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The Explosive Growth of 3D Printing
MojoKid writes "If you've ever attended a World Maker Faire, the first thing that strikes you is how organic the whole scene is. Inventors, creators, and engineers from all walks of life have their gadgets, science projects, and creations on display for all to see. Some of the creations you see on display range from downright amazing to completely bizarre. One of the big attractions, a technology area that has experienced explosive growth, is the land of 3D Printing. MakerBot took the open source RepRap 3D replicator project mainstream back in 2009 with the release of the Cup Cake CNC machine, then came the Thing-o-Matic and then a little bot called Replicator. With each iteration, improvements in process and technology are bringing better, more capable 3D printers to market, from MakerBot's new Replicator 2, to new players in the field like Solidoodle, Up!3D, Ultimaker, and Tinkerines. To watch a 3D printer in action is like witnessing art, science and engineering all working together in glorious unison."
Pity that there is now a bunch of lunatics trying to make printable guns. The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.
-- Cheers!
How long will it take before all the legalese crap breaks loose?
Sooner or later powerful people will want to appropriate this while shielding and litigate the rest of us.
The irony of your low-uid username and this comment is awesome.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The Explosive Growth of 3D Printing
I thought we agreed not to print printable machines that print more printable machines. It's Second Life all over again ... IRL!
My work here is dung.
Or as my French speaking girlfriend suggested: Faire is the French word for "To make" so it could be a play on words?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The 3D printer of today is a lot like the VCR.
In other words pr0n is going to drive the market. Home printing of customized "marital aids" and "massage machines" are going to drive the market. Whichever 3-d printer is first to market with a silicone print head wins. Also lots of size bragging... no one's going to admit a reprap huxley that can only print 5 inch long things (well, more on the diagonal) is "big enough".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So, does anybody care to speculate about the mid/long term distribution/ownership of these things?
I keep seeing the breathless predictions of 'desktop manufacturing, one in every household!'; but I also see that (among the people, friends, family, neighbors needing computer assistance, etc. who I have cause to know about) ownership of inkjets is actually falling, despite the fact that those are nearly free; because it's easier to just upload the pictures to some service that owns a $20k+ printer but will sell you a tiny slice of it for under 10 cents a print. Laser printers are holding the line, so far, among people who push paper.
As a technology, 3d printing is obviously here to stay; but the value proposition of actually owning one, rather than renting a tiny slice of somebody's much classier one over the internet, seem about as mainstream as the economics of owning a high quality large format photo printer or a machine shop. Definitely something that certain professions would lead you to do, and definitely something that a hobbyist would want access to; but not necessarily something that you would seriously consider owning...
One of my favourite Dave Barry quotes: "We should enact an 'e' tax. Government agents would roam the country looking for stores whose names contained any word that ended in an unnecessary 'e,' such as 'shoppe' or 'olde,' and the owners of these stores would be taxed at a flat rate of $50,000 per year per 'e.' We should also consider an additional $50,000 'ye' tax, so that the owner of a store called 'Ye Olde Shoppe' would have to fork over $150,000 a year. In extreme cases, such as 'Ye Olde Barne Shoppe,' the owner would simply be taken outside and shot."
... If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.
I can recommend starting with using a 3D printing service.
Even if you use a commercial printing service, much of the experience of 3D printing is still there, like the design, the anticipation of outcome, etc.
Google for Sculpteo and Shapeways.
They're pretty affordable, and do a lot of the messy work for you.
I had this printed for 90 bucks or so:
https://twitter.com/i/#!/BramStolk/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FJmiojXxJ
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Since all I looked at were completed objects, I can't say anything about how fast they were produced, how reliable or easy to calibrate the printers are, etc. What I mostly looked for were irregularities. In a 3D printed object, the layers are very visible. If you think of a cylinder, you expect the sides to be as smooth as possible, i.e., no protrusions or indentations. The layers should be completely horizontal, no glitches or waviness that make you think the printhead jiggled or anything. If you think of a sphere, the topmost layers should look like perfect concentric circles, and the top shouldn't look like it's about to cave in.
It was insanely crowded in the 3D Printer Pavilion, so once I decided that a vendor's objects were not the best, I moved on. But there were two noteworthy units: Sorry to say, the new Makerbot 2 was a disappointment, given that it's one of the most expensive units at $2800. The objects they had on display were some of the worst. The surprise winner, and the one I'm recommending to a nonprofit children's museum I'm working with that wants to buy one, was the Tinkerines Ditto. It produced the best objects, and at $900 in kit form or $1400 assembled, it was amazing bang for the buck.
Tinkerines is new to the scene, so they don't yet have a dual-nozzle head, nor do they yet support ABS plastic (the necessary heated base is still being developed), only PLA. But for our application, it's perfect. The people were really nice too, despite the crowds and the cacophony in the tent.
(Disclaimer: I have no connection with any vendor except as a customer or with Maker Faire except as an attendee.)
Are full of crap. While such a thing might be possible in the future, current 3D printers just make plastic models. Now that's nice and all, and there's plenty of uses for it (industrial prototyping is a big one) that is far from household manufacturing. They can't work with metal, never mind electronics. You don't just go and print out a cell phone or something.
The only market that might possibly be threatened is the 3D miniatures market. Though I don't know how good they do at colour (all the ones I've encountered are monochromatic) so you might still need to paint things. Aside from that, there is little in the commercial space they threaten. They are extremely cool toys, but little more than that.
In terms of home manufacturing if they gain the ability to work with metal, particularly multiple metals, which would require a major change in how they operate, then they could produce more useful items. If they made metal and plastic parts on a fairly fine scale, they could manufacture many every day items. However unless they could either work on the micro/nano scales that electronics work on, or in some other way make use of it (like be loaded with various kinds of chips to use) their market would still be really limited.
They are nifty for making examples out of a somewhat weak plastic (it isn't super fragile but it isn't high impact) but a universal constructor they are not.
My company makes figurines and toys (primarily) for gaming companies.
With the advent of 3D printing, we can get the 3D resources from the client, print out the model in 3D within a day, with accurate dimensions, colours and precision, make changes, before we send it off to our factories to produce the molds for production.
Previously, each mold would cost around $5k to make, with each change costing hundreds of dollars - significant changes resulting in another $5k to restart the mold.
Cost savings aside, we also save about 6 months development time. The clients love it, because they can see a physical version of their model / figurine instantly; we love it because we can work easily with the client to make changes, and the factories love it because they have a final product and order without months of delays.
It might not help you, but it sure helps us.
Same poster, second point.
There is at least one 3D printing company that I know of that offers 'printing' in brass, bronze and titanium.
They're using a very old and well known technique, the lost wax - but the wax is printed with the 3D printer, and then the metal poured into the mold.
This is not only an amazing evolution on an existing technology, but because the final products aren't built up layer by layer, they're structually equivalent to anything coming out of a foundry.
The ability to print custom tools, gears and moving parts in titanium is incredible.
Remember the Altair 8800. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
The Altair was a pretty primitive and useless computer by today's standards but it was really the first personal computer. Looking at it, you wouldn't have predicted all the ways personal computers have changed our lives.
The 3d printers we have now are primitive and fairly useless. Almost nobody 'needs' one. What about thirty years from now? I'm guessing than many people's lives will be transformed. Many tradespeople will see their industries upended. Old style sign painters had to face competition from unskilled bozos with personal computers and a vinyl cutters. Skills that took a lifetime to learn no longer provided a competitive advantage. The 3d printing revolution promises to be similarly wrenching.
There was a presentation about the genesis of Maker Faire at the Open Hardware Summit last week. The pointed out the French translation of "faire" - and said that it was something that they learned after the fact. FYI.
I have yet to see a low-end 3D printer that works consistently. TechShop has an "Up" and several RepRaps, but it seems to take several tries to make anything, and nobody gets consistently good parts. The machines that work by laying down a strand of ABS from a heated nozzle (which is all the low-end machines) have trouble getting a consistent bond to the previous layer. The temperature at the bonding point is too critical and not well enough controlled.
Somebody should try using some high power laser diodes to heat up the point where the ABS strands are fused. Those aren't expensive up to 2 watts or so. You only need a few watts, focused very tightly on the weld area. Welding is about applying heat to both sides of the joint in the weld area. The heated nozzle approach applies the heat on only one side, the new string approaching the weld. The material being joined to is cold. Of course the bond quality is poor.
The UV-bonded powder machines work fine, but cost about $50K. Laser sintering machines seem to produce good results. The E-beam deposition approach reportedly works very well, but is even more expensive. But ABS through a heated nozzle, not so much.