Technology: Print me a Stradivarius | Hacker News Reader

Technology: Print me a Stradivarius

economist.com

5 pointsoliverdamian6 comments

Here are some "open source" 3d printers that you can build at home for under $1500:

* RepRap - A project with the lofty goal of printing circuit boards and becoming self-replicable (http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page)

* Fab@Home - a 3d printer that tries to optimize print quality, but not necessarily print itself (http://www.fabathome.org/)

* MakerBot - A company that makes several variants of the RepRap (http://makerbot.com/)

There is a community site of 3d models to print at http://www.thingiverse.com/tag:reprap

HNers and engineering majors: There is a $20,000 prize from HumanityPlus for anyone to develop a RepRap that can print conductive material.

http://humanityplus.org/gadaprize/

http://reprap.org/wiki/Gada_Prize

One of my favorite sci fi books on this subject is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The awesome part is that the book is about the manufacturing revolution that follows the 3d printer. Always two++ steps ahead, that guy.

In Diamond Age it was interesting how the control of the printing material ("the source"), and designs was used for a new form of colonialism.

The former can easily be controlled in reality as well, but I wonder whether the open source ethos will be able to keep designs free.

I think the command & control aspect of the Industrial age happened because of the need for and the benefits of economies of scale. There was a need to marshal together huge pools of capital, equipment, management structures, assembly lines, etc. With 3D printing and additive manufacturing, there is the hope of bringing peer-to-peer production that has successfully been implemented in software, information, culture & other intangibles, to the tangible physical realm. This is the direction we should be heading to, not the other way around of trying to apply Industrial age property laws and scarcity paradigms to the abundant fractal scalability of peer-to-peer production.

I suspect this will NOT undermine economies of scale (at least in some areas), due to 'toner' costs, operational costs, and power consumption. It will doubtless be less efficient to print a true-to-life oak 2x4 than it is to harvest and mill one with proper economies of scale set up.

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