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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."
or does this website have the world's biggest default font size? What is that, 20-point Times Roman? Does this website scream "This website is for old farts" or what?
Sent from my ENIAC
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.
And commiitees PROBLEM STEMS website. Mr. 3e munches the most
Why are we getting excited about something that just makes shapes in one material? Why are people acting like this is a Star Trek replicator?
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
to 3D print a fully functional vacuum tube triode like a 12AU7. You can't. If you can't even 3D print a nasty old low-tech thing like a lowly vacuum tube, what makes you think 3D printing is anything more than a faddish way to make expensive trinkets?
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.
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.
> 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
... home manufactories....
After all the Warhammer gaming, I think I'll be calling mine a Manufactorum.
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.
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.
Heh, a Klein bottle. Cool.
I wonder if that was sent to try to trick the software. Inside?! Outside?!?!?! BOOOM!
Ydco co