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3D Printing in Stone, or Copy a Sculpture in Rock
An anonymous reader writes "With all this design
your own parts and electronics
talk lately here on /., what about creating your own stone sculpture on
a PC or Copying a Stone Sculpture? You can do that with an outfit
called Studio Roc in CA. The New York Times has an
interesting article on this marriage of CAD, laser scanning, and rocks. 'Using a huge
Italian-made Omag Mill5 five-axis milling machine equipped with a
scanner and 30 interchangeable diamond-tipped bits and blades, the
Mill5 can record nearly any object in minutes and carve a duplicate in
any stone in a few hours.'"
Oh, this is nice, especially for restoring old buildings. If an artist can recreate a plaster mold, they can get a stone copy. That could save a lot of time in restoration.
This could also have potential in restoring wood carvings, assuming the machine can mill wood.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Say that to the poor sap thats gotta buy it for an engagement ring...
The Stone Masson Association of America will not stand for such a thing. They will soon lobby for a DMCA-like legislation to outlaw progress like this.
You joke about this, but this is exactly what happened with industries in the past - laws have been passed so that people can continue profitting from them when new technologies have threatened people's livelyhoods.
Consider - once upon a time, if you were a story teller, the way you would make more money was by visiting towns and telling your stories, and people would pay you for them, presumably the better ones would get a bigger audience and so earn more. But you wouldn't get rich by it. Then the printing press came along, which had the potential to rob storytellers of their livelyhood. So we made laws such that the original storyteller could make money on every copy of his work sold.
Similarly, if you were a musician a few hundred years ago, the only way you could make money was by playing live. Then recorded music came along - this had the potential to rob musicians of their income - they were now only needed to play the music once, and the a recording to be listened to again and again. So again, laws were made so that musicians could maintain their income.
In the past, artists and composers were comissioned by weathly people to do original artworks for them. Now they can profit from reproductions of their works, so they don't need the wealthy patrons. But only because we have made laws that allow that.
"The comments this is getting suggest to me that too many people nowadays don't have a clue about manufacturing - and we in the West will surely regret this one day."
Why will we regret having no manufacturing skills?
After all, none of the highly-skilled manufacturing *jobs* will be *here* anyhow.
This whole idea is obsolete before it's really got going. If you want a stone replica of something, outsource the stone-cutting to China or Bangladesh. It's not only cheaper and quicker, it's probably more accurate (if you RTFA in the NY Times, you'll see that the machine's carvings need to be hand-finished).