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3D printing could reduce raw material needs by 90%
- nickpinkston 16y agoGood to see the Economist covering 3D printing - it's still amazing to me how much most people, even close to manufacturing, aren't familiar with it at all. FWIW though - the 90% they're referring to is the delta between machining solid parts and printing them. It should be added that this is a rare use-case for 3D printing. Usually it competes more directly with injection molding technologies that often have better material usage because there is no need for support material - which goes to waste holding up the hollow areas for the types of material-saving lattice structures they're talking about. Sometimes you can get great savings, but 3D printing isn't a production materials panacea. Let's not even get into how to recycle composite materials (very energy intensive) and photopolymers (you can't).
- tintin 16y agoWell I'm not sure you could say the same for this example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHgszH0aqI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwHgszH0aqI (printing a working flute, multiple plastics at the same time).
- bobds 16y agoAs far as recycling goes, it's very exciting that you can recycle plastic bottles into plastic granules/filament and use them for printing. I think we are not that far away from a self contained fabricator that turns garbage into everyday plastic parts you need.
- chadgeidel 16y agoIt's probably going to take a little more than that, but I've always held that landfills are probably going to be very valuable property in 50 years or so. I assume there are going to be "dis-assemblers" to consume and separate "junk" for repurposing in manufacturing. It's a little dream I have. :-)
- patrickk 16y agoYour vision is like a scene out of Wall-E!
- Kliment 16y agoWell, that's not entirely true. The lattice structures are internal to the object, and substitute for solid infill. Commercial FDM 3d printers use a crosshatch instead of solid fill, and the reprap toolchain has that as well as a number of cool ones like hexagonal infill. So you have lattices instead of solid walls in the microstructure. With powder printers, such as the metal printers described in the article, you can form hollow areas of any shape since the raw material itself acts as support. To get the material out they need to be open on one side, but that is hardly an issue with a design that airy. No additional material is needed. The only case where you need support is for FDM based printing with sharp overhangs. Even this can be mitigated with clever design, such as making overhanging parts with bridges (connecting walls with a stretched layer of material that spans a gap) or teardrops (closing gaps using low overhang structures, like the buttresses on gothic buildings). The main advantage of 3d printing is that it can produce structures internal to the object that cannot be made by any subtractive method, and that it makes production costs linear and design-independent. This is very cool, since it literally costs the same to make two identical or two different objects (with the same build time) and it separates cost from volume. The costs per unit are still high compared to injection or casting, but the tooling costs are essentially zero. And the costs per unit are dropping rapidly, particularly given that the FDM printers themselves are now partially self-replicating It's a very exciting time to be living in. I have three printers. The first printed the second. The second printed the third. I've made a number of things which turned from idea to design to prototype within hours to days. Then I tweak, hit print again and I've got production. No tooling, no waiting.
- podperson 16y agoI was a bit curious about the 90% figure, but a good deal depends on what point in the adoption process we're talking about, e.g. Use 3D printing instead of milling or whatever for prototype. Use 3D printing instead of whatever for mass production. Use 3D printing at point of use. Simple example: I bought a porcelain teapot a few weeks ago. A few days later we broke the lid. So I bought a new teapot. (The old teapot with the broken lid is sitting on a window sill above the kitchen sink, waiting for glue. A tube of glue costs a substantial fraction of the price of the teapot.) 3D printing could eventually lead to a tectonic shift away from planned obsolescence and disposable culture (which, let's face it, is purely an artifact of mass production).
- nickpinkston 16y agoYea, I'm very much with you. Our goal (at my startup CloudFab) is that by making things for ourselves - or at least closer to what we want - that it'll mean less marketing driven consumer culture and people will want to keep their self-designed goods. FYI - we can print in ceramics now - so that lid is replaceable if you've got a file ;-)
- jobeyonekenobi 16y agoFor me, the point of interest comes from locking down a blueprint distribution model. Everyone can print certain items depending on their access to raw materials/power/specification of fab, but depending on how much they pay for the 'blueprints' will be the difference between generic and premium branding with every tiny difference in between.
- marshray 16y agoWhy would someone pay more for "premium branding" on something they print on their own machine? Granted I don't understand why people pay more for branded clothes either.
- wmf 16y agoThe point of premium branding is in fact to prove that you can afford to pay more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
- iwwr 16y agoThe cheapest professional machines run into $50K unit prices. A RepRap will set you back under $1K, but it's not very useful at the moment.
- StavrosK 16y agoWhy not? What are the differences?
- steveklabnik 16y agoGenerally, those from the engineering community sneer at the MakerBot and the RepRap. Just listen for the word "tolerances." Now, they're totally right: the home printers have a significantly lower resolution than the professional ones. But unless you're making professional grade parts, you probably don't care, and they use the same materials. (I'm assuming you're making the comparison to other FDM machines.)
- tomjen3 16y agoAssuming the tolerances for the cheap 3D printers will improve, isn't this a classic case of disruption we are seeing here? Sure they aren't great enough for everything yet, but there has to be things you can create even with the cheap bots that are good enough to be useful.
- steveklabnik 16y agoOh yeah, totally, on both counts.
- StavrosK 16y agoAh, that makes sense. However, it sounds very good for the price.
- steveklabnik 16y agoOh totally. It's like the state of the art in the 80s, or something. And they're rapidly improving. I'm excited to see what happens as the patents in this space expire. I'm expecting it to be similar to what happened with steam engines.
- yxhuvud 16y agoThis claim seem about as believeable as the claim that computers would create the paperless society.
- steveklabnik 16y agoThe biggest thing that people forget when dreaming about 3D printers is that it doesn't making something from nothing: the materials have to come from somewhere. Even once we get a printer that's easy enough for 'normal' people to use (hard) and a way for them to design the prints that go in the machine (hard) and we make them small and reliable enough that it's acceptable for normal people (hard) you _still_ have to have a big vat of plastic or whatever lying around, and feed it into the machine. We've got a long way to go before 'a printer in every home' is reality, if it ever does. My thoughts: it's like water. A big pipe of raw materials. Just imagine how long that'd take...
- Retric 16y agoReminds me of The Diamond Age aproximate quote "The windows where made of diamond, because as a simple carbon structure it was cheaper than glass".
- rbranson 16y agoI think we are moving away from ownership and towards a more utility/service-oriented society, so I don't think a 3D printer in every home will ever become a reality.
- marshray 16y agoThat's what IBM once thought about computers too.
- rbranson 16y agoI don't think this is comparable. There is a large difference in dynamics between the utilization of a computer and that of a 3D printer. I would argue that IBM was largely right -- the vast majority of consumers do not use their computer in the way in which IBM intentioned to speak, as a calculator or database. Most of this work is performed as a utility and consumed over the Internet. The modern home computer provides something in functionality more resembling the telephone than a calculator. The ONLY purpose of a 3D printer is to produce durable goods. Will there ever be a point at which an average consumer will need such a steady stream of durable goods that a dedicated 3D printer will become a necessity? I don't need even need a home printer or copier really. The few times a year I actually need one, I can walk around the corner to a Kinko's or use the one at work. This also doesn't compare because a printed document is essentially a custom product designed by myself. And despite the prevalence of home printers, it's still vastly cheaper to print documents using mass production techniques. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see this changing, as durable goods are designed by domain experts and the mechanics behind economies of scale would apply even in the 3D printing realm. Continued product convergence and ultimately nano-tech will further obsolete the necessity to have the large number of specialized, one-off durable goods required for the average household.
- pgroves 16y ago>Mr Schmitt says it should be possible for a robot builder to specify what a servo needs to do, rather than how it needs to be made, and send that information to a 3D printer, and for the machine’s software to know how to produce it at a low cost. This is where I will shamelessly plug my startup, DesignByRobots. The overview of the technology is here: http://designbyrobots.com/2011/01/17/first-post/ http://designbyrobots.com/2011/01/17/first-post/
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- pgroves 16y agosorry, server went down. google cache here: http://bit.ly/gPjVr9 http://bit.ly/gPjVr9
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