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RAF Fighter Flies On Printed Parts
Rambo Tribble writes "In what is being touted as a milestone, Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 fighter jets have flown with 3-D printed parts. The announcement came from defense company BAE Systems, and it depicts the program as a model for cost-saving. From the article: 'The parts include protective covers for cockpit radios and guards for power take-off shafts. It is hoped the technology could cut the RAF's maintenance and service bill by over £1.2m over the next four years.'"
... but we're only free from the contractors if we specify that we need the CAD files for the individual components as part of the initial production contract.
On demand part printing is very cool, but it's kind of a yawn until they fly an entirely 3D printed plane.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Without automation, the average car would cost more than a million dollars, just getting the people in who can repeatedly file a part down to the tolerances needed. That new iPhone would cost thousands, if not able to be made at all (good luck soldering the BGA chips.)
Automation is a fact of life, and jobs change. When I was a teenager, I loved the job of running around with a hard disk for reimaging machines... but that has been replaced by PXE booting. Life goes on.
The more automation the better. It benefits us all, other than the people with the dead-end work.
I heard someone refer to a Lathe as a 3D printer... and my dentist proudly told me that he got a 3D printer for teeth, then showed me his CNC milling machine.
I am just waiting for the swiss army knife "3D printer" pocket knife that allows you to "manually 3D print with Cellulose media"
The main cost here is spare parts storage - something you need to have anyway. Replacting some storage space with a very expencive 3D printer (you really thought they want to use a 300$ one? think again) makes no sense, you get lower quality parts and making them takes longer than it would take for you to get the parts from storage.
The military is considering the logistics of access to storage in a battle. It may be considerably cheaper to take a 3D printer and some material to the front than backups of all your parts. I recall reading somewhere that warships tended to carry 3 replacement parts for everything. Since you never know what's going to break you have to carry much more than necessary. A 3D printer should require much less mass and storage since you only need material for the things that actually break, instead of material for everything that might break. The costs of moving backup lenses in hundreds of styles around a battlefield may make 3D printing them more economically viable.