3D Printing - Business Update

[don]

By STEVEN KURUTZMARCH 26, 2014

The first thing Duann Scott does when he arrives at the Shapeways factory in Long Island City, Queens, is check the bins. They are yellow and stacked in an all-white room that resembles the interior of a spaceship, and they contain the latest prints to come out of the machines, which can really stack up.

Shapeways, a 3-D printing service and online marketplace, has been described as the Amazon of 3-D printing for its on-demand model, if not its outsize volume: The machines spit out about 120,000 objects a month, a tidal flow of design that runs from the mundane to the astonishing.

On a recent day, a quick search through the bins revealed a pair of pliable black-frame eyeglasses, a scale model of a biplane, an intricately detailed brass ring, enough plastic train cars to form a miniature railroad and a figurine of two tiny purple women on tiny purple trapezes. To what use any of these things will be put, Mr. Scott usually has not a clue. But that doesn’t diminish the Christmas-morning grin he gets while he is fishing through them.





Mr. Scott, a tall, bearded man of 39 who was born in Australia, holds the title of designer evangelist at Shapeways. He judges 3-D design competitions, gives talks at schools and businesses, and attends events likeSouth by Southwest Interactive, in Austin, Tex., where earlier this month he and his co-workers took a 3-D scanner to parties. (Willing guests were scanned and could order a figurine of themselves printed by Shapeways.)

Mr. Scott also spends a good portion of his day searching not just the bins, but all the designs uploaded to the Shapeways website, for the 3-D-modeled equivalent of a gold nugget. Impressed by a designer’s work, he will call and offer the use of company resources, or feature the designer on the Shapeways blog, or extend an invitation to a party — or, as he did with Bradley Rothenberg, a Manhattan-based architect and designer, recommend the person in question to brands with an interest in 3-D printing.

After seeing Mr. Rothenberg give a talk about a year ago, Mr. Scott suggested him to representatives from Victoria’s Secret. The designer modeled snowflake angel wings and other pieces based on sketches by the Victoria’s Secret design team, which were then worn by the models in the Victoria’s Secret fashion show late last year, garnering attention for Shapeways, which printed the nylon plastic pieces, and for Mr. Rothenberg.

“I keep my eye on talent,” Mr. Scott said. “I’ve always got this group of amazing designers in the back of my mind if someone needs to connect with them.”

Other 3-D printing services exist, including Sculpteo and Materialise, but most of them are based in Europe. Kraftwurx, a Houston company, provides on-demand printing and a venue for designers to sell their work, but it doesn’t yet have the robust public presence of Shapeways, which sponsors design contests, courts talented designers and partners with museums.

In his role as a Pied Piper for on-demand 3-D printing, Mr. Scott has been instrumental in developing that relationship with the design community. Some designers, like Mr. Rothenberg, use the company’s sophisticated, highly accurate printers to make prototypes or produce their work. Others, though, are treating the company as an everything-in-one platform: manufacturer, e-retailer and venue for propelling their careers.

Susan Taing, who started a 3-D design studio called bhold, is one of those who has developed a close partnership with Shapeways. Ms. Taing, 33, first experimented with 3-D printing and modeling as a hobby, designing simple things like an earbud cord winder. Last year, she used Shapeways to print the device, which she called the bsnug wrap, and began selling the tool through the Shapeways website.

“Every few days I got more ideas as to what I could do with 3-D printing,” said Ms. Taing, whose offerings now include the bholdable espresso tumbler ($69) and the bheard sound pod ($39.50), an acoustic amplifier for smartphones. “I’d been thinking about starting a company, and once the concept came, it felt right.”

It was the Shapeways “lower risk, lower barrier” model, Ms. Taing said, that made it possible for her to start her own business. Because Shapeways prints on demand, there were no discouraging upfront manufacturing costs; Shapeways also handled time-consuming back-end processes like billing, shipping and customer service. Ms. Taing simply uploaded a printable design, set a price above the cost Shapeways charged her to print and paid the 3.5 percent processing fee out of her profit. And she was assured that supply would exactly meet demand. “You don’t have to manage inventory for something that may or may not be needed,” she said. “It’s much less wasteful.”

Evan Gant, an industrial designer in Massachusetts, said if not for Shapeways, many of the ideas he comes up with in his spare time would never make it out of his notebook. “To develop a product takes a tremendous amount of time,” he said. “There’s not only initial conception and design, but beyond that there’s a massive amount of funding, you have to find the right manufacturer, you have to understand retail.”

It’s unlikely that Mr. Gant or any outside investors would have devoted significant resources to manufacturing Button 2.0, a shirt button with a clip that he designed to secure an earbud cord. (Stray earbud cords, it seems, are one of the trials of modern life.) But after uploading a computer-aided design (CAD) model to Shapeways, he received an instant production quote and ordered a few to test. And once he refined his design, he sold them. Total R&D: about $15.

“I think Shapeways charged $2.50 to make that button, and I added $1.50,” Mr. Gant said, for his own profit.

With Shapeways handling the manufacturing and back end, “what you’re left with is conceptualizing the design,” he said. “And documenting it to get your story out there.”

Although Shapeways promotes designers and tries to “surface,” from the tens of thousands of items for sale on its site, what it thinks are the best goods, marketing is largely left to the designers, as are patent issues. Mr. Scott’s favorite designers to work with, he said, are the ones who grasp form and 3-D printing technology, but can also produce a good video or photography.

“Once we see someone can do that well, we’ll promote them and help them to improve as much as we can,” he said. “Because the more successful they are, the more successful we are.”

And users like Mr. Gant have accepted and even embraced those self-promotional duties. Mr. Gant currently offers eight products for sale in hisShapeways shop (not including Button 2.0, which he stopped selling after someone claimed an existing patent). They range from a modular flower-planter system ($75) to a liquid-siphoning toy for children ($12). To promote them, he posts professional-looking photos or videos, and often reaches out to design blogs.

A calm female voice narrates all the videos. Could that be Mr. Gant’s wife?

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “It gets very low-budget.”

Still, that sense of play and experimentation, in both the design and the marketing, is part of the appeal. “With Shapeways, the risk is so little,” Mr. Gant said. “It’s not like I’m going to China and producing 10,000 of them.”

The other big attraction for designers is the company’s printers. Boxy, refrigerator-size machines that glow orange when working, they can print objects of greater size and complexity than desktop 3-D printers can. And through partners, Shapeways offers access to materials like gold-plated and polished brass, stainless steel and ceramics. The objects have the professional-looking finish that the marketplace or the art gallery demands.

Ashley Zelinskie, 26, a sculptor who works with 3-D printing, tried using a desktop machine to print a full-size chair whose structure was embedded with hexadecimal code readable by a computer. Influenced by “One and Three Chairs,” a conceptual art piece by Joseph Kosuth, the project was an exercise in high-tech frustration.

“It took me two years of printing every day, and then I lost my mind,” Ms. Zelinskie said. She bought a nanny cam to keep tabs on the glitchy machine in her studio and later moved it to her apartment. “I got to the point where I could be asleep and hear it messing up,” she said.

Last December, Ms. Zelinskie contacted Shapeways to print her chair. When the nylon plastic pieces arrived at her house a few days later, she said, “the chair was built within minutes. The parts snapped together easily. It was clean, professional. It looked like it belonged in a gallery.”

Ms. Zelinskie’s “One and One Chair” now sits on the second floor of the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan. Shapeways has an interactive space there as part of “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” an exhibition on computer-assisted methods of production. It was Mr. Scott, in his evangelist role, who invited Ms. Zelinskie to become a Shapeways artist-in-residence at the museum.

“Shapeways has really backed me,” Ms. Zelinskie said. “They point me in the direction of new materials. They did a blog post on me. If you’re with them, you’re in.”

Dhemerae Ford, half of a design duo called the Laser Girls, has been similarly fostered by the company. She and her partner, Sarah C. Awad, worked at the 3-D printing lab at New York University, where they began making fake fingernails in wild designs. They used N.Y.U.’s printers for prototypes, but as Ms. Awad said, “Shapeways has printers that N.Y.U. doesn’t have,” offering materials like nylon and metal. And “we could more easily produce and send out nails to buyers.”

Around the same time, Mr. Scott noticed that an acrylic that Shapeways makes is similar to the material used for fake nails, and he looked for designers willing to experiment. “I’d been contacting women on Instagram who are into nails,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I know that sounds bad.”

The Laser Girls met representatives from Shapeways at a tech event last fall, and have since begun selling their nails through the company’s site, printing them in standard materials like nylon plastic, but also bronze-infused stainless steel. “They’ve helped us a lot from a business sense,” Ms. Ford said. “In terms of design, they’ve given us ideas for ways we can push the technology.”

Of the Laser Girls, who are in their early 20s, Mr. Scott said: “It’s not always established designers who are doing some of the best work. It’s kids coming out of school and really kicking it.” And that, he said, is part of the joy of discovery.

For New York designers, Shapeways also offers the advantage of proximity. Ms. Taing, for instance, runs her design studio from a tiny office in Long Island City, where on a recent afternoon a MakerBot desktop printer was humming away in a corner, producing a prototype that may eventually be sent to Shapeways, if it proved functional. The office is just one block from the factory, and Ms. Taing has visited several times, to resolve production issues and to speed the delivery by picking up finished prints.

One of the few complaints about Shapeways, it seems, is its turnaround time. It can take a week or longer, depending on the material, to fulfill an order. (“The two weeks is rough,” Ms. Ford said.) And the company doesn’t ship partial orders.

Also, as Ms. Taing pointed out, Sculpteo, a rival on-demand printing service in France, has much wider color options, while Materialise, a firm in Belgium, offers titanium, a material Ms. Ford wants to try.

Nevertheless, Ms. Taing and Ms. Ford said they use Shapeways for much of their printing because the company is local and consistent in its quality, and it supports the 3-D design community.

Ms. Ford said: “I’ve been to their factory. It’s very homey. I was welcomed less as a customer than as someone who is interested in the technology. We all geeked-out over the printers for 30 minutes.”

The manufacturing process for nylon plastic, the most common material, could be described as a blend of high-tech and high-school art class. Engineers approve the uploaded design files and assign them to a “build,” in which as many objects as possible, perhaps 1,000, are virtually fitted together, as if in a game of 3-D Tetris. The build comes out of the 3-D printers in a square cake of nylon powder. The cakes are cooled and the powder brushed off to reveal the objects inside, a process Raheel Valiani, the director of operations for the Queens factory, likened to an archaeological dig.

Young, hip-looking factory workers then sort the objects, hand-color some of them using boiled fabric dyes (white is the default shade for nylon plastic) and package and place them in the yellow bins to be shipped out.

Shapeways, which started in the Netherlands in 2007, as part of an incubator run by Philips, the electronics maker, initially outsourced its 3-D printing. Now there are two factories, one in Queens and the other in Eindhoven in the Netherlands; the one here is adding four printers to its fleet of 12, at a cost of $500,000 or more each. The hope is that the new machines will increase capacity, speed up work flow and bring Shapeways closer to its long-term goal of overnight fulfillment.

Of the thousands of objects printed each week, iPhone accessories and hobbyist parts like model railroad cars are the most common, Mr. Scott said, as is jewelry. “Drone parts are currently very popular, too,” he added.

Still, despite the production volume, and a few breakout objects that have sold in the thousands of units, most designers aren’t getting rich selling their products through Shapeways. The company declined to disclose combined earnings for its 15,000 shop owners.

Mr. Gant estimates that he has made about $800 so far through his Shapeways shop, but has spent about $300 on prototypes and printing his designs. As Mr. Scott noted, however, once a product has been designed and uploaded, there is potential for its designer to earn royalty-driven passive income, something Mr. Gant has experienced. “I will still, weekly, get a couple sales,” he said. “It still slowly trickles in. As I do more products, the trickle gets a little bigger.”


Mr. Scott said he is looking forward to the first Shapeways millionaire. Perhaps it will be him. In addition to promoting all the designers who use Shapeways, he is a designer himself. Bits to Atoms, a digital fabrication studio and consultancy he founded, has a Shapeways shop where you can buy the bronze skull ring that he wears on his right hand.

That ring was the second design Mr. Scott uploaded, and it inspired his first act of evangelism. He photographed it and sent the photos to jewelry blogs. He earned a few thousand dollars from sales.

“For months afterwards, I would sell a few more rings and make more money,” Mr. Scott said. “I started documenting what I did and shouting to the world: ‘This is the future of design.’ ”

[don]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Is there an interface problem with copy/paste from a Mac?

[rtchoke]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Is there an interface problem with copy/paste from a Mac?

When you are pasting into iTulip, do you have an option to paste as plain text?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Is there an interface problem with copy/paste from a Mac?

My home PC is a Mac; the majority of my posts are made from it with no trouble.

Many websites from which we copy use tricky formatting that just does not copy and paste well.
At a few sites this seems intentional to protect their content.
Here's a website that gives me fits like this http://www.project-syndicate.org/economics

In these cases the iTulip forum software tries to decode the original formatting, gets it wrong, and the result is a jumbled mess.
The very same issues happen with my Windows machine -the trouble is at the source webpage.

In that situation I open Microsoft Word, and paste from the website into Word. I'll get a different kind of jumbled mess in MS Word from a straight paste.
But once in that word processor it's far easier to clean things up.
Word processors are made to do that kind of text manipulation.

As my last step in MS Word I'll copy it all and paste it as plain text. That final version will copy and paste well into iTulip.

Sometimes I'll work for half an hour to get things cleaned up in a word processor before I can paste into iTulip with a good result.

I would also note that iTulip is one such problem source websites.
I notice it when I try to print EJ's longer articles on paper to read as hard-copy.
They print in a poor format, and when I try to run them through MS Word to clean it up it's a huge struggle.

[jpatter666]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Paste into Notepad -- that cleans it up immediately.

That's how I do it.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Don, here's your article cleaned up that away through MS Word.
========

By STEVEN KURUTZMARCH 26, 2014

The first thing Duann Scott does when he arrives at the Shapeways factory in Long Island City, Queens, is check the bins. They are yellow and stacked in an all-white room that resembles the interior of a spaceship, and they contain the latest prints to come out of the machines, which can really stack up.

Shapeways, a 3-D printing service and online marketplace, has been described as the Amazon of 3-D printing for its on-demand model, if not its outsize volume: The machines spit out about 120,000 objects a month, a tidal flow of design that runs from the mundane to the astonishing.

On a recent day, a quick search through the bins revealed a pair of pliable black-frame eyeglasses, a scale model of a biplane, an intricately detailed brass ring, enough plastic train cars to form a miniature railroad and a figurine of two tiny purple women on tiny purple trapezes. To what use any of these things will be put, Mr. Scott usually has not a clue. But that doesn’t diminish the Christmas-morning grin he gets while he is fishing through them.

Mr. Scott, a tall, bearded man of 39 who was born in Australia, holds the title of designer evangelist at Shapeways. He judges 3-D design competitions, gives talks at schools and businesses, and attends events likeSouth by Southwest Interactive, in Austin, Tex., where earlier this month he and his co-workers took a 3-D scanner to parties. (Willing guests were scanned and could order a figurine of themselves printed by Shapeways.)

Mr. Scott also spends a good portion of his day searching not just the bins, but all the designs uploaded to the Shapeways website, for the 3-D-modeled equivalent of a gold nugget. Impressed by a designer’s work, he will call and offer the use of company resources, or feature the designer on the Shapeways blog, or extend an invitation to a party — or, as he did with Bradley Rothenberg, a Manhattan-based architect and designer, recommend the person in question to brands with an interest in 3-D printing.

After seeing Mr. Rothenberg give a talk about a year ago, Mr. Scott suggested him to representatives from Victoria’s Secret. The designer modeled snowflake angel wingsand other pieces based on sketches by the Victoria’s Secret design team, which were then worn by the models in the Victoria’s Secret fashion show late last year, garnering attention for Shapeways, which printed the nylon plastic pieces, and for Mr. Rothenberg.

“I keep my eye on talent,” Mr. Scott said. “I’ve always got this group of amazing designers in the back of my mind if someone needs to connect with them.”

Other 3-D printing services exist, including Sculpteo and Materialise, but most of them are based in Europe. Kraftwurx, a Houston company, provides on-demand printing and a venue for designers to sell their work, but it doesn’t yet have the robust public presence of Shapeways, which sponsors design contests, courts talented designers and partners with museums.

In his role as a Pied Piper for on-demand 3-D printing, Mr. Scott has been instrumental in developing that relationship with the design community. Some designers, like Mr. Rothenberg, use the company’s sophisticated, highly accurate printers to make prototypes or produce their work. Others, though, are treating the company as an everything-in-one platform: manufacturer, e-retailer and venue for propelling their careers.

Susan Taing, who started a 3-D design studio called bhold, is one of those who has developed a close partnership with Shapeways. Ms. Taing, 33, first experimented with 3-D printing and modeling as a hobby, designing simple things like an earbud cord winder. Last year, she used Shapeways to print the device, which she called the bsnug wrap, and began selling the tool through the Shapeways website.

“Every few days I got more ideas as to what I could do with 3-D printing,” said Ms. Taing, whose offerings now include the bholdable espresso tumbler ($69) and the bheard sound pod ($39.50), an acoustic amplifier for smartphones. “I’d been thinking about starting a company, and once the concept came, it felt right.”

It was the Shapeways “lower risk, lower barrier” model, Ms. Taing said, that made it possible for her to start her own business. Because Shapeways prints on demand, there were no discouraging upfront manufacturing costs; Shapeways also handled time-consuming back-end processes like billing, shipping and customer service. Ms. Taing simply uploaded a printable design, set a price above the cost Shapeways charged her to print and paid the 3.5 percent processing fee out of her profit. And she was assured that supply would exactly meet demand. “You don’t have to manage inventory for something that may or may not be needed,” she said. “It’s much less wasteful.”

Evan Gant, an industrial designer in Massachusetts, said if not for Shapeways, many of the ideas he comes up with in his spare time would never make it out of his notebook. “To develop a product takes a tremendous amount of time,” he said. “There’s not only initial conception and design, but beyond that there’s a massive amount of funding, you have to find the right manufacturer, you have to understand retail.”

It’s unlikely that Mr. Gant or any outside investors would have devoted significant resources to manufacturing Button 2.0, a shirt button with a clip that he designed to secure an earbud cord. (Stray earbud cords, it seems, are one of the trials of modern life.) But after uploading a computer-aided design (CAD) model to Shapeways, he received an instant production quote and ordered a few to test. And once he refined his design, he sold them. Total R&D: about $15.

“I think Shapeways charged $2.50 to make that button, and I added $1.50,” Mr. Gant said, for his own profit.

With Shapeways handling the manufacturing and back end, “what you’re left with is conceptualizing the design,” he said. “And documenting it to get your story out there.”

Although Shapeways promotes designers and tries to “surface,” from the tens of thousands of items for sale on its site, what it thinks are the best goods, marketing is largely left to the designers, as are patent issues. Mr. Scott’s favorite designers to work with, he said, are the ones who grasp form and 3-D printing technology, but can also produce a good video or photography.

“Once we see someone can do that well, we’ll promote them and help them to improve as much as we can,” he said. “Because the more successful they are, the more successful we are.”

And users like Mr. Gant have accepted and even embraced those self-promotional duties. Mr. Gant currently offers eight products for sale in hisShapeways shop (not including Button 2.0, which he stopped selling after someone claimed an existing patent). They range from a modular flower-planter system ($75) to a liquid-siphoning toy for children ($12). To promote them, he posts professional-looking photos or videos, and often reaches out to design blogs.

A calm female voice narrates all the videos. Could that be Mr. Gant’s wife?

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “It gets very low-budget.”

Still, that sense of play and experimentation, in both the design and the marketing, is part of the appeal. “With Shapeways, the risk is so little,” Mr. Gant said. “It’s not like I’m going to China and producing 10,000 of them.”

The other big attraction for designers is the company’s printers. Boxy, refrigerator-size machines that glow orange when working, they can print objects of greater size and complexity than desktop 3-D printers can. And through partners, Shapeways offers access to materials like gold-plated and polished brass, stainless steel and ceramics. The objects have the professional-looking finish that the marketplace or the art gallery demands.

Ashley Zelinskie, 26, a sculptor who works with 3-D printing, tried using a desktop machine to print a full-size chair whose structure was embedded with hexadecimal code readable by a computer. Influenced by “One and Three Chairs,” a conceptual art piece by Joseph Kosuth, the project was an exercise in high-tech frustration.

“It took me two years of printing every day, and then I lost my mind,” Ms. Zelinskie said. She bought a nanny cam to keep tabs on the glitchy machine in her studio and later moved it to her apartment. “I got to the point where I could be asleep and hear it messing up,” she said.

Last December, Ms. Zelinskie contacted Shapeways to print her chair. When the nylon plastic pieces arrived at her house a few days later, she said, “the chair was built within minutes. The parts snapped together easily. It was clean, professional. It looked like it belonged in a gallery.”

Ms. Zelinskie’s “One and One Chair” now sits on the second floor of the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan. Shapeways has an interactive space there as part of “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” an exhibition on computer-assisted methods of production. It was Mr. Scott, in his evangelist role, who invited Ms. Zelinskie to become a Shapeways artist-in-residence at the museum.

“Shapeways has really backed me,” Ms. Zelinskie said. “They point me in the direction of new materials. They did a blog post on me. If you’re with them, you’re in.”

Dhemerae Ford, half of a design duo called the Laser Girls, has been similarly fostered by the company. She and her partner, Sarah C. Awad, worked at the 3-D printing lab at New York University, where they began making fake fingernails in wild designs. They used N.Y.U.’s printers for prototypes, but as Ms. Awad said, “Shapeways has printers that N.Y.U. doesn’t have,” offering materials like nylon and metal. And “we could more easily produce and send out nails to buyers.”

Around the same time, Mr. Scott noticed that an acrylic that Shapeways makes is similar to the material used for fake nails, and he looked for designers willing to experiment. “I’d been contacting women on Instagram who are into nails,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I know that sounds bad.”

The Laser Girls met representatives from Shapeways at a tech event last fall, and have since begun selling their nails through the company’s site, printing them in standard materials like nylon plastic, but also bronze-infused stainless steel. “They’ve helped us a lot from a business sense,” Ms. Ford said. “In terms of design, they’ve given us ideas for ways we can push the technology.”

Of the Laser Girls, who are in their early 20s, Mr. Scott said: “It’s not always established designers who are doing some of the best work. It’s kids coming out of school and really kicking it.” And that, he said, is part of the joy of discovery.

For New York designers, Shapeways also offers the advantage of proximity. Ms. Taing, for instance, runs her design studio from a tiny office in Long Island City, where on a recent afternoon a MakerBot desktop printer was humming away in a corner, producing a prototype that may eventually be sent to Shapeways, if it proved functional. The office is just one block from the factory, and Ms. Taing has visited several times, to resolve production issues and to speed the delivery by picking up finished prints.

One of the few complaints about Shapeways, it seems, is its turnaround time. It can take a week or longer, depending on the material, to fulfill an order. (“The two weeks is rough,” Ms. Ford said.) And the company doesn’t ship partial orders.

Also, as Ms. Taing pointed out, Sculpteo, a rival on-demand printing service in France, has much wider color options, while Materialise, a firm in Belgium, offers titanium, a material Ms. Ford wants to try.

Nevertheless, Ms. Taing and Ms. Ford said they use Shapeways for much of their printing because the company is local and consistent in its quality, and it supports the 3-D design community.

Ms. Ford said: “I’ve been to their factory. It’s very homey. I was welcomed less as a customer than as someone who is interested in the technology. We all geeked-out over the printers for 30 minutes.”

The manufacturing process for nylon plastic, the most common material, could be described as a blend of high-tech and high-school art class. Engineers approve the uploaded design files and assign them to a “build,” in which as many objects as possible, perhaps 1,000, are virtually fitted together, as if in a game of 3-D Tetris. The build comes out of the 3-D printers in a square cake of nylon powder. The cakes are cooled and the powder brushed off to reveal the objects inside, a process Raheel Valiani, the director of operations for the Queens factory, likened to an archaeological dig.

Young, hip-looking factory workers then sort the objects, hand-color some of them using boiled fabric dyes (white is the default shade for nylon plastic) and package and place them in the yellow bins to be shipped out.

Shapeways, which started in the Netherlands in 2007, as part of an incubator run by Philips, the electronics maker, initially outsourced its 3-D printing. Now there are two factories, one in Queens and the other in Eindhoven in the Netherlands; the one here is adding four printers to its fleet of 12, at a cost of $500,000 or more each. The hope is that the new machines will increase capacity, speed up work flow and bring Shapeways closer to its long-term goal of overnight fulfillment.

Of the thousands of objects printed each week, iPhone accessories and hobbyist parts like model railroad cars are the most common, Mr. Scott said, as is jewelry. “Drone parts are currently very popular, too,” he added.

Still, despite the production volume, and a few breakout objects that have sold in the thousands of units, most designers aren’t getting rich selling their products through Shapeways. The company declined to disclose combined earnings for its 15,000 shop owners.

Mr. Gant estimates that he has made about $800 so far through his Shapeways shop, but has spent about $300 on prototypes and printing his designs. As Mr. Scott noted, however, once a product has been designed and uploaded, there is potential for its designer to earn royalty-driven passive income, something Mr. Gant has experienced. “I will still, weekly, get a couple sales,” he said. “It still slowly trickles in. As I do more products, the trickle gets a little bigger.”


Mr. Scott said he is looking forward to the first Shapeways millionaire. Perhaps it will be him. In addition to promoting all the designers who use Shapeways, he is a designer himself. Bits to Atoms, a digital fabrication studio and consultancy he founded, has a Shapeways shop where you can buy the bronze skull ring that he wears on his right hand.

That ring was the second design Mr. Scott uploaded, and it inspired his first act of evangelism. He photographed it and sent the photos to jewelry blogs. He earned a few thousand dollars from sales.

“For months afterwards, I would sell a few more rings and make more money,” Mr. Scott said. “I started documenting what I did and shouting to the world: ‘This is the future of design.’ ”

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Paste into Notepad -- that cleans it up immediately.

That's how I do it.

That's my first move too -it works 90 percent of the time.
Embedded graphics and multi-column layouts sometime make me go to plan B in a word processor

[don]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

thanks T&B - nice read! ( the thing that drives me really nuts is the posting looks perfect in the 'tulip compositional window, then voila, garbage.)

There appears to be a couple of mac tricks to try out, suggested by another 'tuliper. Use the normal Command C to copy, then Command-Option-Shift V to paste. Another is copy with Control K and paste with Control Y. Looking forward to trying them out.

[Fiat Currency]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

... Another is copy with Control K and paste with Control Y. Looking forward to trying them out.

I doubt CTRL-K will work on a website … more for editors … actually an old unix leftover for us old hackers.

While there's probably 1,000s of mac tip sites … this one has a couple of the lessor-known ones.

http://mac.appstorm.net/how-to/os-x/...and-shortcuts/

Adjusting to a mac will become old hat soon enough don … it's a little worse for folks like me who have to live in both PC/MAC worlds each day.

Also - always preview your post … it will show you the bad formatting right away. Good luck.

[don]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Also - always preview your post … it will show you the bad formatting right away. Good luck.

Absolutely, Fiat, though when I do, and see poor formatting, I can't fix it because its perfect in the comp window and non-responsive to fixing. A crazy maker, for sure.

[don]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

3D printers print ten houses in 24 hours SHANGHAI, April 25, (Xinhua) -- A private company in east China recently used a giant printer set to print out ten full-sized houses within just one day. The stand-alone one-story houses in the Shanghai Hi-Tech Industrial Park look just like ordinary buildings. They were created using an intelligent printing array in east China's city of Suzhou. The array consists of four printers that are 10 meters wide and 6.6 meters high and use multi-directional automated sprays. The sprays emit a combination of cement and construction waste that is used to print building walls layer-by-layer. Ma Yihe, the inventor of the printers, said he and his team are especially proud of their core technology of quick-drying cement. This technology allows for the printed material to dry rapidly. Ma has been cautious not to reveal the secrets of this technology. Ma, who has been designing 3D printers for 12 years, said the new technology is cost-effective and environmentally friendly. "To obtain natural stone, we have to employ miners, dig up blocks of stone and saw them into pieces. This badly damages the environment," Ma said. "But with the 3D printing, we recycle mine tailings into usable materials. And we can print building with any digital design our customers bring us. It's fast and cheap," he said. Buildings made with 3D printing technology can spare construction workers from having to work in hazardous, dusty environments, he said. The printers can print multi-story houses, but Chinese building codes do not currently include standards for 3D-printed houses. Quality checks are currently conducted by examining each piece of the structure as it is printed out. Ma said he hopes his printers can be used to build skyscrapers in the future. (To watch the complete story, please visit China View on Youtube: http://xhne.ws/wbGsZ) Chinese design firm builds 10 homes in 1 day using 3-D printing WinSun As debate stirs over whether Americans are willing to create and print items using 3-D printers in their homes, one Chinese design and engineering firm is printing houses. Massive 3-D printers have been used to construct 10 full-sized homes in China in just 24 hours, according to WinSun, a private Chinese firm. WinSun’s assembly line of four printers, each about 33-feet wide and 22-feet high, spray a mixture of quick-drying cement and construction waste used to print layers of walls, according to Xinhua state news agency. Because the material is inexpensive and there are no labor costs, each house can be printed for less than $5,000, Xinhua reported. Ma Yihe, who designed the printers, says creating 3-D houses is cheaper and better for the environment because the machines use recyclable materials. Ma wouldn’t discuss in detail the technology used to print the homes, Xinhua reported. Earlier this year, USC professor Behrokh Khoshnevis was testing a 3-D printer that could build a 2,500-square-foot house in 24 hours using a technology called “contour crafting.” Khoshnevis told MSN.com the technology could be used to provide affordable housing in impoverished parts of the world as well as quickly create shelter in the wake of natural disasters. Here’s a closer look at contour crafting:

The 3D printer that can build a house in 24 hours


Getty



The University of Southern California is testing a giant 3D printer that could be used to build a whole house in under 24 hours.

Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has designed the giant robot that replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, this squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home according to a computer pattern. It is “basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building,” says Khoshnevis. The technology, known as Contour Crafting, could revolutionise the construction industry.

The affordable home?

Contour Crafting could slash the cost of home-owning, making it possible for millions of displaced people to get on the property ladder. It could even be used in disaster relief areas to build emergency and replacement housing. For example, after an event such as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which has displaced almost 600,000 people, Contour Crafting could be used to build replacement homes quickly.

It could be used to create high-quality shelter for people currently living in desperate conditions. “At the dawn of the 21st century [slums] are the condition of shelter for nearly one billion people in our world,” says Khoshnevis, “These buildings are breeding grounds for disease a problem of conventional construction which is slow, labour intensive and inefficient.”

As Khoshnevis points out, if you look around you pretty much everything is made automatically these days – “your shoes, your clothes, home appliances, your car. The only thing that is still built by hand are these buildings.”


Contour Crafting


How does Contour Crafting work?

The Contour Crafting system is a robot that by automates age-old tools normally used by hand. These are wielded by a robotic gantry that builds a three-dimensional object.

“Ultimately it would work like this,” says Brad Lemley from Discover Magazine. “On a cleared and leveled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet further apart than the eventual building's width and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in layers to create hollow walls, and then fill in the walls with additional concrete… humans would hang doors and insert windows.”


Contour Crafting


“It’s a CAD/CAM solution,” says Khoshnevis. The buildings are “designed on computer and built by a computer”. Contour Crafting hopes to generate “entire neighbourhoods built at a fraction of the cost, in a fraction of the time, far more safely, and with architectural flexibility that is unprecedented.”

The Contour Crafting solution also produces much stronger structures than traditional building methods. According to Contour Crafting the tested wall is a 10,000PSI (pounds per square inch) strength compared to an average of 3,000PSI for a regular wall.


Contour Crafting


The system could potentially be used to build large office blocks and even tower blocks. “You can have multi-nozzle machines and even have the structure climb the building,” says Khoshnevis. says Khoshnevis. This animationdemonstrates how a home is built using the Contour Crafting technique.

Will all future buildings look the same?

One concern with contour crafted homes is that they’d all look the same. Mind-numbing duplication was a key criticism of the suburban estates from the 1950s, even though they also brought good-quality housing to millions of people. Would robot-made homes have the same problem, spitting out endless duplication of the same basic template?

They would not be as homogenous as the suburbs, says Khoshnevis, because “every [Contour Crafted] building can be different. They do not have to look like track houses because all you have to do is change a computer program” to get a completely different house.

Because the buildings are printed with a nozzle, they can also be far more creative than current constructions. “The walls can be curved” says Khoshnevis and “you can have very exotic architectural features without incurring additional costs.”


Colour Crafting


Will builders be out of work?

What the implications are for builders is, of course, a major concern. Building and construction has largely escaped the construction line automation of other industries and remains solid employment for millions worldwide. According to the International Labour Organisation construction employs nearly 110 million people worldwide and “plays a major role in combating the high levels of unemployment and in absorbing surplus labour from the rural areas.”

That’s a lot of people Contour Crafting could make redundant, which raises the question of whether the system could do more harm than good.


Contour Crafting


“There is concern about people being put out of construction jobs,” says Khoshnevis but “the reality is that a lot of new jobs can be created in this sector as well.” Khoshnevis reminds us that in 1900 almost 62% of all Americans were farmers, whereas today less than 1.5% of Americans are in agriculture, thanks to advanced in technology. “The same will be true in the case of construction.” Khoshnevis argues that “Construction is a hazardous job” and points out that “it is more dangerous than mining and agriculture.“it is more dangerous than mining and agriculture. It kills 10,000 people every year [and] because of all the different trade and managements structures, the process is pretty corruption prone. It is very costly and always over budget.”

When will we see robotic builders?

But can the Contour Crafting robot move from its research lab environment and into the real world? “Khoshnevis is a prolific inventor,” says Brad Lemley, “who emigrated from Iran in 1974 and holds patents in fields ranging from optics to robotics, [and] decided there had to be a better way while trowelling plaster cracks in his living room following the 1994 Northridge California earthquake."

“If you can build a wall, you can build a house,” says Khoshnevis. But Contour Crafting was named one of the 25 best inventions in 2006 by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the History Channel’s Modern Marvels programme and is still being tested.


Contour Crafting


Current research is being funded by Nasa along with the Cal-Earth institute. The future development for Contour Crafting is to investigate construction of modern civil structures, alongside the construction of structures on the moon. According to Contour Crafting these structures include landing pads, roads, hangers and radiation walls.

Nasa’s Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) facility is investigating infrastructure elements in order to evaluate the feasibility of adapting and using the Contour Crafting technology for extraterrestrial application.

“This technology is like a rock that we have rolled to the top of a cliff,” Khoshnevis told Discover Magazine, “just one little push and the idea will roll along on its own."

[wayiwalk]

Re: 3D Printing - Business Update

Looks like it still makes sense to be in the raw materials (concrete) business.

Fascinating stuff though, thanks for posting.