Just finished reading Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. He makes a very compelling case that this is the next major game changer. Makerspaces/hackerspaces are now prevalent. I seems nearly every major city has at least one now. I agree that it is comparable to PCs in the late 70’s. Mostly hobbyists and a few commercial firms. I would say that they are common enough that one is probably closer to you than you might think. Makerspaces generally have open houses where you can see one in action.
A 3-D printer has been on my wishlist for a while now since I read about the RepRap. (I have not had the time or space to assemble one yet - hoping to have both this fall.)
Also Hypno-Toad, those companies already exist. There are also firms such Shapeways that will print for you. Send them the file and other specs and it will be at your door in just a few days. I can see something similar opening at a mall - bring in a design or object to be scanned, and they will have it ready the next day, or possibly by the time you finish your other shopping.
I think the first major uses will be to repair toys, or make accessories - Anderson writes about making furniture for his kids’ dollhouse. I can see my nephews designing new “hot wheels” and printing them. I expect to see at least one in most high schools by the end of the decade, and in most machine shops by then also.
The most common material is ABS - i.e. what Lego bricks are made from. So I would say fairly durable under normal wear and tear for most objects. As the tech improves and costs come down, I would expect to see metal sintering as a standard option.
What this will do for design and manufacturing is the open question. Will it recreate the chaos of music file-sharing, or remain a hobbyist tool? Anderson predicts it will find its niche in batch processing. Traditional manufacturing is great for large-scale production runs. This opens up markets for small batch runs (100 to 10,000) and for artisans such as Etsy sellers. It creates a great opportunity for hyper customization.
I can also see it become the next major appliance/shop tool. Put one in the garage and build whatever on the weekends. Break a dish? Print a replacement. Break your cell phone case? Print a new one. Want to make a gift for a friend? Go for it. Add a way for users to recycle materials such as tin cans or soda bottles and whole new economies come into play.
I’m looking forward to seeing what how it develops.
You need two 3D printers. It’s like this… when a mommy 3D printer and a daddy 3D printer love each other very much, they have a very special way of hugging…
It’s behind a paywall, but search for it if you can: Koten, John. “A Revolution in the Making.” The Wall Street Journal 11 June 2013: R1. Print.
The article has some statistics that directly answer the (few month old) OP. Roughly 0.1% of U.S. manufactured products are manufactured using 3-D printing. So in the manufacturing industry it is still quite limited. That’s one reason people are starting to get really excited about it, if it’s only used in 1/10th of a percent now, then even if it’s only used in 5% of manufactured products 5-10 years from now that’s still a 50-fold increase from today.
Importantly if you put your money in the right company poised to take advantage of that growth, the dream is it could be like the next internet bubble. (I personally think AutoDesk will reap significantly from it, but they are too established to have 1990s style internet growth as a likely outcome these days.)
Keep in mind, printing a working firearm that can handle the stresses of actually being fired is a lot different than printing a gun-shaped block of epoxy resin. I think we are still a bit off from the former. At least to the point where it would be more convenient simply to go out and acquire an actual firearm.
That actually applies to most mechanical parts. Engines, turbines, pumps, motors and other working mechanisms have parts that are under extreme stress and temperatures. I don’t think current 3D printers can make a replacement part for your car’s drive shaft any more than you could whittle one out of balsa wood.
Exactly. 3d printing is one of those technologies with the potential to shape our lifestyles as much as the car did. Once one can have a huge variety of items made in situ, why go out for them? I can easily see consumers choosing inferior products just for the instant gratification provided by home fabrication.
Who knows, in 50 years our standard home furnishings may include an all-purpose internet system and a home fabricator. Bio-printers may even make it possible to create the meals we want. It’s sort of disconcerting, but imagine that instead of using a bio-printer to make a new heart for an ailing patient, one could use it to print out the best prime-rib ever.
Many of the structural parts on my 3D printer were 3D-printed. Many parts such as the motors, electronics, belts and bearings, wiring, etc, can’t be printed yet, but the bulk structural elements can be and often are 3D-printed. There are people in the RepRap project working on ways to print motors and beaings, but at the moment that’s mostly a theoretical project as those parts can be gotten off-the-shelf easily enough that there’s not much reason to print them.
Which model are they? If they’re the Makerbot Cupcake or Thing-o-matic, I’m not surprised. Those things are pieces of junk. We have a Thing-o-matic at the office, and even after extensive modification it still only works properly about half the time. The Makerbot Replicator is supposed to be a better design, with a lot of the bad engineering on the earlier models corrected.
CNC machines and 3D printers are barely in the same category of machine right now. 3D printers absolutely have their place, but most can’t even print in metal, and the ones that do use (weak) sintering (there is a technique for increasing the strength, but it involves molten bronze). When I can print out an object in solid titanium with <0.0005" tolerances, then CNC will be obsolete.
Looking at the pictures it seems to have the front panel thing of a Replicator. (I don’t actually work with them at all, somebody in Technology was just showing them to me. Made me a little kitty cat.)
