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What's Holding Back 3-D Printing
An anonymous reader writes "An article at MIT's Technology Review makes the case that the complexity of the design tools behind 3-D printing are what's holding it back from widespread adoption. Many of the devices are indeed prohibitively expensive, but the inability for your average person — or even your average tech hobbyist — to pick it up and start experimenting is an even bigger obstacle. 'That means software innovation could be more important to 3-D printing than gradual improvements in the underlying technology for shaping objects. That technology is already 30 years old and is widely used in industry to create prototypes, molds, and, in some cases, parts for airplanes. ... Although additive manufacturing allows for designs that can't be made easily in any other way — such as complex shapes with internal cavities — so far, companies have mostly used 3-D printing to create prototypes or models of familiar products.'"
What's holding back 3D printing is that the companies making the machines are either rinky-dink startups who make machines for hobbyists or they are 3D printing specialty companies that make very expensive industrial machines. When a consumer products company like HP (remember what they did with laser and ink-jet printers), or one of the Japanese camera companies gets into the business and mass produces machines that are easy to use, reliable, and cheap, they will start showing up everywhere.
With regards to manufacturing, 3D printers are slow. If you want a plastic doo-dad you wait for anywhere from several minutes to several hours for it to finish printing. So if you need a million plastic doo-dads, a 3D printer doesn't look like the way to make them. But just imagine there are a million identical, reliable, easy to operate HP or Canon 3D printers out there, all networked together. Now if someone needed a million plastic doo-dads they could be produced overnight by putting all those machines to work on them (we'll look at the distribution problem later) at the same time.
So how do you get people/companies to buy 3D printers and put it in their homes/workplaces? By offering a way for the machine to pay for itself by allowing it to be used by other for mass production purposes. You buy a printer for $1K, and allow it to print other people's stuff for $ when you're not using it. Maybe the company that makes the machines leases time on the machine to you and puts the machine in your home for free.
How do those 1 million doo-dads get where they need to go? The data that is sent to your machine for 3D print is also sent with a 2D printable shipping label to affix to the envelope/box, and a pickup is automatically scheduled. Yeah, I know it doesn't sound very "green"- thousands of guys in brown pants picking up parts at a million locations. It's not. But neither is any other way of making a million plastic doo-dads in short order, yet they get made all the time.