iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

[ProdigyofZen]

was searching iTulip for threads pertaining to 3D printing. Here is what I have found:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/23628-Hey-man-love-your-gun-can-you-print-me-a-copy?highlight=3D+printing
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/25266-3D-Printing-Experience-from-the-Front-Line?highlight=3D+printing
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/24120-3D-Printing-How-Long-till-the-Revolution?highlight=3D+printing

I am wondering what the iTulip consensus is regarding 3D printing and its potential impact on changing manufacturing?

http://www.csc.com/innovation/insigh..._manufacturing

Thank you in advance!

[EJ]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

was searching iTulip for threads pertaining to 3D printing. Here is what I have found:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/23628-Hey-man-love-your-gun-can-you-print-me-a-copy?highlight=3D+printing
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/25266-3D-Printing-Experience-from-the-Front-Line?highlight=3D+printing
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php/24120-3D-Printing-How-Long-till-the-Revolution?highlight=3D+printing

I am wondering what the iTulip consensus is regarding 3D printing and its potential impact on changing manufacturing?

http://www.csc.com/innovation/insigh..._manufacturing

Thank you in advance!

Low cost 3D printers will enable more garage shop inventors to compete with well capitalized manufacturing firms instead of licensing ideas to them and hoping for the best.

I used a 3D printer at a friend's house recently. More precisely, his 9-year-old daughter let me use it; it's hers. Both her parents are MIT grads.

You can't "print a gun" with it as the hysterics claim. You can print parts of prototypes of machines and put them together into working models, thus eliminating iterations in actual production to get a new product fit together.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

I'm still waiting for the mass volume 3d printers before I buy one for my kids.

The Makerbot 3D printers are still pretty expensive for our purpose(kids toy to experiment).

I wonder how fast and drastic the price reduction will be when the likes of HP get in the game?

I'm guessing the inevitability of big players moving into 3D printing is the reason behind the MakerBot acquisition:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellycla...-million-deal/

Back in the 90's working at a Semicon equipment manufacturer I remember the model shop guys acting like it was Christmas when they got a Stereolithography machine.

The first time I saw a prototype part emerge from the goo was like being in a Star Trek episode....pretty cool.

But it was horrendously expensive....low 7 figures IIRC at the time.

While not exactly the same thing, in less than 20 years the price has collapsed 99.9% to achieve some of the same capabilities.

I've also seen a video of a powder based system that created an adjustable wrench strong enough to use(although don't know about long term durability).

I recall plans a LONG time ago with Amazon and on-demand-printing....but after I left I think this went down the track of self-publishing on-demand, rather than high volume on-demand stuff.

I assume the rise of the Kindle/E-book may have helped to quickly kabosh any plans for dispersed on-demand-printing at regional centers around the world closer to the "last mile".

I wonder if there's any genuine scope for production quality goods 3D printed on demand?

Anywho, it's good to see there's been a substantial amount of price democratization for rapid prototyping and the future potential for small volume bespoke finished goods.

I'm thinking that if it helps to inspire and visualize innovation/creativity faster and cheaper, it must be good.

3 years ago I posted about Techshop when I think they were still at only one location in Menlo Park. They've added a fair few locations since(and a few dropped off the map) then.

What's interesting is the speed at which outfits such as this respond so quickly to educational/entrepreneurial opportunities. I don't think you would see MakerBot on a University course syllabus, or even a Community College course list, with the same speed.

http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes....egoryId=17#723

I still hope for some sort of low cost "blue collar business incubator" like a mashup between Techshop and Founders Institute http://fi.co/ to emerge on the far side of this mess.

I don't so much see the next Apple coming out of 3D printing(or Techshop/Founders Institute) as I do heaps of "Apple seeds".

Surely if you plant enough seeds, some will germinate, and a few will grow to bear fruit.

----------
When it comes to my kids, they play with Legos like I did.

Are Legos a bit like old school manual 3D "printing"? Just low DPI and labour intensive?

Is consumer 3D printing like a "Lego Gutenberg"?

[SeanO]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

Low cost 3D printers will enable more garage shop inventors to compete with well capitalized manufacturing firms instead of licensing ideas to them and hoping for the best.

I used a 3D printer at a friend's house recently. More precisely, his 9-year-old daughter let me use it; it's hers. Both her parents are MIT grads.

You can't "print a gun" with it as the hysterics claim. You can print parts of prototypes of machines and put them together into working models, thus eliminating iterations in actual production to get a new product fit together.

Multiple guns have been printed and fired. Here's video of one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3eDSGVsLQU. Still its hardly a practical use for a 3D Printer and you won't find me printing or firing one anytime soon.

I have a Makerbot Replicator. Today's 3D printers remind me of my first Apple II, or accompanying dot matrix printer in the late 70's. No question in my mind that over time 3D printers will play a role almost as important. But lets be clear - the sub $10k variety are more hobby or toy then tool. Printing stuff on "cheap" $2k machines is a pain in the butt. If anything goes wrong during a print you start over - there is no error detection or correction. And if you aren't watching when things go wrong (and they do), the mess is "interesting". And that assumes you are able to design something that can actually be printed.

3D printing is an "additive" process (start with nothing deposit drops of plastic and build something). I actually think subtractive processes are more practical right now and aren't getting the attention they deserve (start with a block of material and cut or carve it into something - CNC mill, router, lathe, waterjet, laser, plasma cutter, etc).

Also, hardware is not the gating factor (at least outside of error detection/correction). Instead we seem to be a VERY long way from putting good 3D design tools into the hands of consumers. Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks and others are awesome tools, but don't expect to learn them in an afternoon (or for that matter a month of afternoons).

I think we've got a 10+ year journey until we see them reach their real potential.

[c1ue]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

The 3D printers are a nice toy, but they aren't a substitute for actual manufacturing.

Sure, everything seems to be made of plastic these days, but the plastic still covers metal structural frames, electronics, and so forth.

Thus while you can print a gun - it is a crappy gun. One which isn't going to shoot well, is dangerous to use, and still requires you to buy the ammo and a few parts.

So unless you're making Legos for a living, or robbing people's houses with 'unduplicatable' keys printed on 3D printers, the devices are useful primarily as toys for wealthy people, tools for artists, and perhaps prototyping machines for inventors and hobbyists.

The key printing:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/mit...-and-entering/

Note that the above is using formulas for specific key brands. A bit of software coupled with a cell phone digital camera could as easily be used to take digital photos of house keys which are then converted into formulas for printing.

A regular person isn't going to get much use out of a plastic key - especially as you'd have paid $1000+ for the printer, but for a thief - that's beautiful. A similar thing could be done with older cars.

A neat 3D artistic toy:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d-printing-pen'


Another use I can see for 3D printers is to offer some competition for replacement plastic paneling. Instead of paying an auto dealer for some plastic cup holder or what not that breaks, you could print one out. The problem is, there will likely be IP issues there.

Similar to the above - the places that offer logo or existing plastics services could use this for faster turnaround. Depending on the cost, plastic packaging services also.

Let's also not forget the business model issues with printers: these days the money is made by making toner/inkjet cartridges expensive.

I don't see any reason why the same won't occur with the 3D printers.

[SeanO]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

The 3D printers are a nice toy, but they aren't a substitute for actual manufacturing.

C1ue - While I agree with you that this is where the technology stands today, your comment is quite reminiscent of my college advisor in the early 80's who told me that personal computers would never be anything more than a toy, and that if I wanted to do well in school and in life I'd be smart to focus on mainframes and ADA. I dropped out and did quite well. He became a dinosaur whose career was only saved by tenure. We're in the very early stages on this.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

Last time I visited a small machine shop with a 3D printer they were making useable parts with it.
It was essentially the old stereolithography wet bath process, with state of the art resin material and controls for the laser.
He uses it to make temporary machine parts like gears or linkages while he machines a permanent replacement from steel.
He told me some of the plastic gears have lasted months and are still going strong.

The new resin is very hard and glassy, and the surface finish is very good right out of the 3D printer.
It still takes all night to make a part the size of a golf ball, these high quality 3D printers still cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the resin is still thousand of dollars a gallon.

I do not see these printers having a radical disruptive effect on traditional manufacturing.
Lathes, milling machines, punch presses, and EDM will likely be around for another hundred years.

[c1ue]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

C1ue - While I agree with you that this is where the technology stands today, your comment is quite reminiscent of my college advisor in the early 80's who told me that personal computers would never be anything more than a toy, and that if I wanted to do well in school and in life I'd be smart to focus on mainframes and ADA. I dropped out and did quite well. He became a dinosaur whose career was only saved by tenure. We're in the very early stages on this.

If 3D printing can switch from plastic to metal, and/or can start creating usable electronic circuitry with a reasonable lifespan, then I will agree with you.

So long as the medium is plastic - it is difficult for me to see how any handy 3D plastic printer is going to compete with the price points provided by high volume manufacturers.

My counter analogy to your PC one is the advent of word processing + cheap paper printing on the book market. Rather than revolutionize the scope and scale of books offered, the actual effect was nil on the mainstream market.

We still get the Harry Potter/Hunger Games comprising a huge percentage of overall book sales volume. In 2011, for example, 229 million books were sold vs. 162 million in 2001. The Harry Potter series alone sold 450 million books over 10 years from 1997 to 2007 - a very visible percentage of annual totals.

A secondary market has arisen where small run books are considerably more affordable to print, but the largest expense is still marketing - not the cost of the book printing or even shipping.

It took the creation of e-books and e-reading platforms to really have a significant impact on publishing, and even there it is still pretty unclear how it will all turn out for the 'small guys'.

BTW, if you are interested, here is a very illuminating article on the pluses, minuses, and gory details about 3D printing - from a 3D printing professional:

http://gizmodo.com/why-3d-printing-i...t-fo-508176750

Everyone's now aware of 3D printing — they’ve read about it in the papers, on blogs or seen it on TV. The mentality now seems to be that, in the future, we'll be able to download our products or make them ourselves with CAD programs, apps and 3D scanners, then just print them out, either at home, or in localised print shops. Which in turn will supposedly decentralize manufacturing, bringing it back to the West. But like the cupcake, Daft Punk’s latest album, or goji berries, 3D printing is severely overhyped — and I should know, because it’s what I do for a living.

All day, every day, I operate machines and speak to both the public and the industries about what their requirements are. In the last two years, I’ve made over 5,000 models and answered over 10,000 emails from major corporations to crackpot inventors, designers to hobbyists. So, I feel that I’ve had a good deal of interaction with all levels of customers, and in turn, their awareness of 3D printing.

Thanks to images like this…

…people expect the world from 3D printers. This has been printed in one piece, which is in itself phenomenal to anyone who knows anything about manufacturing. However, it is made purely from a plaster powder and some inkjet ink for colouration. Joe Public on the other hand may see this and think it’s made from a combination of metals, plastics and rubbers. Sadly this is not the case. The thing is about as functional as your mom’s figurine collection.

Other images show gloss plastics with complex shapes that have been produced on machines worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and then have been meticulously post-processed for hours, days—even weeks—at great expense by highly-trained professionals. People see images or videos of 3D printed mechanisms, 3D printed tables, material 3D prints, and of course guns—and then they see that they can buy one for under $800 and think "WOW!" I can do all this at home. This is the future!

And it is, in some respects — it’s going to open so many things up in the world. But that doesn’t mean to say that you will do it yourself or that it will decentralize manufacturing, like the hype seems to suggest.

So, no revolution?

The main issue lies with raised expectations, build quality, price and usability. So here we go, my list of reasons 3D printing isn’t all you think it’s cracked up to be.

People’s expectations: They’ve seen a 3D printed violin; a crazy shoe, and a wrench (yawn) which actually works, straight out of a printer. A very, very expensive, high-end printer which uses lasers or resins. These people think that they can create objects as well without much input or training, on a machine which costs $800 or less. Imagine you’d lived on a planet that had never seen a car before, and all of a sudden the newspapers start reporting about the car, a vehicle which can do up to 250mph, carrying up to 10 people, and cost as little as $300. All true, but as we know, that’s not the full story.

The name: ’3D printing’ makes it sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Do you think if it were still called ‘rapid prototyping,’ people would be saying “I can’t wait to get a rapid prototyper in my house’?

Strength: 3D printed parts are not as strong as traditionally-manufactured parts. Their layer-by-layer technique of manufacturing is both their biggest strength and their greatest weakness. In something like injection moulding, you have a very even strength across the part, as the material is of a relatively consistent material structure. In 3D printing, you are building it in layers — this means that it has laminate weaknesses as the layers don’t bond as well in the Z axis as they do in the X and Y plane. This is comparable to a Lego wall — you place all the bricks on top of each other, and press down: feels strong, but push the wall from the side and it breaks really easily.

Surface finish: People hear you can print in plastic, so they visualise a plastic item. This is likely to be gloss and smooth. They don’t visualise a matt finish with rough layer lines all over. Many companies offer a ‘smooth’ surface finish, but often neglect to add the suffix ‘for 3D printing’. You can also post-process parts, but this generally involves labour and/or chemicals like acetone (really nasty stuff) and loses detail and tolerance on parts.

Cost: Cost is based on material used, so big things are expensive, and small things are cheap. That’s it. Nothing to do with complexity, and nothing to do with number of parts. The beauty of it is that there is no tooling — this opens up a world of opportunity to the designer, the creator and the hacker, but does it really help people who just want a replacement door knob? There is also no economy of scale, so one item is $X pounds, and a thousand items are $1000s. So, producing anything in bulk that is bigger than your fist seems to be a waste of time.

The materials are also much more expensive than buying just raw material, with the cheapest being about $50 per kg, ranging up to $500 for some resins. So you’re not really making a saving here, I’m afraid to say. Sadly for every request we have for a full sized Daft Punk helmet, there’s an equal number of disappointed Daft Punk fans out there, when they find out how much it will cost to build.

Speed: Many people say that 3D printing is quick — this is another omission of a suffix — this time ‘for manufacturing processes’. Items regularly take hours to print, even days. You can speed this up by making the layers thicker, but as soon as you do this, you lose your surface finish quality. The notion of ‘but it’ll get faster in the future’ is not necessarily true, as we are limited by the chemical properties of materials such as ABS and PLY — these materials can only be extruded so fast, and at such a rate before you start to destroy the properties of the part. This is happening with the top-end machines right now for FDM (Fluid Deposition Modelling).

Usability: This is huge. To print something, you need a CAD model. Getting that is hard. Really hard. When you write a letter, you don’t just click ‘print,’ do you? You have to actually type it and check it for mistakes. Now this is the same for 3D printing, but a million items harder. So how can you do this, I hear you ask?

1. Learn CAD: Advisable, but difficult. You not only have to learn how the program works (it’s a bit like Photoshop; give it a week and you can draw something, but give it three years and you’ll learn it inside out), but you also have to learn how to design. You need to acknowledge things like tolerances — i.e. a 10mm shaft will not fit in a 10mm hole.

2. 3D Scanning: Great if you only want to scan the outer surface of a part (they cannot scan the inside of items), and if you don’t want any driven dimensions. The idea of scanning a broken part and 3D printing it is a massive over-engineered approach to replacing a part when there are inventions like superglue or silicone moulding (much better smoother and stronger way to produce duplicates). Also it’s not as easy as it sounds, and not cheap either. You can get something like an Xbox Kinect and rig it up as a scanner; that is if you want an incredibly abstract version of what you want, or you can get a pro to do it at a cost.

3. Downloading 3D files: Every day a new 3D model library opens up on the internet. These instantly seem to get populated with the same 3D files that are on all the other sites. These files are 99% unmoderated, meaning that they are not guaranteed to be 3D printable. Many of them are made for animation/rendering and are flat surfaces with images projected onto them. These aren’t printable. Even the major 3D printing libraries are full of files with errors and/or have been designed with little respect to the capabilities and cost of 3D printers.

4. Photo-based apps: Like scanning, only worse.


Example of a scan and print at home. (These will get better though.)

Machine range: So you can 3D print in hundreds of different types of materials, but can they all be done in your living room? Absolutely not. People seem to forget that there are loads of different types of 3D printers, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. FDM, the main consumer form of 3D printers, extrudes ABS or PLY in a relatively safe manor, with the materials cooling down quickly, meaning the parts are safe to touch straight off the machine (and leave little in the way of mess). This is definitely not true for any other type of printer. Resins, though higher detail, are really messy and expensive; powder-based printers are really messy, and sometimes explosive (never make the 3D printed gun on a powder-based printer); others operate at high temperatures or produce masses of waste. This basically leaves us with FDM (which by the way has the worst surface finish) as the only really suitable technology for the home.

Materials: Generally speaking, you can only print in one material, and this is generally a plastic. Now look around you…how many items are in your room that are made up of a single piece of plastic — just plastic, nothing else? I can see two things; a cup and a lens cap. The cup cost 5p. The lens cap was expensive, but requires very high accuracy and acute clips (not great on a 3D print thanks to the layers causing weaknesses). Would I 3D print it? No. Most items in the house are made up from multiple materials, and most of them are both metal and plastic. Those two cannot be made together as their melting temperatures are hundreds, if not thousands of degrees apart. I’d not like to smelt in my living room either.

A great analogy I once read was the comparison of 3D printers to the bread making machine. In the '90s, bread makers suddenly became affordable and everyone got one; they then went and spent $4-7 on all the ingredients to make bread. They followed the instructions and left the bread cooking overnight. In the morning they came down to the wonderful smell of freshly cooked bread; bread that they had created using a machine, some materials and some time. They smugly sat eating their bread thinking "this is the best loaf of bread ever". Two weeks later the bread machine is in the cupboard and they’ve gone back to buying their carbs from the shop. I’d say that 99 per cent of the population would rather go out and buy a loaf of bread for $1, rather than making one for $3, despite it being more rewarding.

A lover, not a hater

After all that, I bet you think I hate 3D printing, and that you think I think it has no future. Not at all. I’m obsessed with it, and know it has a huge future — I wouldn’t be committing every day of my life to it if I didn’t wholeheartedly believe this.

The future for consumer 3D printing lies in the potential for people to create, invent and share ideas. Since starting this business I’ve helped hundreds of designers make their ideas come to life, and am proudly watching as they arrive in the marketplace. These products are now being mass produced and not 3D printed, so the quality is much higher.

3D printing will continue to grow in areas like the prototyping market, low-volume production runs (on very high-end machines), medical, aerospace — the list goes on. But as an everyday household object? I’m not convinced.

We are still firmly in the honeymoon period with 3D printing — we’re in awe of it and what it can do. But when you look at just the parts produced and not the way they were produced, printed parts are a long way behind in terms of quality, and when there often is no cost advantage, Captain Everyday will always go for the mass-produced one. Boy, do I hope I’m wrong, though.

[SeanO]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

If 3D printing can switch from plastic to metal, and/or can start creating usable electronic circuitry with a reasonable lifespan, then I will agree with you.

So long as the medium is plastic - it is difficult for me to see how any handy 3D plastic printer is going to compete with the price points provided by high volume manufacturers.

My counter analogy to your PC one is the advent of word processing + cheap paper printing on the book market. Rather than revolutionize the scope and scale of books offered, the actual effect was nil on the mainstream market.

There are already metal printers, mixed material printers, and printers that create usable circuitry, though all are still very rough at this point. I do agree it will likely never hit the price point achieved by injection molding, etc, though I think that misses the value. And of course they are already transforming those businesses with rapid prototyping.

Your book analogy is interesting, but I disagree a bit with your conclusion. Like a book, printing technologies have had some impact, but the core value is the intellectual property, not the printing process. Today a writer certainly has more options to get to market, and share their work, then they did before the word processor. Still technology is not the gating factor, good writing, and a marketing driven herd mentality among consumers is. Similarly good design will be a gating factor in 3D printing, though I believe it will open opportunities up to would be designers in far more profound way than the keyboard did over the pen.

Where your analogy breaks down is customization. I personally have no desire to modify a good story, but almost DAILY, I'd like a variation of a product I find. Too small. Too big. One more hole, one less. Etc. While not necessary for every product, and likely more expensive than "the standard" widget, I believe there is strong demand for mass customization and I'm convinced "3D Printing" is in the very, very, early stages of delivering on that promise. In addition to customization, there are also plenty of cases where instant part availability outweighs reduced cost of mass manufacturing. Imagine the appliance repair guy being able to print the part they need, instead of having to order it and drive back to your home again. Sure they may save $5 by ordering it, but that pales in comparison to the value of their time. Focus on these two benefits (customization, timeliness) and you'll see there is a LARGE future market for this technology that takes it well beyond today's prototyping and hobby applications.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

There are already metal printers, mixed material printers, and printers that create usable circuitry, though all are still very rough at this point. I do agree it will likely never hit the price point achieved by injection molding, etc, though I think that misses the value. And of course they are already transforming those businesses with rapid prototyping.

Your book analogy is interesting, but I disagree a bit with your conclusion. Like a book, printing technologies have had some impact, but the core value is the intellectual property, not the printing process. Today a writer certainly has more options to get to market, and share their work, then they did before the word processor. Still technology is not the gating factor, good writing, and a marketing driven herd mentality among consumers is. Similarly good design will be a gating factor in 3D printing, though I believe it will open opportunities up to would be designers in far more profound way than the keyboard did over the pen.

Where your analogy breaks down is customization. I personally have no desire to modify a good story, but almost DAILY, I'd like a variation of a product I find. Too small. Too big. One more hole, one less. Etc. While not necessary for every product, and likely more expensive than "the standard" widget, I believe there is strong demand for mass customization and I'm convinced "3D Printing" is in the very, very, early stages of delivering on that promise. In addition to customization, there are also plenty of cases where instant part availability outweighs reduced cost of mass manufacturing. Imagine the appliance repair guy being able to print the part they need, instead of having to order it and drive back to your home again. Sure they may save $5 by ordering it, but that pales in comparison to the value of their time. Focus on these two benefits (customization, timeliness) and you'll see there is a LARGE future market for this technology that takes it well beyond today's prototyping and hobby applications.

I could imagine a market for a printer with a catalog of digital plastic parts for service call as you suggested.....maybe some iTunes/iParts version for multiple manufacturers to ensure they get their parts design royalties.

I could also imagine bespoke customization for non-electric things with limited safety/liability issues attached that relate to human physiology fit/comfort.....custom running shoes printed locally and on demand for example.

BUT how will manufacturers be able to offer mass customized, bespoke derivatives of their products when it comes to safety certification such as UL(Underwriters Laboratories)?

Will they be able to certify size ranges?

Or will the cost/complexity of doing so be too hard?

And on that note.....will little guys offering bespoke products that involve electricity/safety/liability even be able to produce anything for profit without being suffocated by potential product safety/compliance issues?

[c1ue]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

Your book analogy is interesting, but I disagree a bit with your conclusion. Like a book, printing technologies have had some impact, but the core value is the intellectual property, not the printing process. Today a writer certainly has more options to get to market, and share their work, then they did before the word processor. Still technology is not the gating factor, good writing, and a marketing driven herd mentality among consumers is. Similarly good design will be a gating factor in 3D printing, though I believe it will open opportunities up to would be designers in far more profound way than the keyboard did over the pen.

With reference to the bolded section above, I would note that you are discounting a number of services in the existing value chain - including marketing, editing, and proofreading. Irrespective of the ease of writing, these other factors are not in any way resolved by word publishing or even e-books.

Where your analogy breaks down is customization. I personally have no desire to modify a good story, but almost DAILY, I'd like a variation of a product I find. Too small. Too big. One more hole, one less. Etc. While not necessary for every product, and likely more expensive than "the standard" widget, I believe there is strong demand for mass customization and I'm convinced "3D Printing" is in the very, very, early stages of delivering on that promise. In addition to customization, there are also plenty of cases where instant part availability outweighs reduced cost of mass manufacturing. Imagine the appliance repair guy being able to print the part they need, instead of having to order it and drive back to your home again. Sure they may save $5 by ordering it, but that pales in comparison to the value of their time. Focus on these two benefits (customization, timeliness) and you'll see there is a LARGE future market for this technology that takes it well beyond today's prototyping and hobby applications.

I think there is a market for design, but the usability issues noted above are non-trivial. The first job I performed when I started working in AMD was layout - this is where an electrical circuit is described into physical layers. These days, the CAD portions of a design team are bigger than the design team itself - if you count all of the off-site library suppliers and software tool suppliers.

The appliance guy above - barring major retraining, I very much doubt he's going to be in any kind of position to be adding holes, shrinking, enlarging, etc. Non-standard appliance replacement parts also probably void the warranty - I've written elsewhere about a friend who makes $300K a year fixing $10K refrigerators that broke down - apparently primarily because of their being assembled in Mexico instead of Germany, where they used to be assembled.

Still, I do agree that if you need a cup that's 10% larger than the standard one in the store, you can definitely print one out. It is going to be 10 times or more expensive, but there you go. I don't see that being a major market, though definitely some people will be able to make some money doing it - a kind of electronic-intermediated arts and crafts. After all, there is a market for $80,000 hand made Japanese swords - it just isn't a very big one.

If in fact people are willing to pay multiple times more for the same part, then that business model will work. The proliferation of knock-off parts, though, would seem to argue that this is a tough road to hoe. I'd also note that the low prices of components is such that there are stores which survive just by selling rubber gaskets for home appliances and what not - it doesn't really seem that there is a burning need that needs fulfillment, either.

[BK]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

Its interesting to look at the 3D Printing companies and see how they are declining.

Stratasys, Ltd.
NASDAQ: SSYS - Aug 9 4:00pm ET
95.04-3.22 (-3.28%)

Has been taking the roll up - strategy - with Marketbot acquire for $400 Million in stock - meanwhile buying Puts on Stratasys looks to be very expensive, so even though Stratasys is in the high tech meme - lots of folks appear to expect its stock price to fall sooner rather than later.

I'm speaking wayyyyy over my pay-grade in these matters, but it looks like Stratasys is paying up a lot for Revenues, MakerBot disclosures showed approx $13 Million in Revenue in the previous year, and $12-$13 Million for the first quarter making $400 Million an insane valuation!

[walenk]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

I doubt he phrase "original equipment" has a long life from here. As a corollary, what is "counterfeit" in a complex system? Similarly, what is the "product" under warranty? The lawyers will also likely be churning the chum in product liability lawsuits.
I knew a man who had the original hatchet George Washington used to chop down the infamous cherry tree. The handle had only been replaced 4 times and the head twice.

[c1ue]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

A really entertaining story concerning 3D printers is "Kiosk", by Bruce Sterling.

In this tale, the 3D printer is the mechanism by which society completely changes. The problem, of course, is that this 3D printer not only apparently works by plugging into a wall socket, and has a perfectly function library as well as the built-in ability to scan objects and recreate them, but it also creates superhard, durable objects out of carbon nanotubes. It can even re-extract carbon nanotubes from a previously made object for recycling!

Note this was written in 2007. You can hear it for free here I believe (I didn't try it):

http://www.starshipsofa.com/2010/01/...ruce-sterling/

The portion of the story which closely echoes present capabilities:

The fabrikator spoke to him as a veteran street merchant. Yes. it definitely meant something that those rowdy kids were so eager to buy toys that fell apart and turned to dirt. Any kiosk was all about high-volume repeat business.

Note the assumption here: that the output is so cheap that even street kids in a post-Collapse Eastern Europe can afford to buy the output, and that the machinery capital cost is an inconsequential expense.

Then the magic carbon nanotube fabrikator shows up, and the hero of the story avoids EU legal issues by giving the nanotube fabrikator to the local government:

The fab now reformed its efforts: from consumer knickknacks to the pressing needs of the state's public sector. Jet-black fireplugs appeared in the arts district. Jet-black hoods for the broken streetlights, and jet-black man-hole covers for the streets.

Great story, but of course in this fictional tale, the output from the fabricator is superior to pretty much all other materials. Yes, there are jet-black knives and guns!

[WildspitzE]

Re: iTulip consensus on 3D Printing?

You can print parts of prototypes of machines and put them together into working models, thus eliminating iterations in actual production to get a new product fit together.

I agree. That said, and while the "at home" models continue to develop, places like shapeways.com may serve as a production bridge for producers/creators (currently mostly hobby pieces, trinkets, accessories).