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Nanoscale Race Car Gets 3D Printed With a Laser
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have managed to perfect 3D printing at the nanoscale. What may look like a grain of sand to the human eye could in fact be a detailed racing car model, a reproduction of a famous church, or London Bridge. The 3D printer relies on a laser beam directed by mirrors through a liquid resin onto a surface. It can print at 5 meters per second, which is a world record, and the end result is only a few hundred nanometers in size. The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs."
The ONLY reason I clicked on this link and went to see the story is that I thought it was a real race car printed on a 3d printer with a laser. I didn't even care to see the shark that the laser was attached to. /. tricked me at looking into TFA and I find it abhorrent, absolutely unacceptable behaviour on the part of /. - tricking people to click on TFA link.
Oh, it's not a real car, did I mention that?
Nano car. Crap.
You can't handle the truth.
It's like they made a little car!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Nano-scale 3D printers don't come cheap, and there's a lot of space on the car to cover.
Sure, it'll make Jimmie Johnson go on for an hour as he lists the sponsors on his Eyelashes, but it's not like you had a race to watch.
I was hoping maybe the printer was also tiny. I live in a tiny apartment and a nano scale printer would be awesome. I'd love to have a 3d printer at home, but so far they all seem to be big counter hogs.
I've been doing this for years but you don't see me bragging.
It's stretching it a bit to call it nano-scale. The legend on the images puts the models in the region of 100um. 0.1mm is not really nano-scale, unless the hair on our head is nano-scale. With around 200 lines per layer, we're still talking about hundreds of nanometers for the print resolution.
small is not nano, regardless of how much SEO you're after
It prints at micro scale. Willard Wigen is unimpressed.
That's a lot faster than my old black and white laser which could only print at (3,17,-4) inches / hour!
Grey goo here we cum
.. if the printer prints a tiny nanoscale printer!
WHO IS LAUGHING NOW, FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE?
Why make a tiny car when they could have actually printed the world's tiniest violin?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs.
Seriously? SERIOUSLY? You must fantasize at night about drawing retarded conclusions. How about this. The next step for NASA should be to invent a hyperdrive so that we can go to the edge of the solar system and gather gold and other useful minerals. Yeah. Because 3D printing of your so-called "bio materials" with a laser is just so feasible that we can consider it our next "hurdle." If you can manage to culture enough specialized cells to....wow, I'm not even going to bother. Herp a derp, dude.
They are solving the same problems I solved in the '80 with high precision laser control. Laser shows high speed AND high accuracy, they probably could have bought the computer scanning controls off the shelf for a couple of grand.
so it printed in like, a serious fraction of a second?
I wonder if it will be possible to make the printed resin conductive? Or even better variably conductive.
reproduction of a famous church, or London Bridge.
It's TOWER BRIDGE. ffs. You can tell by the, um, towers.
How about we start referring to your landmarks as the Statue of Eiffel, or The Silver Gate Bridge, or the Quite Big Canyon?
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Current 3D printers have a resolution limit on the order of 0.2 mm. If this can be improved by even one order of magnitude, you're getting to the point where objects look perfect to the naked eye.