... are maturing, with phenomenal delivery models. I'm fairly certain somebody in the auto industry is paying attention to projects like https://www.osvehicle.com/faq/ and there is impetus to nail down markets before they become wide spread. Even the early hype is back filling in, and it is sort of amusing that the really innovative stuff now happening is unmentioned because it simply not sound-bite-able.

That said, you seem to be agreeing with my point that the high quality 3-D printers are designed for specific jobs. The one that prints titanium can't print cement, etc. This means that their utility in space is limited, though there are other places where they can be extremely useful. I agree that it's reasonable that the high quality printers be more expensive, but that *is* a factor limiting some of their uses, so it's not only the limitation in the materials that they can handle, the speed they can print, the resolution they can print at, or the maximum/minimum size they can print...though those are also limitations on any particular printer.

I generally agree with you. But it's the case with ordinary paper printers also :-)

Yes, this is a reasonable trade-off, but it argues against "just ship a 3-D printer with your space ship to make all the spare parts". (Well, the cost isn't a argument against *that* use case, but the rest are.)

To my point about "really innovative stuff now happening is unmentioned", your case is true for current space ship designs.But there is a decade(s) long wrap around effect with manufacturing technology. It is much different when you can design from the ground up, accommodating the capabilities of the tool chain and materials - one big part becomes several smaller parts to fit in the envelope, for instance.

Way back when, a friend of mine (aeronautical engineer) and I had a chance to crawl through a Soviet Mir ground test article ( identical in all aspects to the actual station in orbit ). We started denigrating the seemingly astonishing primitiveness of what we were observing. He paused, and said "Ya know, every thing here can be fixed with ordinary hand tools, all fasteners the same, cabinets had reach room ... I'd feel safer in this knowing I could fix or jury-rig everything!". In other words, they designed for a resilient total life-cycle.

The big lag now, is recycling materials back into feed stock - a totally non-glamorous technological arena, and undeserving of hype! :-)

You seem to be describing Shapeways, aside from the detail of "picking up the piece after work". (They instead want to mail it to you when it's done, and it can take more than a few hours.)

1 to 2 weeks in my experience. It's worked well for me though and I'll be using them again.

You seem to be describing Shapeways, aside from the detail of "picking up the piece after work". (They instead want to mail it to you when it's done, and it can take more than a few hours.)

Someday, a while from now, you'll be able to go to a website, select a cup or a custom statue or whatever, have it 3D printed and delivered to your door for a fairly reasonable, even cheap, price.

You mean something like Shapeways or 3D hubs*?

* they also list commercial/industrial-quality services, not just home owners.

I'm not calculating my time because the parts I make are for personal projects, i.e. it's a hobby.

By definition a tool used for a hobby is also a toy.

What commercial services use FDM? The one I have seen use much more expensive technologies.

One service I called was proud that their Stratasys was able to make 0.25mm layers even though a properly calibrated home-made printer can do 0.10mm layers.

That is kind of strange since the lowest cost Stratsis, the Mojo, can do 0.178mm layers. This also brings up the question of how hard is it to "properly calibrate" and how long does that celebration last? If it takes hours of setup to print one item it is a toy. Sure, if you compare low quality prints done by a hobbyist and the same prints using similar equipment by a service the hobbyist will always be cheaper. You have to pay something for not doing it yourself.
There are quite a few services that use technologies other than FDM. I was referring to companies like Shapeways and Quickparts.

I had the same thought recently. Shapeways offers parts printed in wax for casting. I question the value, though, as shipping may well warp waxy materials. There are also others selling materials intended specifically for lost investment casting. Still others thought to see whether PLA could be used directly for lost investment casting with good results. The author at the second link used foam strips, presumably because it's cheap and fast, which 3d printing generally isn't.

So go ahead and print your barrel (that should be interesting...)

Not really. It's old news by now in fact.

Now, of course, people don't have additive printers using the laser sintred process at home just yet. But I don't see anything fundamentally difficult about getting those to market at a reasonable cost in the future. And neither does the experts aparently.

So, forget the plastic pop-gun crap. "Real" guns are just around the corner. The first are already here.

... please tell me that payload will include a Jeb doll

Methods are improving and materials are improving. As costs continue to drop and more materials become available, look around your home and ask: What objects could be replaced with replicas made of metal, ceramics, even advanced composites of wood or stone. A composite maplewood desk. A custom designed set of steel silverware. Porcelain plates. Ceramic bowls. Iron composite free weights. I have a painting I purchased at an art museum. It would be neat to be able to snap a photo, get home and have a replica suit of armor. Surely this won't cover everything, but certain kinds of objects will simply be available now, whether or not you purchased them directly (simply by having the materials necessary). It will be interesting to see how the market reacts, but in terms of the products that get replaced, to the innovations that build on top of this.

... printing a copy and selling it for $100,000,000 to some very stupid collector who doesn't notice that it is made rather roughly from plastic.

I see your point regarding basic FDM printers, but note that for the right price you can 3-D print in steel, ceramics, wax, and more, or print a mold from which you can cast various other materials, including silver, brass, and bronze.

Get a used mouseman from ebay ($10 and free shipping), throw away the top cover, and 3-d print your own.

Don't own a 3-d printer? Probably one of your friends does, or the local university, or the local hackerspace, or as a last resort you can use shapeways.

Grab some modeling clay in your hand, make a 3-d scan of the resulting "handle", add fasteners for the buttons and ball (or IR chip), then 3-d print a custom-grip top cover. You can get IR mouse elements and ball elements from old mice, usually for free on Craigslist. Or the local Salvation Army store.

Purchase a sheet of friendly plastic (polycaprolactone), soften it in a pan of boiling water, then lay it over your relaxed open hand like a handkerchief. Wait for it to cool and harden, take a dremel to it, and use that as a custom-molded mouse top.

Get an Arduino, or any of the zillions of hobbyist microcontroller systems (pic, propeller, &c) which have a USB interface, and add buttons and an IR chip from an existing older mouse and program the buttons specifically for your needs.

Get a used mouse with lots of buttons, remount the buttons into a custom top as mentioned, then reprogram the button codes in the driver.

Or write your own USB driver at the OS level - it's not that hard. (For windows, it involves downloading the DDK and modifying an example found on the net.)

I have to disagree, there are certain areas where 3D printed items are usefully filling gaps in the market.

One group is model railway people who now have many previously unobtainable items made this way. Interesting the first hackers were model railroaders too ! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

I'm one of the small scale manufacturers who makes his living by selling 3-d printed model trains, both direct to public through Shapeways ( https://www.shapeways.com/shop... ) and reselling things I get printed through eBay and other outlets.

Because there is so little up-front costs involved it's possible to cater for market segments where it would not have been economically viable before and make items profitably that may sell in tens rather than thousands - this is the beauty of 3-d printing.

It's just finding those niches - spare parts for household items is probably another one, it just needs someone to start designing them and then workout some sort of online database so the rest of the world knows how to find them.

Already exists. Next question.

Captcha: mechanic

Well for commodity items - I get your point. However, my personal experience is owning a house that has a really unusual shelf pegs. Unusual in that they are simply not available. I ended up modelling them and using shapeways to print them. What I made is up at https://www.shapeways.com/shop....

The cost, was about $2 per peg - which is about the same cost as low run retail products at home depot.

3D printers will make it affordable for extremely low run prints. For spare parts and out-of-production items it removes a lot of obsolescence.

The 3D printing hype is a little optimistic in ways but there is more to the notion of small scale production than 3D printing. CNC machines are very main stream in industry and the cost is well within the reach of Middle America. The cost of automation is coming down and is much more accessible than it used to be.

I would also like to see a move away from big box stores. It would be nice for a change to be able to walk into a store (camera shop, hardware store, and other more or less specialty stores) and talk to some one that knows what they are talking about.

Unless 3D printers can start molding metals, rubber, paint, and various other base materials then this is a non-issue.

They are already doing this - just not at the 'home' level...

Alumide, Steel, Sterling Silver, Brass, Full Color Sandstone, Ceramics...

http://www.shapeways.com/mater...

Back in the day before digital cameras, I also used to take photos on film, but I didn't have my own darkroom. Same thing.

Yeah. There are third-party lens covers like GlassKap, but there are two problems:
1) They don't match Glass in color. So it keeps the tinfoilhatters (an honestly small but vocal and whiny part of the crowd) happier but to everyone else you look really silly. (Yes, there are some that will say you'll always look silly with Glass - but it looks far sillier with a GlassKap on due to the color mismatch.)
2) Google put the light sensor for the device in the camera hole. So with GlassKap, Glass thinks you're always in a dark room and dims the display. :( (I wish I could get a version of http://www.shapeways.com/model... that didn't have the display shield component - I'd put a translucent cover over the camera hole.)

What if it was 3D printed? ...

Funny you should mention that as someone was selling (somewhat imperfect) replicas on Shapeways

I think this is particularly true because of how little progress has been made on making it easy for end users to design their own pieces that can be fabricated. Realistically, a non-savvy user who owns a 3d printer currently, even if the 3d printer works flawlessly and unattended, is limited to printing out widgets from files they downloaded on the internet. But that particular use-case doesn't provide much reason to have a 3d printer in your home at all. If you're downloading files from an online widget library like Shapeways, you might as well just order the already-synthesized part from them in the first place.

You can't print ceramic (at least not within the next decade). Source: any basic metallurgy class.

Really?

Never made nor purchased anything from the site nor am I affiliated with them in anyway, but shapeways can print in metal. http://www.shapeways.com/materials

I personally have purchased a set of gaming dice 3d printed with stainless steel.

FTFY

It's a small but important distinction. The ability to print stainless steel would be revolutionary, while the ability to powder cast has been around for millennia. A hyped convolution of the mold making process is not going to change much besides the number of shitty knives and dice in pawn shop display cases.

you seem to misunderstand the possibilities with expensive equipment on the market..

http://www.shapeways.com/materials/steel

Apple releases dimensioned drawings for it's portable devices so that accessory manufacturers can create functional products without taking their own tedious measurements. Shapeways, a 3D printing company, ran a contest to make iPhone 5 accessories.

I also wondered, is there any way to know if a design will print out correctly? For example if I designed a pencil balancing on its tip with no supports, does the software, or somebody at shapeways, alert me that I'm being stupid?

Yep... they check your models before they print it and will notify you of problems like that. From their FAQ:

When a product is ordered for the first time a manual check will be done to make sure the object is printable. Now, factors like wall thickness and detail thickness are tested, which sometimes leads to the rejection of the design. Sometimes products for sale (whether it is your own or not) can be uploaded but turn out not to be printable.

Unfortunately, we do not have an automated way of checking every single design rule, which is why we optimize and only do a thorough (manual) check for designs that are ordered, not just designs that are uploaded.

The amount of detail all depends on the material you're printing in. IIRC, some of the metals can be really detailed. They have full details on what the specs are for each material on their website. http://www.shapeways.com/materials/material-options

They charge by the amount of material used, as a simple glance at http://www.shapeways.com/materials would show you.

Eh its all on their site. The steel dice that let me roll like Sauron cost about $12-$15 each, with the expected postage. Those were the most expensive ones though except the gold plated versions, so material used would be the main thing associated with the cost. http://www.shapeways.com/model/126266/thorn-dice-set-with-decader.html

http://www.shapeways.com/

pretty close to that

And just yesterday (and I mean yesterday), a self-proclaimed smart person was telling me that 3D printers would never be able to make anything useful.

How about a bikini

open scad is the bomb for the technically minded.
two nights ago i downloaded it and had produced this parametric model in about 2 hours:
http://www.shapeways.com/model/722830/two-interlocking-cube-grid-things.html

i'm a bit dismayed at the time it takes to compute the meshes sometimes.
for example producing a grid-cube like the above with 10x10x10 cells instead of 3x3x3 would take maybe 6 minutes.

You rang?

I've seen 'cloth' printed to this design; it is somewhat flexible but more akin to chainmail than fabric.

Excuse the blatant advertising, but I for one am actually making a living from making and selling 3-d printed things.

What you may ask? Would you belive model train parts?

  http://www.shapeways.com/shops/tebee?sort=newest

and selling them on the dreaded Ebay too http://stores.ebay.com/tbmod

The RepRap and other low-end 3D printers are toys. I see those things at TechShop all the time, but they're rarely used. All they can do is produce plastic trinkets.

Around $50K, the machines start to get good. Shapeways makes usable plastic parts. What the industry needs is a $2000 machine that really works. There's slow progress in the industry; 30 years ago the high-end machines were as crappy as the RepRap.

All these processes are incredibly slow. As in hours for one small part. It's inherent in laying down a 3D part in thin layers that it will take time. That's why Shapeways charges about $50 for a 1 ounce part. Injection molding is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. This technology is not going to replace mass production.

Yes, enough trees together definitely hold up, this model (one of my favorites) is printed at an even smaller scale, 1 mm/block, and the canopy prints fine. The forest has to be pretty dense, though. The default Mineways print size of 2 mm/block is mostly good enough that normal trees are unlikely to snap off. More info here.

Shapeways has a good materials cost chart (I don't work for Shapeways, by the way, I just use them a fair bit). Cost is all by weight (plus a fixed fee per model), so complexity is free. From what I can tell, their markup for labor doesn't seem to be all that much, maybe 50% above "retail" materials, if you had your own ($70k) color 3D printer? I suspect I'm spending someone's venture capital when I make an order, as their prices seem pretty low all in all.

I found it by chance yesterday, at least it looks good http://www.shapeways.com/model/432614/nanolet-ipod-nano-bracelet.html

Not so elusive...

Nope.

Even the commercial systems used by Shapeways don't have sufficient accuracy.

Here's an old post where I looked up the numbers:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2395582&cid=37191528

The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.

By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top [shapeways.com] ) uses has a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers

If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.

Shapesways is definitely interesting. A mech friend of mine introduced me to it. He created a hdd sled so you can take your hard drive from your old xbox 360 and drop it in the new gen machine (http://www.shapeways.com/model/402108/). It's priced ~$11. Yes, it could probably be produced in mass quantities for $1 each, but that's after a $8K mold. This type of thing is great for long tail type products, but will kill the profitability in doing it traditionally.

There are other devices that use ceramics, metals, or plastics. There are about 30 companies that make some form of additive manufacturing device using different processes like Selective Laser Sintering, Fused Deposition Modeling, and 3D Printing. This is a new industrial revolution that's just getting started. With these devices you can make small production runs cost effective and efficient. Also, these processes produce far less waste, so they use less material and energy.

As for consumer goods, I haven't seen clothing, but there are a lot of interesting items being designed for everyday use on Shapeways.

I've been following Additive Manufacturing since I read the article "Print me a Stradivarius" in the Economist. I expect this to be as significant as the Internet.

I don't know of any premade options; but if you have one of the Model M's with removable keycaps, there are probably enough Model M enthusiasts around that you could CAD up and have printed in laser-sintered, bronze impregnated, stainless steel(not real stainless steel; but similar, and the copper in the bronze probably helps the antibacterial value. If you could get the quantity up, fully stainless steel parts punched out of sheetstock would probably be doable; but that wouldn't be a 'quantity 1' thing...)

This. Absolutely this. It's called "Disruptive Technology" for a reason.

I figure robots and AI skilled enough to take-over low-level administration in everything from Accounts & Payable to Legal Services just proves to me that the current model of...um...what do I call it? Skill Topology? Career Pyramid?...is beginning to show it's age. It's obliquely considered in Iain M. Banks "Culture" novels and in Dan Simmons "Ilium" that I am currently reading: They present societies that are post-scarcity and have every imaginable "job" administered by a far superior AI. The "traditional" 9-to-5, expense account, vacation days job for a corp is totally unviable.

On the other hand, this may inspire a second Arts & Crafts Movement which brings back the small business/small skills trade (a good source of employment too). An AI will never replace the concept of another human making that pair of boots, jewelry or that dress for you. Just look at how succesful a company like Shapeways is.

None of this will happen tomorrow though. Unfortunately - or fortunately - I get to see the very early beginnings involving the birth pangs of a new structure of labour. You just know it deep in your heart, this annoys somebody who has something to lose, and they will hamper every step of it to make sure their millions and their mansions are untouched. But that's true of any age. Somebody just has to hoard the cookies and step on others to do it.

It will be hard to get there.

Look at the Shapeways videos. There's quite a lot of human labor required, and it misses on economies of scale.

I think for a long time it'll be like with printers. Anybody can print an entire book at home if they want to, but getting it to the point where it really looks like a book is difficult and much more expensive than just buying it. Things will only change radically if the cost falls down so much that it's only a small percentage over mass production.

Probably the first change will be towards more customization. You'll still buy say, a computer mouse, but if you want to be really cool you'll print a custom casing for it.

Take a look around this site Mr. Troll:

http://www.shapeways.com/gallery?mg%5Bsearch%5D%5Bcategories%5D=21&mg%5Bsearch%5D%5Bclear%5D

Impressed yet?

The intertubes, at your service!

Not inexpensive; but you pretty much upload mesh+money and get fedexed an object...

Cheaper and better for a number of applications; but somewhat less versatile, are the online machine shop services, which use conventional feedstock materials and machining techniques. You can't do some of the really fancy geometry; but paying $10/cc to have a part laser-sintered when it could be milled, tapped, and finished to your spec in the same time and probably for less money doesn't make a whole lot of sense...

The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.

By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top ) uses as a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers

If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.

Also not that "no moving parts" is not even necessarily true: http://www.shapeways.com/shops/oskarpuzzles

So, can someone explain to me how this is different from a small personal CNC mill? With the obvious exception that this is plastic goo, instead of a block of alloy to start with.

Try to do something like this with a CNC mill.
The image was linked from the shapeways.com site and used only as an example (I'm not endorsing or promoting their services - just been impressed of some 3D printed models I found there).