MakerBot's bold bet that 3D printers would become common
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TechShop used to have some MakerBots, but they've been replaced by better machines. Materials costs are too high, though; the Form I and Form II use a working fluid that costs $130/liter. (This is a bit like the inkjet printer ink problem.) They also go through build tanks fairly fast; the working fluid in its solid form builds up at the bottom. But the build quality is excellent.
The "maker revolution", such as it is, is driven by laser cutters. They're accurate, fast, reliable, work on large sheets, and have no consumables.
The Next Big Thing is supposed to be desktop waterjet cutters. The Wazer, though, is apparently very slow, and may use more garnet per cut than the big waterjets. Wazer also glosses over the problem that waterjets generate a sludge composed of water, shattered garnet, and whatever you're cutting. You have to pay to get rid of that stuff. Waterjet cutting is a good industrial process, but not office-ready.
(On a vaguely related note for maker types: does anyone know of a good low-cost surface mount reflow oven? The common low-end T962 has a big hot spot in the middle of the heating area and will scorch boards when used at lead-free solder temperatures. Yes, there are fixes, but I want something that works out of the box.)
We're pushing 14 bar of 99.8% purity nitrogen through our 4kW fibre laser cutter to cut up to 12mm thick stainless steel.
Regular mild steel is reactive cut with 0.4 bar of oxygen and a trickle of nitrogen for lense cooling.
We go through 110 cubic meters of nitrogen on a slow week. We've got a 1400 litre liquid nitrogen bulk tank and 3500 litre liquid oxygen bulk tank.
If you bought a laser cutter earlier you probably have a CO2 laser so there's another consumable.
And we're getting slogged on lenses and protective glass windows. That's how they get you, the long tail of proprietary parts. I need to find a cheaper supplier of parts, but do you really want to put aftermarket lenses in your bosses one million dollar laser cutter?
And then theres the tons and tons of oxydized steel waste, stainless steel dross, and scrap that fall through that has to be sent for recycling but no one will take when the scrap prices are low like they are now.
[1] http://www.thefabricator.com/article/lasercutting/a-case-of-...
Out of the box? No, sadly not. But you may find this interesting nonetheless: a friend of mine took a Black and Decker convection oven, replaced the control electronics with his own PID setup, and created a reflow oven that works better than the T962 he had. If you're willing to put in some elbow grease, you may find the DIY route appealing.
I also don't think the parts are too weak. Certainly, machined aluminium or lasercut MDF is more robust, but for a lot of things I find that 3D printed ABS or PLA is plenty strong enough ;)
I very much agree on the usefulness of laser cutters! Unfortunately they are too big for our space :(
I use a Black and Decker toaster oven I got off Amazon for $25[0] Works great, super cheap, even heating is important in cooking after all. I set the second dial on "Bake" and the third dial on "Stay on" then use a stop watch and the first dial to control the temperature according to what-ever re-flow profile I'm trying to achieve. You can tell when the oven reaches temperature by listening to the relay click noise it makes.
You can buy an add-on controller for this kind of oven called the reflowster but I don't personally think it is worth the money at $140. The stopwatch method hasn't failed me yet.
This has been my experience with them, as well. They're a low end printer but priced way outside of low end range.
My uni had a lot of them (50+), and the guy that ran the 3D printing lab was constantly repairing/swapping out extruders. So many, in fact, that when he said "per week," Makerbot themselves asked, "you mean per month?" No, it was per week. I forget the exact figures, but it was shamefully high considering their price point.
Pretty much every Makerbot in the school was guaranteed start the month with one extruder and finish the month with a new one, likely with a new one in between as well. And the lab had a pretty big pile of broken extruders that just grew almost daily.
Part of 3D printing's "success problem" IMO is that people started using a hopelessly ambitious definition of success.
However, the author gets it completely wrong by not looking at any of the other companies shipping reprap designs. https://www.lulzbot.com/ has seen consistent yearly growth, from tens of thousands a month when the first MakerBots came out to tens of millions per month today. http://prusaprinters.org/ is experiencing the same growth, and that's despite an obscene number of clones of their machine on the market. The growth of 3D printing never stopped. If you look at the well-respected companies in the field, they're seeing consistent, increasing revenue.
The trouble with the industry is Makerbot. They burned their community with the change to closed source, they killed their industrial/educational market with the Smart Extruder problems, but they were the darling of the media. When Makerbot laid off employees, it made headlines. When manufacturing was outsourced to China, tech bloggers stumbled over themselves to get a post out. As Makerbot went south, so went the perception of the industry.
3D printing is still a growing industry, and the tech in low-end printers is getting really, really good. It'll never be a printer on every desk, but if you find a household with a circular saw or a soldering iron, you'll probably also find a 3D printer. That's what it should be, anyway: a tool, and not a fetishized technology.
Anyone can fire-up a word processor and produce interesting looking documents and flyers.
A lot less people can fire-up a paint program and produce interesting images.
A lot less people than that can fire-up a 2D CAD program and produce 2D mechanical or architectural drawings.
And yet a lot less people than that can run a 3D modeling program and product much beyond trivial trinkets.
Beyond "Look! I printed this tiny Statue of Liberty from a file I got online" and "Check out the letter A I made!" lies real mechanical design. This is where mechanical things start to become useful.
At that level you now need far better understanding of how to design multi-component mechanical assemblies, materials, etc. Anyone can do a little pyramid in Sketchup. Not everyone can design a full robotic hand with differential drive and force compliance.
I imagine most folks buy 3D printers, print a few things they can get online and that's the end of it. A very few are inspired to learn some more and do some basic modeling. I can only see a very, very few go all out, learn advanced modeling and mechanical design and start to extract value out of their 3D printers.
* You have to model explicitly the model walls. That is you can't just say "using X material, print this model with whatever minimum thickness is necessary".
* Even if the model visually looks correct, you may have to remove hidden surfaces or non-continuous (or connected) surfaces.
* Even if an online service like shapeways verifies a model it may not print correctly. And it's not always clear how to fix it.
* Solid models are extremely expensive and so you have to create a shell. Shells have several issues like print orientation, holes for the excess material to drain out, thickness of solid, overhangs, etc edges.
* Typically shapeways, etc either don't support certain formats or don't support them well. This means you have to convert your model into whatever format they support. This can introduce more errors.
* Automatically re-sizing - strangely enough if you can print a say 10cm tall model on a printer you can't necessarily print a 15cm version, even if it fits in the print volume.
Given all these things, even if you have a decent model, there is a large subsequent step in turning that model into something that can print on a specific printer and material. It's likely that printer hardware makers have to create some software that takes popular native model formats like .stl, .blender, etc and convert it reliably into a printable model for that specific printer/material.
My point was to say that 3D printers end-up collecting dust because what's needed to make them useful is beyond the realm of what most people --not all-- are willing to devote time, effort and money to learn. Without learning these things the 3D printers become useless very quickly.
However, at this point, there's a huge gap between what a, say, sculptor would create from looking at the model and the garbage you get out of a typical 3d printer/software combo, if you can get it to print at all.
[0] www.renderfab.com
Actually, even this is harder than it seems. Having worked as a teacher, I saw many teacher create their own materials. They created handouts, pamphlets, worksheets, exams, short instructional materials, and some even whole text books. Compared to profession stuff from publishers, these self-made artifacts were often awful. The artifacts worked, of course, but typesetting, layout, illustrations, printing, and editing were almost always sub-par.
The most common example of this was trying to fit a worksheet or exam on one sheet A4, printed on both sides. As a result, my colleagues and I chose to use smaller fonts, smaller margins, decreased image size, less whitespace, and so on. Over-all, we ignored the intended readers (also known as our students), and focused on secondary matters such as ease of distribution.
On the other hand, where these instructional artifacts did shine was with respect to their practical applicability and usefulness because they were custom made (by the teacher) to fit a very specific situation (their classroom). Which is why readily available computers, software, and printers are such a powerful and awesome tool for a teacher.
If I had a 3D printer right now I'd want to make a circular gasket with an outer diameter of 78 mm. That's the simplest modeling imaginable but it would be useful for me.
It's like how a power saw is useful even if you don't know advanced furniture construction...
For everything else traditional parametric CAD is a million times better. If you don't mind closed source, give AutoCAD 360 a try (make sure you use it in parametric mode; direct modelling is a stupid): https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/troublesho...
If you can't stand closed source then there are not many options. Most open source CAD software is worthless. The only one I've found that works as it should is SolveSpace - http://solvespace.com/ - but it does have a slightly 80s interface and... well SolveSpace is to Solidworks what Notepad is to Word. But it does do constraint-based sketching and parametric modelling right.
But the import filter in FreeCAD is old and not maintained (for example, text/fonts were added to OpenSCAD after the filter was written, and the filter has not been upgraded to be able to deal with them).
You can certainly print directly from OpenSCAD and it works well, but when you go from 3D print to an industrial process, factories won't accept scad files, and you usually want to do things to your parts that OpenSCAD won't let you do, such as filleting angles. In a plastic 3D-printed prototype fillets don't matter, but the same part in aluminum or steel will have very sharp edges that will cut the users' hands if they're not filleted.
It's like confusing learning Python with producing solid software products.
OK, let me illustrate the point with a question: You have two parts that attach to each other. The parts are joined using a set of six 5 mm bolts with washers and locking nuts. The hole pattern is circular and has a radius of 3 inches.
What are the minimum diameter and dimensional tolerances you should specify in order to guarantee mating across multiple parts and across thermal variations?
OK, same two pars. Now they mate using no screws. They use a one-time-only locking tab and catch system along the inner periphery. What's the geometry and what are the tolerances?
Interestingly enough, none of the above talks about how to use the UI of some 3D program to solve the problems.
But in hindsight the context of the discussion is more about industrial design of functional consumer goods, which I completely agree is a highly skilled trade, and while learning the CAD program is still a lot of work, that's one of the least of the requirements.
Clarification: Not saying it's impossible to learn. All I am saying is that a very, very, very, very small percentage of 3D printer buyers develop the chops.
Don't confuse an intuitive UI with mechanical design.
It's the difference between the intuitive UI of a word processor and writing a novel.
The same could be said of, say, Python. Easy to learn from a few videos on YouTube. There's a vast difference between that and actually producing good, efficient, fast, sophisticated and accurate software.
I've been programming, designing hardware and electronics for over twenty years. There is no way anyone can obtain the equivalent chops and experience from a bunch of videos on YouTube. Maybe they can learn to use Altium Designer, Solidworks, a compiler or two and Xilinx's FPGA toolset. That does not mean they can actually design products at all. That takes years or learning and dedication and is hard.
Learning to drive Solidworks from a few YouTube videos does not make that person a mechanical engineer or a mechanical designer beyond the basics.
Example, unrelated to 3D printing: Design a differential, cable-driven wrist actuator with 3 degrees of freedom. Use a combination of 3D printing, machined parts and off-the-shelf hardware. Use SW to run load analysis on the parts and assemblies.
Calculate allowable dimensional tolerances. Produce mechanical drawings with annotations for class of fit of various components as required.
Now make the entire assembly (all components) parametrically driven by a reference sketch. Automatically produce a new set of prints and revisions if any dimension is changed. In other words, if you change one gear all other components in the actuator redefine themselves based on the new gear and so does the assembly. If the new gear is large enough to accommodate four mounting holes rather than two, it should implement those changes automatically.
I still hold that creating anything truly useful for 3D printing requires background that most people don't have and are not interested obtaining through hard, self-directed work.
And that, almost precisely, betrays a lack of understanding of mechanical (or electrical, or architectural, etc.) design.
CAD is a tool for documentation and, to some extent, verification. A mechanical engineer (or self-taught designer) isn't made by being able to use the tool. Mechanical design starts with a fundamental understanding of principles, techniques, structures, familiarity with historical solutions to similar problems and a deep understanding of DFM as well as DFMEA. CAD isn't about creating fancy 3D models at all.
You can use 3D CAD to design things that are impossible to make. I think you are equating 3D CAD with mechanical design, which isn't quite right.
My co-founder at http://8-food.com/ and I are at the earliest section of that path right now and - while we are attempting to optimize for manufacturing by assembling primarily from pre-existing commercially available components - do recognize the need to improve our presently nearly nonexistent mechanical engineering skills.
People like me are able to do what we do because, at some level, we are a product of a different generation. I was disassembling and rebuilding engines and modifying cars in my driveway when I was 16 years old. I designed and built my first computer from raw chips when I was 18 and wrote my first OS out of hand-keyed hex machine codes afterwards.
Today I've worked with young engineers who openly admit not being good at soldering and know PhD's who have trouble assembling Ikea furniture. Not sure what it is, but it sure seems engineering is being done differently these days. Back then, if you went into any of the engineering fields it was very likely you tinkered ad nauseum way before hitting college. Not so these days.
What I am saying is that as an electrical engineer by schooling I had already done tons of mechanical, software, optical and other work and picking up some aspects of these other fields over the years was an organic process. Starting from "nonexistent mechanical engineering skills", well, that's a bad place to start. Driving CAD isn't going to make you a mechanical product designer.
It's not like everyone will build robotic arms with articulate hands as phrotesis on repraps.
What would be some resources one could use to step up from Solidworks warrior to "decent enough at mechanical design that you wouldn't make a pro cringe"?
I would also add, ironically: No 3D printing.
It's very interesting to see young engineers do such things as specify, for example, an array of 0.250 in holes spaced 0.750 in apart and require a tolerance of 0.001 in.
You then take that same engineer into the shop and ask them to drill just two of those holes.
The surprise in their expressions when they can't produce a single good pair of holes is very telling.
3D printing doesn't teach you about mechanical design and manufacturing any more than a word processor teaches you about good typesetting and layout.
So, I'd say, design things and make them by hand using hand tools, manual milling machines, manual lathes, etc.
Just drilling a single precisely positioned and accurately dimension-ed round hole can require an hour of work, if not more. There's a reason professionals call it "hole manufacturing" rather than "drilling". You need at least three tools to manufacture precise round holes.
Anyone who thinks that drill bits are for making round holes needs to go do some research.
I would suggest you get a copy of Machinery's Handbook and study it.
There are also books that are collections of mechanisms. I probably have ten of them. There are some online resources today with animated versions of mechanisms. Google is your friend here.
Learn about materials. What's the difference between mild steel, hot rolled steel, stainless steel, 6061, 7075 and MIC-6 Aluminum. What do you use, when and why?
Research topics such as "hole manufacturing" and "high speed machining".
Read online forums such as "Practical Machinist", ask questions.
Learn about Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing.
If you don't have a background in Physics, learn some. Mechanics and Heat would be the basics. Don't need Calculus for the fundamentals.
Plastics is a topic in and of itself. Study injection molding. Visit sites like Protolabs, read through all of their materials. Understand their process. Learn about conventional injection molding.
Learn about analyzing structures/designs for strength, deflection, etc. Do this by hand first with simple shapes.
Learn FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and apply it to both mechanical and thermal analysis of designs.
Understand how to use fasteners. You'd be surprised how many people don't understand such basics ideas as "you never use a screw for positioning, only for clamping".
Read about finishing: paint, powder-coating, ceramic coating, electroplating, anodizing, porcelain enamel coating, chromate, passivation, texturing, sand blasting, brushing, chemical etching, etc.
Learn about laser and water-jet manufacturing processes and when to use them.
If you have access (or the money) get yourself in front of a milling machine or lathe (or both) and learn to take parts from CAD to finished product. Not trivial. Don't need a big sophisticated machine to do this. A mid-size bench-top mill and lathe will do. No CNC. Manual first.
Design and fabricate all the parts needed to convert your mill and lathe to CNC. Now learn CNC machining.
There's more, lots more. For example, adhesives is a huge topic. Lubricants is another. Composites. Casting. Extruding. Sheet Metal. Die casting. Etc.
Yet another huge topic is understanding all of the above in the context of costs and manufacturing efficiency. What's the consequence of designing a rectangular hole with 0.005 in radius corners on an aluminum part to be machined? When do you switch between extruding and machining and why? When do you completely redesign a part in order to better fit the best manufacturing process? What are the implications and manufacturing realities of requiring extreme accuracy?
You are not going to pick all of this up in a week or a year. It takes time, years. I've put my hands on most of the above during my career, but I am talking about 30 years designing and manufacturing all kinds of products. Don't expect instant results.
That, BTW, is why becoming a Solidworks "driver" does not make someone a mechanical designer. Solidworks is simply a design documentation tool. Becoming good at driving the software will not provide anyone with any of the knowledge listed above.
Better done in the context of actually working rather than tinkering. You don't have to become an expert at all of these either. Almost no such thing any more. Yet, it really pays to have as wide an understanding of manufacturing as possible. 3D printing is an almost insignificant segment of the totality of manufacturing.
It's hard to make a recommendation. I did not learn mechanical design formally. Also an EE. However, mechanical has always been a part of my life since I was a teenager. The only way I can summarize my path is: doing thousands of projects and constantly learning.
(Or you could just have Shapeways do the printing.)
Ultimately, these printers are one tool in an arsenal of tools for making things; they don't stand alone. There article gets it right that these are more likely to be tools for hobbyists and professionals who need lots of physical prototypes and (maybe) schools. These aren't trivial markets at all, but also aren't all of the people in the world, either.
When I lived in the UK, I would default to trying to 3D print anything I needed around the house. But manufacturing is cheap enough, and availability of products so ubiquitous in the UK, that it was almost always cheaper to just buy the thing on Amazon instead of print it. The only thing I printed that I couldn't have bought cheaply was custom plumbing parts.
Now I've moved to Kenya where Amazon doesn't deliver, import duty is extremely high, and availability of low throughput items is non-existent. I 3D print everything from spare parts for my truck to basic DIY supplies like rawl plugs and cable tidies - things I just cant get cheaply. Of course the fact that 3D printing is so useful in this environment is offset by the fact that hardly anyone here can afford it. I'm planning to set up a community makespace where people can print cheaply, but I don't expect it to cause a revolution.
Today 3D printing is eating small-batch manufacturing. Tomorrow any production run of less than 5000 units will happen on 3D printers.
Bre Pettis and the maker (and investment) community had the right ideas about the future, but I believe Makerbot focused too much on how to sell a hot glue gun (with extra steps) to the public and far too little on how to make a product that was truly useful to their customers.
(disclaimer: I work here https://markforged.com, we're hiring)
20x price change. If I just want to print in Onyx material, there seems to be no point in the more expensive machine. The carbon filament printing is cool, and I may step up to the $13,000 machine. I just wish someone could justify the big machine - or in reality I wish it was actually significantly bigger. Double each dimension, so 6x the build volume of the small machine. It is using linear guides, it is easy to purchase them in any size needed.
The pricing seems to be arbitrarily aimed at maximum cash extraction from the customer, not reality. I will probably end up with the cheaper machine. I am looking for a way to print parts I would normally machine from aluminum.
It is a well built machine, however. It makes very very nice out of the box prints too. Retail quality, probably the first machine that I have seen using filaments that can do that (in the pro-sumer price range, excluding big dollar machines). It will be machines like this one with good parts inside (slides, bearings, servos) that will make 3D printing really useful.
At the tradeshow I saw the machine at (SEMASHOW) , the side by side comparison to the machined aluminum parts was quite impressive. The part felt like half the weight, and had really nice surface finish.
If you're looking to print aluminum replacement parts, you should look at the higher end machines. They have the ability to print continuous composites (our homegrown, weird, and very powerful 3D printing technology) which will let you print parts which are strength/stiffness competitive with Aluminum.
While our $69,000 printer definitely has an enterprise price-tag, it's still the cheapest (on an amortized cost basis) way of getting strong parts with a 24hr or less turnaround. The purpose of the laser scanner is to close the loop on what is typically an open-loop system in essentially all other 3D printers. I can't say too much more about this but we're adding a lot of cool features all the time.
(Obvious Disclaimer: I'm trying to sell you on the printers we make because I believe they are the best)
I would buy the $69000 version in a heartbeat (we are a manufacturing company) if it would print a 12x12x12 inch size or a little larger
If you want I can put you in touch with someone who can help you figure out if your use cases will fit our printer. Send me a note if you're interested: abe@markforged.com
The 3D printing community, like some coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity.
In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.
I was thinking of getting a cheap 3D printer for Christmas, but will probably put it off now I realise it's not, as you say, pulg'n'play.
Agreed. MakerBot in 2012 was like trying to start Apple in 1962. What kind of personal computer could one build from the era's transistors and magnetic core memory? That primitive thing could have sparked someone's imagination, but it wouldn't have had any mass-market applications.
3D printing's Apple moment is still waiting for its equivalent of the integrated circuit (a technological enabler) followed by a VisiCalc (a killer application).
I predicted in 2014 that within 3 years majority of upper middle class
households will have 3D printer just like they have paper printer.
On the whole, though, I'm really struggling to see how these things will ever take off. (Like others, I have a paper printer which I use a handful of times a year, and it's never an experience I relish. At least printers are very cheap now, even if ink isn't.)
On the topic of 3D, I don't see a market for home use, but in enterprise - well, I could use one right now if they were cheap enough, easy to use and produced quality products (or maybe I just don't know that they are? Last researched a year ago...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640988#5641367
I own a 2D printer and have found my use of it declined dramatically over the last five years.
Given I just became a Google Shopping Express member and I am already addicted to Amazon Prime, I anticipate my desire to make my own 3D items at home to also decline over time.
I do agree with @JDDunn9. There will be businesses that will provide 3D printing services using state of the art printers, high quality materials, and their expertise. Bay Photo is a 2D example of this kind of service. They will deliver the results quickly, cheaply, and reliably using distribution services like Prime and Express.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594997#4595489
I'll buy a 3D printer when I can print all the pieces to build a Nerf N-Strike Elite Hail Fire for under forty dollars worth of materials and it can be printed and assembled in under three hours.
I picked this item because it was featured in the Wired magazine article right after their "3D printers are the next PC" article. ~
For my money, cheap & modular mills like those at http://carbide3d.com/ are much more promising because you can actually make structural components. A $500 CNC'd Grizzly mill equivalent (hell, probably $1000 if it was user friendly enough) would be extremely useful and would sell like hotcakes, but of course that's empirically extremely difficult to design since mills are a mature technology that requires things like calibration, knowledge of tools and materials to use, etc. Even their $1100 machine would probably be fun as hell, but it's a price point that actually requires a use in mind.
Incidentally, as far as I can tell the most successful home-manufacturing product of the past 10 years or so has been https://ghostgunner.net/ .
The goal should be to have advanced 3D printers, latches and CNC milling machine shops that provide easy to use services for walk-in customers or mail-orders. It should work just as easily as copying and printing services work for PDF files. You don't know if they have Xerox or Canon and you don't care. You want to know if they can print A1 and things like that.
As 3D printing advances, having affordable access to several $20,000 - $200,000 specialized printers in your city beats the $2,000 printer in your home for a serious hobbyist or small business. Maybe its worth paying $200-$300 for printer you can use for prototypes before ordering more expensive work.
These guys are close to that model: https://www.plethora.com/ . Their supposed killer advantage is that they have spent a lot of time deriving a cost model for arbitrary designs which allows relatively unsupervised submissions, but because they're very dependent on that cost model, the number of operations and customizations they support is fairly limited.
And yes, I could use a CNC mill an create a lot of my parts and they'd be just as good, probably stronger. The problem is that I live in a studio apartment. Since I don't have a workshop and I don't want to drive to a hackerspace when I want to make something, I'm going to choose not to subject my girlfriend (and preferably not myself) to to the mess and noise of a mill. Plus a printer is so much easier in my experience, I don't need to worry about setting feed rates or replacing bits, I can just click print and go watch TV while it prints.
I'll admit there are things that I can't do that I could do with a mill (I would really like to be able to mill circuit boards), but at least to me a printer makes much more sense for the vast majority of lazy stupid people like me.
> Writing on Brokelyn.com, former employee Isaac Anderson placed the blame for those three machines’ problems squarely on MakerBot’s decision to go closed source. They could no longer rely on their old customer base of “capable hobbyists who provided tech-savvy feedback and suggestions for improvement.” The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.”
If one designs for it, it is possible to build complex products. FarmBot is a good example. It is made with a combination of 3D FDM printed parts, flat metal parts that could be made with a plasma cutter or CNC, open source software and compute provided by small ARM computers, and commodity produced parts like wires, motors and extruded aluminium rails.
Thats how RepRaps are made, and that is how you have to build in this new way. Very few things are solid plastic shapes.
3D FDM printers are great for designing and producing the case that your etched PCB, switches and LED's attach to. It is an ingredient in the recipe.
FDM can be used to make custom metal components through green sandcasting metals.
If more projects were designed like RepRap, or FarmBot, this new industrial revolution could still take shape. Robotic PCB production is another key ingredient that is needed for reality to match up to the hype.
Not to forget than certain steel parts might not even be accessible to mere mortals, either because certain steel require certain things.
I'm not against fixing your dishwasher with some plastic part, but that's far from a revolution.
And it's not like industry won't fight it either.
I had one guy insist that his 3d printer could 3d print wood. I said there's no way, so the next day he brought in an object made out of ABS with wood flower suspended in it. He literally couldn't comprehend how that differs from a real wood object, structurally, or even better how it'd differ from a cold-molded composite wood object.
It’s awesome for abstract mathematical sculpures though.
Good thing AuroraLabs is working on that problem. Won't be long until their 3D printers are standard accessories on oil-platforms and deep mines and the ISS, oh my...
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/D6VL1OQrebg/maxresdefault.jpg
(Generally, google for "wood filament 3d printing" and look at the pictures.)
We also have a good machine shop, and some of the members got together and refurbished an old injection molding machine.
So, we can 3d print a test, then can transform the finished design into instructions for the CNC machine, to produce a mold which goes into the injection molding machine.
So far no one has used this to prototype a part that started a business, but that is a great way to use a 3d printer, as a first run prototype which can then be used for other manufacturing.
A guy who is designing a game used both the 3d printer and laser cutter to make his prototype board and pieces.
We also have a few whizzes who have whipped up replacement parts and e.g. hose adapters for the dust collector in the woodshop.
Overall 3d printing is like the early days of the commercial Internet: people intuitively knew it was changing things, but had only scattered anecdotes as proof.
In middle school we'd learn various things about art, art history, art techniques, and while they weren't comprehensive, they provided a basic level of appreciation for art. As an example, if I hadn't learned about techniques like shading or perspective drawing, I would've thought that they were impossible for a layman like me to attempt.
For most people (and by "most people" I mean anecdotally most people I know), 3d modeling and 3d printing seems to be at this unapproachable level of complexity. If we can show kids the simpler side of 3d modeling, there would be a much greater consumer interest in 3d printing.
As someone who was listening when makerbot was just starting up, I think that Makerbot as a company both did 3D printing a great service and a great disservice. Without makerbot it's entirely possible that without makerbot making as big of a splash as they did and without the press that they were able to create 3d printing wouldn't have taken off like it did. Unfortunately the disservices that they then did to the 3d printing community had so much more of an impact because of all that press that was primarily focused on them and equating '3d printer' to mean 'makerbot'.
All that said, I'll never give up my 3D printers. For me it was still a revolution, I think I just had a lower bar for what it needed to be to be a revolution.
I find this to be a strange statement when the previous paragraph talked about a class-action lawsuit due to a faulty extruder. Is it an unrealistic expectation now to expect your thousand-dollar 3D printer to Just Work? You can't just promise someone the future and then backtrack when people hold you to it.
A good use case would be anything that's usually mass produced but actually benefits from high customization. Like clothes. If you could 3D print clothes, you might have a market. Or cables (electrical, Ethernet, etc.) that are an exact length. Or perhaps things like toothbrushes, or contact lenses.
The technology isn't very close to that yet. But if it keeps improving, there's a good chance that we really will end up with a 3D printer in every home.
We aren't even at the Ford Model T stage with 3D printing.
The trouble is, we can't 3D print PCBs .. not safely anyway. There are quite a few more toxic chemicals to deal with, not to mention the complexities you'd run into trying to make multi-layer boards.
Also I think people forgot plastic still cost money.
I just sat there and thought "they finally managed to invent an automated manufacturing process that's even more slow and expensive than machining."
So the real problems are in more than 2 layers (since cameras and marks/holes can align both sides of a 2-layer board).
The lasers, as you'd guess, are for prototyping and a few specialty purposes.
Check out LPKF[1] for all kinds of neat toys.
We do know that for sure 3D printing will make a comeback for good one day, probably one decade in the future.
Almost zero nerds gave half a shit about printing guns. Like, at all.
But news, news, news sites had a story to sell, right around the time of the Silk Road takedown, and poof, nerds received a message, which, in the context of other dubious criminal prosecutions, communicated that an alphabet agency might just destroy you and ruin your life because some abiguous technical detail made for an easy target.
Pirating music and movies, becomes a child pornography felony. Trading in bit coins becomes a Silk Road drug bust. 3D printing becomes weapons possessions with mandatory minimums.
Message received, propaganda apparatus.
Risk total ruin, by buying a 3D printer.
Got it. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Move right along.
They are useful for making things that don't yet exist, but that means it must be something you come up with and model yourself. And this is where they are no longer the tool of users, only engineers.
To have distributed manufacturing, a much faster, higher capacity, more energy efficient, more flexible (more materials, deposition/removal methods), easy-to-use/-monetize/-protect IP machine/front-end would need to happen to be practical to do more than prototyping.
Amazon could pull this off and save on 'round-the-world shipping by becoming more of an IP to end-user fulfillment marketplace instead of a warehouse logistics shop. (for products which can be built JIT from standard parts/materials)
1. Prefer plug and play, interested in making stuff not debugging 3d printers. Probably that exclude most of cheap 3d printers.
2. Hobby, so likely will go with FDM instead of SLA. FDM seems cheaper, faster and more materials for just a little precision loss.
3. Zortrax M200 (https://zortrax.com/) seems to be the best option. Any other suggestions?
(There seems to be some curiosity in this thread about what printer you should get)
So in end effect the current status doesn't proof at all that there is not a market, just that the technology can't reach market yet.
Can anybody explain how that should work out? Usually people laugh about someone who only pretends.
Personally, I found the old displays that were more electronics-based more interesting – more variety.