If this is the story, it sounds like this is made with selective laser sintering, which looks like it has more freedom of materials than your standard makerbot does.
Staples has announced in-store 3d printing in some of their stores in the Netherlands and Belgium. They’re only using glued paper for now, but if nothing else, this could eventually provide a lot more visibility for this technology.
There have been proposed systems that would use laminated layers of cut metal in this same way. The metal layers would be resistance welded together to make a final product approaching the strength of cast and machined materials.
In one case where printing may rapidly outperform conventional technology is in printing electronic components. In that case the conventional technology is not as simple as casting plastic or metal though.
What’s the point, from a food shortage perspective? Unless you’re talking about gastronomic delights?
Nobody has yet mentioned the cost of supplies for this printer. Also, what are they?
Another question: How often do you have to clean the printer? If it’s pumping glue it seems to me this would be a major problem.
There are many different types of 3D printers, and different technologies have different stock materials and maintenance requirement.
The cheap (sub-$2000) printers that have become very common in the last few years typically use reels of plastic filament, either PLA or ABS. The material costs about $20 a pound, and a pound lasts a fairly long time since most of the objects printed are lightweight and hollow. The feed material is solid and doesn’t become a liquid until it reaches the heated extrusion nozzle. Occasionally the nozzle becomes clogged and needs to be taken apart and cleaned. This happens more often if you buy cheaper feed material from questionable sources that’s had filler added to bulk it out.
I don’t know what maintenance is required for the higher-end printers that work by fusing powders together. I would expect it wouldn’t be much, the ones which work by spraying glue on the material use heads that are very similar to those used by inkjet printers, and the laser sintering machines shouldn’t need much more than an occasional cleaning. I’ve never worked with those types, so I can’t say for sure.
I think 3D printing will be big. We’re at the Model T stage now. The technology will become faster, better and cheaper in the next twenty years or so.
The place that this analogy falls apart is that all 2-D printed end products are producible by both technologies. There’s no such thing as a 2-D image that can’t be made by a printing press. But, as mentioned above, there is a huge class of objects that simply can’t be made with mills, molds, or dies. Objects that are hollow or have a sophisticated internal lattice structure. Design of such objects has been limited so far, since it didn’t make too much sense to design them when they couldn’t be produced (and 3-D printers still aren’t quite there in many respects), so it’s tough to say how much they will out-compete traditional designs. However, objects with internal lattices are generally stronger, lighter, and cheaper (in material cost), which means that 3-D printers might almost entirely displace traditional manufacturing because we’ll end up designing things that just can’t be constructed traditionally.
Hm, that’s a good point. I hadn’t given much thought to such objects because there are so few of them in existence now… But then again, maybe there should be some.