Slashdot Mirror
Inside the World's Biggest Consumer 3D Printing Factory
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Much has been made of consumer 3D printers like Makerbot's Replicator and the open-source RepRap. But for those not yet willing to shell out thousands of dollars for their own machine, Shapeways offers 3D printing as a mail-order service. And its new Queens, NY factory is now the biggest production facility for consumer 3D printing in the world. Just one of Shapeways' industrial 3D printers, which use lasers to fuse nylon dust, can print a thousand objects in a day, with far higher resolution than a consumer machine as well as intricate features like interlocking and nested parts. The company hopes to have more than fifty of those printers up and running within a year. And it also offers printing in materials that aren't attainable at home, like gold, silver, ceramic, sandstone and steel."
If I front some capital, can I become the next Shapeways? Do I just buy machines people can't afford, and then print things on those machines, selling them at a markup sufficient to recoup my costs? Or is there something else going on?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I ordered the sintered steel thorn dice set from them for roleplaying games, and I have to say I'm delighted. I'd imagine in about fifty years home manufactories will be about as common as power tool sets are today, although if you want the best quality you'll have to go to larger producers. Mostly they will be used for short term, specialised, low stress, or artistic requirements though, I can't see anyone printing off high end tech like the latest laptop cheaper than it could be bought through regular channels.
Neither the story, the summary, or even your comment, has what most people want to know: how much does their service cost?
How much did your dice cost? Do they charge by the time it takes to print, or the amount of material used?
Better known as 318230.
Okay, what if I submit a design to print a 3D gun (or replacement parts for one)? What about the packaging for, say, a credit card skimmer? How about a timing circuit made entirely out of electrically-conductive plastic (so it doesn't show up on an x-ray scanner)? I can only hope they look at the things being submitted; But I'm reminded of the scene in Batman begins where Alfred says, "Well, we'll have to order a lot of them in order to avoid suspicion." "Oh? How many?" "About ten thousand sir." "Well, at least we'll have spares."
3D printers open up a whole new world for both good and bad applications. If they aren't thinking about this now, they should start -- because someone else is reading this right now and tapping their fingers together saying "myes, myes my pretties..."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
how many cheap do-dad's, gadgets and custom dice the world needs to support this type of operation in any serious capacity
before the MAFIAA turn their attention to these 3D printing outfits.
You've got that exactly backwards. Tea Party people hate government interference and enjoy usenet shootong on weekends. His comments are those of a liberal weenie.
It's Forbes. It's designed for rich old people with poor eyesight.
In a banjs new industry, it's all about marketing, getting market share. Profits come later, after the market stabilizes and you are the market leader. So plan to spend a lot more on marketing than machines at first. Also, three months later, better machines will come out. Buy smart and plan to replace often. Better processes will also be developed, so budget big for research and development so that your process is better than the other guy's.
I see they wear particle filter masks, but it looks like the nylon powder can get all over and be inhaled afterward. Anyone more familiar with the safety of this? I realize by the time it gets to the person who purchased it, it's been cleaned up, more concerned about those working with the machines directly.
I challenge you to use a modern, fully equipped machine shop to machine a fully functional horse. You can't. If you can't even machine old low-tech thing like a horse, what makes you think a machine shop could make anything other than expensive trinkets?
Machining a horse? Are you retarded or just intentionally stupid?
> can print a thousand objects in a day,
>thousand
Wake me when a 3D printer can output something as simple as a pen clip at 600/minute (which is what you get out of a 30 year old press).
For rapid prototyping, yes, this kind of stuff is OK, because there is no demo tooling that winds up being production tooling (as is typical, bleh) and actually saves money. But to tout these kinds of numbers as if they're any meaningful amount of production is just crazy.
Expecting downmods.
--
BMO
I challenge you to use a modern, fully equipped machine shop to machine a fully functional horse.
A horse is not low tech. It's taken 4 billion years of evolution and controlled breeding to make a modern horse.
Reductio ad absurdum
Picking some arbitrary thing from old technology and saying some tool/shop/etc is not capable of making it, does not mean the tool is relegated to making trinkets. Heck, many modern machine shops and production shops would not be capable of making some components of vacuum tubes either. This is not to say that 3D printing won't be dominated by useless trinkets in the near future... just that the original point was really stupid.
And yet, as high tech as a horse is, it cannot make a vacuum tube either. I guess that takes 4 billion+4 years of evolution, controlled breeding, and an engineering degree. I hope the expensive "trinkets" made by horses don't become a fad, despite their inability to make vacuum tubes.
... home manufactories....
After all the Warhammer gaming, I think I'll be calling mine a Manufactorum.
Control + scrolwheel down works in most browsers
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
NPR blogs has been doing this lately too with 20 point sans-serif. It's annoying as hell.
I seriously do believe that they are compensating for people who can't be arsed to adjust minimum font size (or dpi) on their own, or to even tell Windows to "use big fonts."
Look at this. Just look at it.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/
I'm 47. I'm not blind.
--
BMO
Best thing short of owning a Replicator from Star Trek!!!!
I can't wait till you can dump trash into one side of it and get useful objects out of the other side...
The Forbes article plays a video from some cooking show. With a player with no stop button.
There are other 3D printing service providers. Autodesk has a list. Autodesk itself also does some 3D printing as a sideline. They're more interested in selling the CAD tools for designing parts. Their printing service providers are more oriented towards working parts than decorative objects.
Commercial "3D printing" has existed forever, or at least the equivalent ("here's the money, here's the model, make me X number of them"). What technology is used to do it is really quite inconsequential - current 3D printing really doesn't add any value to the process beyond more conventional techniques.
The attractive feature of actual 3D printing is that people can do it themselves. Buy a bag of nylon, load it into the machine, press out all the little play-figures you want from designs pulled from the Internet. Do it properly and, within a few years and instead loading 4 packs of nylon, you could even have them pre-coloured.
You could then literally destroy the toy-making (Lego!), Christmas-ornament-making, sculpture, board-games and other industries overnight if you wanted. That's the *interesting* bit about 3D printing. For years I've been able to supply a company a 3D model and have them make it in whatever materials and even paint it for me. That's never been a problem. Cost has, and the available skill and equipment (like this article - the equipment is specialist and unlikely to be able to be operated by an ordinary person with no training), but not the actual making a model of anything you can design on a computer.
Home 3D printing will drastically reduce the cost of such things, though, drastically reduce the cost of plastic items of all kinds (e.g. board games, role-playing games, Christmas cracker trinkets, even casing for embedded boards, etc.).
And like with 2D printing and 2D scanning, we could all end up with a device in the back-bedroom and just "knock up" a quick copy of, say, a key, or a toy for the kids, or a cup.
The interesting part isn't massive machines in commercial use, it's tiny machines in home use. 50 years ago nobody had a computer, now we all have them (probably several). 50 years ago, nobody could get their books printed without going to a printer, now we can all run off something on a device cheaper than a book costs to buy (if you buy the cheap rubbish). 100 years ago, businesses had to PAY people to wander around London with an accurate watch, calibrated to the Greenwich clock, and would subscribe to a service where that person would come back each week and tell them the time.
Advances in basic, cheap 3D scanning and printing, I'm interested in. Large companies being able to produce McDonald's toys (which have been around for decades), I'm not.
Give a hardware hacker a year and they could knock up a 3D scanner that formed a 3D model on the computer, with coloured textures for the outside "skin". Give them a year and they could knock up a 3D printer that might be able to come close to reproducing that model in plastic, with colourations on the outside approximating those in the model.
Make those devices cheap, reliable, as easy to use as a printer (i.e. not millimetre-vital calibration and building) and of half-decent quality, that you can just place an original model inside and pour nylon powder into and get a copy model out the other end and you'll make a fortune. That's what I class as the modern phrase of "3D printing", not something we could do for the last 30 years on commercial scales.
Waiting not very patiently for the first open source sport aircraft printable kit plane.
It is the default base font size for the modular scale plug in for compass. Changing it would be one line in the config file and then recompiling the css.
Work bio at MMWD
NPR blogs has been doing this lately too with 20 point sans-serif. It's annoying as hell.
I seriously do believe that they are compensating for people who can't be arsed to adjust minimum font size (or dpi) on their own, or to even tell Windows to "use big fonts."
Look at this. Just look at it.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/
I'm 47. I'm not blind.
Oh, God.
That site specifies font sizes in pixels. That's going to look oh-so-readable on 'retina' displays...
CSS was very carefully designed to adapt to the specified needs of the USER. The user knows what size font (s)he finds comfortable to use, and can be presumed to have configured the browser to render normal sized font at that size. Specifying font sizes in absolute sizes - point sizes, millimetres, whatever - breaks that, but at least eight point font should be one tenth of an inch tall on any correctly configured display. Pixel sizes - pixel sizes - are display dependent. No wonder it looks fucking huge on your screen, the designer was probably using a late-model MacBook Pro and it was tiny on his screen...
This is NOT rocket science, guys.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Rich old people don't have poor eyesight, poor old people do. Rich old people can have their cataracts, nearsightedness, age-related farsightedness, and astigmatism completely cured for $15,000, the price of two CrystaLens implant surgeries.
I'm 60 and have one in my left eye, my vision is better than 20/20 at all distances. My eyesight (which used to be incredibly nearsighted as well as age-related farsighted; I had contacts AND reading glasses) is better than most 20 year olds. I now need no corrective lenses at all.
Hooray for technology!
You will be assimilated... if you can afford it.
Maybe Forbes is for poor old people who wish they were rich?
Free Martian Whores!
Meh, Apple has put some smart safeguards in Safari (And Firefox and Chrome have also adapted it) that translates "font-size: 12px;" to 24px. However, as hi-res displays become more commonplace also on Windows PCs, this might becom an issue.
Considering the fact that in the video, nearly all but one (yes, the bikini!) of the shown products is unless junk. Wow a video full of desk weights! Or stuff you buy at sharper image (useless) or spencer gifts.
Is that the future of 3D printing? 3D is cool, but there's way too much creative hype.
Instead of useless apps, we now have useless (possibly throw away) 'stuff' made of nylon. Looks neat, is cool and built precisely thingy's, but in reality a waste of material IMHO.
And yet, as high tech as a horse is, it cannot make a vacuum tube either.
Their evolutionary path specialized them for something very different than us.
Let me know when you can run a quarter-mile in 21 seconds, on dirt, from a standing start. Barefoot.
Heh, a Klein bottle. Cool.
I wonder if that was sent to try to trick the software. Inside?! Outside?!?!?! BOOOM!
Ydco co